For the past two weeks, as the Clacton by-election dragged on with all the excitement of a soggy quiz night, one particular football clip from the early 2000s refused to leave my head. Michael Owen, newly celebrated and apparently very pleased with himself, slams a penalty kick past a young goalkeeper and starts pumping his fists and yelling “get in there!” as if he has just won the World Cup. Neville Southall, the old goalkeeper watching on, delivers one of the greatest reality checks in football punditry: “Well done, he’s 13.” That is the exact energy that surrounded Nigel Farage’s triumphant return to Clacton, except the goalkeeper in this case was not a child in too-big gloves but a man wearing a bin on his head. Farage chose to trigger a by-election in one of the most Reform-friendly seats in the country. He reportedly spent £10,000 on advertising, pulled volunteers away from the Greater Manchester mayoral race, and turned the whole operation into a solo victory lap. And after all that, he managed to secure a majority of just under 13,000 votes against Count Binface. Let that sink in. A sitting MP, the leader of a political party, spent tens of thousands of pounds and weeks of everyone’s time to win a seat that was already his, in front of an opponent whose entire political platform is a rubbish gag. Neville Southall would probably have looked at Farage’s victory celebration and muttered: “Well done, he’s a comedy writer wearing a bin on his head.”
And yet, as strange as it was to watch Farage milk a victory over a man dressed as an intergalactic space warrior, the most uncomfortable moment came when the result was announced. He wasn’t there. In British politics, candidates are expected to turn up for their own result night. It is one of those unwritten rituals, like wearing a rosette and pretending to be nervous, and it is very, very rare for a candidate to skip it, especially when they have won. Farage decided not to appear. He stayed away from the count, leaving his supporters and the cameras to deal with the awkwardness of an empty podium. If that doesn’t scream a lack of self-confidence, it is hard to know what would. Instead of accepting the result and standing in front of the ballot boxes, he gave a speech to his own people elsewhere, a controlled environment where nobody would ask awkward questions. In that speech, he did something even more bizarre. He described Count Binface, again, a comedy writer wearing a bin on his head, as the “establishment candidate.” Let’s be clear about what happened here. Farage triggered a by-election to prove how popular he was. He spent plenty of money and pulled in plenty of volunteers. His main opponent was a man whose entire political persona is a joke from a late-night panel show. And when the result came in, Farage couldn’t even bring himself to show up. Then he called the bin man “the establishment.” You can’t make it up. If he’d shown up and taken it on the chin, he might have looked magnanimous. Instead, he looked like a man trying to avoid the reality of what the result actually meant.
Now, there is one bright spot if you are a Reform supporter, and Farage will hammer it home in the days and weeks ahead. He did increase his vote count from the 2024 general election, by just over 1,000 votes, and he did it on a lower turnout. That is a genuine fact, and it will be repeated endlessly. But context matters, and the context is devastating. He was the only major party candidate in that by-election. The Conservative Party, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, they all knew what this was, a vanity project, and they didn’t give him the satisfaction of a proper contest. His main opponent was Count Binface. It is not hard to imagine a significant number of voters in Clacton who simply could not bear the thought of their constituency being represented in Parliament by a parody Star Wars character, holding their noses and putting an X next to Farage’s name. That isn’t an enthusiastic endorsement. That is voters making the least bad choice between a man with a controversial record and a man with a wheelie bin on his head. The result says less about Farage’s personal popularity in Clacton than it does about the indignity of the alternative. If you are the only real candidate in a race against a joke, you should win. And you should win by a lot more than a margin that only feels comfortable because the joke candidate still managed to pull in more than 26% of the vote and more than 40% as many votes as you did. That is not a landslide. That is a holding pattern, dressed up in Union Jacks and victory music.
This is all context to keep in mind if, and it is still an if, the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner decides that Farage broke the rules when he failed to declare a £5 million pre-election “gift” from a crypto billionaire. That is the other cloud hanging over him, and it isn’t going away just because he won a by-election. If the commissioner finds against him, it could trigger another by-election in Clacton. And if that happens, you can already hear Reform’s argument forming: “His constituents just gave him their backing, another vote would be a waste of time and money.” It is an argument designed to sound reasonable, but every other party would push back hard. Imagine the fury from voters who would have to go through all of this again, not because of a national emergency, but because a sitting MP decided to play games with the truth. Farage would very likely win again. His majority from 2024 is substantial, and he remains popular in those parts. It would take a considerable effort to overturn that. But the bigger question is not whether Farage can hold one safe seat in Essex. The bigger question is whether the rest of the country still believes in him the way it once seemed to. Not so long ago, the widespread assumption in Westminster was that Farage was almost certain to become the next Prime Minister. The tide was supposedly moving in his direction, and the old parties were supposedly finished. Now, Reform is slipping in the polls, and Farage’s personal popularity is plunging too. The mystique has faded. He is no longer the outsider shaking up the system; he is an incumbent MP triggering by-elections to boost his ego and getting into a fight with a man wearing a bin.
What makes all of this feel so strange is the gap between the scale of Farage’s ambition and the scale of his current theatre. He wants to be Prime Minister. He wants to lead the realignment of British politics. He wants to be the voice of millions of angry voters. But here he was, in a by-election of his own making, celebrating a majority over Count Binface as if it were proof of national destiny. Michael Owen celebrated scoring against a 13-year-old as if he had won the Champions League. Farage celebrated winning a seat he already held as if it were a coronation. The truth is that if a man dressed up as a bin can secure more than a quarter of the vote in a by-election that Farage triggered purely to prove how popular he is, what chance does he have in the country as a whole? In a national contest, he would not have the luxury of hand-picking the battlefield. He would be facing serious candidates from every party, people with teams and policies and, most importantly, the ability to turn up on the night and accept their results. The voters who held their noses and voted for him in Clacton because they didn’t want a bin in Parliament might not feel the same way in a general election, when the choice is a real Prime Minister and the stakes are infinitely higher. The by-election did not prove that Farage is unstoppable. It proved that he is stoppable enough to make winning an unopposed race look like a close call.
And so we come back to Michael Owen, Neville Southall, and the 13-year-old goalkeeper. The kid in that clip probably went home feeling embarrassed, but the real lesson was never about him. It was about the man celebrating. Goals against much smaller opponents are not worth a triple fist pump. Similarly, a majority against Count Binface is not worth a speech calling Binface the establishment. Farage has spent his whole political career pretending to be the underdog, but now he has to deal with the fact that he is the incumbent, the insider, the man who stayed away from his own result announcement. The comedy routine is wearing thin. The jokes are becoming less funny, and the man at the centre of them seems less sure of himself. If another by-election comes, he might win again, but he will be fighting the same impossible battle, trying to prove he is a giant by standing on a bin. Perhaps the best thing that could happen to British politics is for Neville Southall to be on hand to pat Farage on the back after every victory and say, in that flat Welsh deadpan, “Well done, he’s a comedy writer wearing a bin on his head.” Because that, more than any poll or pundit analysis, captures the state of things. The man who once promised to shake up Westminster is now reduced to declaring victory over a man in fancy dress, then hiding from the cameras. For all the talk of landslides and mandates, the real takeaway is simple: when you spend all that energy to prove you’re winning, and your opponent is a bin, you might want to ask yourself why you still feel the need to tell everyone.
