Election results are always worth looking at carefully. The Clacton by-election ones are in and, based on Parliamentary figures, Nigel Farage got 22,239 votes. That is a substantial majority and more votes than he got in 2024 so I suppose we should say “well done Nigel” and “the people of Clacton have entirely vindicated all your choices”.
Not so fast though. It was a very skewed election because none of the main parties stood (unless you count Reform as part of the political establishment). In the end there were a lot of independents and representatives of small parties with no Westminster representation, including three from the Monster Raving Loonies. Potentially that diluted the absurdist vote but not enough to swing it to a Binface victory. Despite the constituency having grown by about 1,500 people, overall turnout was down by about 15%. Fewer than half the people in the area bothered to vote at all: they threw their right to vote in the bin rather than putting it towards Binface or elsewhere. Meanwhile, Binface went from being one of the candidates who regularly looses their deposit to getting the kind of share that could potentially win a more evenly contested election.
I would love to have seen Binface put to the test of actually winning and wish more people had bothered to get out and vote. I am strongly in favour of the idea that voting should be mandatory for everyone with the franchise, at least if there is always a “none of the above” option. In this case, that might have claimed the day, if the non-voters really couldn’t bring themselves to put a tick in the box of either of the main candidates or any of the 31 who stood very little chance of being first past the post. Meanwhile, Farage has won pyrrhic victory, with the investigation into his finances already restarted (not something a by election has any scope to test) and, in my eyes, his reputation is further sullied by his failure to show his face in Clacton despite the “police security advice” excuse having being refuted by Essex Police.
I also notice that the constituency was only given its present boundaries in 2023. I wonder how that might have skewed things although it was always either Conservative or UKIP since the previous change in 2010.
