The story so far:
Nigel Farage is what was known in wartime British slang as a ‘‘spiv’’: a flashy, fast-talking petty criminal who always has something shoddy and borderline illegal to sell.
They were all anti-immigrant, ultra-nationalist and shyly racist, and they all used populist tactics well before that style went global. Think of him as a Donald Trump who didn’t inherit great wealth but is a lot more coherent.
And in due course the rest of the world did catch up: his current political vehicle, Reform UK, has led the opinion polls for two years straight.
By last April it looked like the four biggest countries of western Europe were all going to get hard-Right, maybe even fascist-adjacent governments. Giorgia Meloni is already in power in Italy; Marine Le Pen in France and Alice Weidel in Germany are on track for election victories next year — and Farage in the UK seems a likely winner in 2028-29.
Farage’s future victory is less certain, of course, because the governing Labour Party has just got a new leader and is getting a new prime minister, Andy Burnham.
Then suddenly, just a couple of weeks ago, the wheels fell off Farage’s chariot. A team of investigative journalists from the Guardian newspaper discovered that Farage had accepted a personal gift of £5 million from Christopher Harborne, an expat British cryptocurrency billionaire who lives in Thailand.
It’s not illegal to accept a huge gift if you are a politician, but it raises questions about what the giver expects in return — especially if the politician doesn’t mention it.
And if you are a British Member of Parliament (as Farage is), you are obliged to report all such gifts even from the year before you were elected. He didn’t.
As often happens, that first revelation shook others loose, and Farage now faces four separate investigations for various financial failings. He was drowning in allegations, so he came up with a clever scheme.
He would resign from his own seat, run for re-election, and use that ‘‘vote of confidence’’ to distract people from all the accusations against him.
In the best populist tradition, he was using ‘‘the people’’ (or at least the people of his seat in Clacton) to destroy ‘‘the elite’’.
‘‘It’s a chance to stick two fingers to the entire establishment to tell them where to go,’’ said the Man of the People.
And it might have worked for him, except that all five other British parties instantly said they would boycott his glorified opinion poll.
And then Count Binface spoke up, promising to make matters even more interesting. He’s a comedian who frequently runs in a parliamentary election or by-election somewhere, not expecting to win, and shows up at the count wearing a hi-tech bucket on his head.
At this point I must mention that the English are weird. When the government said that people should not put their religion down as ‘‘Jedi’’ on census forms, 390,000 people reported that they were Jedi in the next census.
So when Count Binface is running unopposed against Farage, there is a genuine chance that Count Binface can win. So long as Howling Laud Hope of the Monster Raving Loony Party doesn’t run too and split the anti-Farage vote. Farage got slightly less than half the votes last time, so it could happen.
• Gwynne Dyer is an independent London journalist.
