CLACTON-ON-SEA, England — Voters in this faded Victorian beach resort headed to the polls Thursday for an election intended to provide a show of strength for Nigel Farage, the architect of Brexit, the face of the anti-immigrant Reform UK party and President Donald Trump’s closest ally in Britain.
After all, he won the constituency handily just two years ago.
Polls have predicted a win. But political experts — and comedians — say getting the most votes would be no victory in a campaign that had morphed from an act of defiance to a summer punchline, leaving Farage’s future, and potentially the future of Reform UK without him, uncertain. (The future of his leading challenger — a costumed “alien” sporting a trash-can helmet — also remained unclear.)
Ordinarily a Farage win in a parliamentary election would be cause for celebration in Reform’s ranks. Instead there is a growing sense that he was undone by his own gambit and remains in danger of being overcome by mounting corruption accusations.
Amid a drumbeat of revelations about millions of dollars in unreported gifts — including $6.8 million from a British crypto billionaire in Thailand — Farage resigned his Clacton seat last month and demanded a fresh election, casting it as a chance for his voters to rebuke his “persecution” by a hostile media and Britain’s political elite.
But the elite sat it out, with all major parties dismissing the election as a stunt and declining to field any candidates. That left “Count Binface”— in reality, comedian Jon Harvey, the man under the garbage pail — as his main opponent, running on a platform of ice cream price controls and building “at least one affordable house.”
His opposition — which also includes three candidates from the Monster Raving Loony Party and Laurence Fox, the actor turned anti-woke activist who played an Oxford detective on “Inspector Lewis” — leaves Farage to celebrate an ignominious victory at best. At least two investigations into his financial dealings are ongoing.
With Reform’s once-surging poll numbers in decline and Farage’s personal approval ratings at a six-year low, his peril has begun to rattle others inside the party, according to Dan Hodges, a political columnist for the Daily Mail who chronicles Reform’s internal dynamics.
“There are some people in Reform who are now starting to at least think about the unthinkable, which is life without Nigel Farage,” Hodges said. “That sort of seditious talk would have been unthinkable a few months ago, but obviously the political landscape has changed significantly in a number of ways.”
Reform officials didn’t respond to a request for comment. A member of Reform’s board, Gawain Towler, dismissed the possibility that Farage is going to step aside, or be forced from the party. The party constitution allows for the selection of a new leader when needed in the future, he said.
In Clacton, Farage remains popular, as does the party he built largely by tapping into the anti-immigrant sentiment and economic malaise that are easy to find around the town’s Victorian pier. When a turquoise double-decker campaign bus bearing a half-dozen Farage supporters passed by the Moon and Starfish pub a few days before the vote, two young men on the pub deck jumped up to cheer.
“He wants what we want: to save the country,” said Josh Keeble, 27, a land manager who voted Reform in the last general election and planned to back Farage with gusto. “With these boats, people are coming over and eventually we’re going to be overrun.”
But even if Farage were to step aside, these voters would stick with Reform, or any party that took up the mantle of reducing immigration and upping deportations. They are Trump fans, praising his tough border enforcement and aggressive deportation program, and want more of that here.
“It’s what we need,” said Will Shiress, 23, a tree surgeon. “Everywhere you walk now, you don’t feel like you’re in Britain anymore.”
Until recently, it looked like Reform’s message was spreading well beyond enclaves like Clacton. For two years, the party was the surging strongman of British politics, rocketing to the top of national polls after Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer took office and sweeping up more than 1,700 council seats across two rounds of local elections.
Reform’s rise so panicked Labour lawmakers that they pushed Starmer aside last month and voted in Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester, as party leader and, therefore, the new prime minister.
But Reform’s national momentum had already begun to soften last fall, when the party’s polling peaked at about 31 percent. For all its council victories, Reform candidates have lost every parliamentary contest since.
Burnham, off to an energetic start, is enjoying his own bounce in the polls. And the revelations about Farage’s finances have continued. In late July, Reform fell behind Labour in national polling for the first time in more than a year.
Britain probably won’t hold the next national general election until 2029. But who might take over Reform if Farage can’t shake his current troubles is already a subject of chatter among political watchers.
The obvious names are Reform’s next-best-known figures. Robert Jenrick, the former Conservative minister who defected to Reform last year, is a polished media performer but a relative newcomer to the party. Zia Yusuf, Reform’s combative home affairs spokesman, is ambitious and attention-grabbing but is not a member of Parliament. Richard Tice, the deputy leader, who ran Reform from 2021 to 2024, is seen as disciplined and loyal but generated little excitement as leader and is tangled in some of the same financial questions now dogging Farage.
The bigger question is whether anyone but Farage could run a party that is so completely identified with its charismatic leader.
“It’s difficult to imagine that Reform could get anywhere near the kind of numbers it is getting in the polls without him, and certainly the numbers they were getting a few months ago,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. “It really isn’t too much of an exaggeration to say that without Farage, they would be, well, not nothing but not what they are today.”
He points to the three-year period starting in 2021 when Farage left politics to be a full-time pundit on British and American television. Tice “kept the lights on,” Bale said, but the party hovered around 10 percent in the polls and didn’t win many elections. It was Farage’s return in 2024 that sparked the party’s resurgence.
“You have to say he is an incredibly talented politician,” Bale said.
Reform is part of a broader wave of populist parties and movements across Europe and the United States. Experience suggests those built around a single strong personality struggle without their leader more than those resting on sturdy organizational infrastructure, said Jeremy Cliffe, senior policy fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin.
At one end of the spectrum, Cliffe said, are “hyper-personality” parties such as Trump’s MAGA movement within the GOP and Geert Wilders’s anti-Islam Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. At the other are more institutional bodies such as France’s National Rally, which Marine Le Pen inherited from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2011, professionalized and then handed to a younger successor, Jordan Bardella, in 2021. It’s currently the largest party in the French National Assembly.
Farage and Reform definitely sit at the personality end, Cliffe said. A comparison might be to the fate of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party in Italy. The once-dominant party was never the same after its magnetic founder died, not folding completely but shrinking to a “junior force on the Italian right,” where it remains today.
“Likewise, I don’t see Reform vanishing entirely,” Cliffe said. “I suppose it could continue under one of these other prominent figures. But clearly none of them has the obvious personal following of Farage.”
Reform has more organizational rigor than it once did, having won majorities on 24 local councils across Britain. In May, it took control of the Essex County Council, which includes Clacton, ending 25 years of Conservative dominance.
Sylvia Runnacles, 79, said she hoped Reform’s rapid growth in local councils like hers will give it durability should Farage not stay at the party’s helm.
“Somebody needs to stop these immigrants,” said Runnacles, a retired credit manager sitting on a seaside bench near the pier. She was fresh from eating breakfast at a cafe where the adjacent tables were occupied by “a Chinese girl and two Muslims.”
She was voting for Farage, as most of her friends would be, she said. Except for one, a neighbor: “She can’t stand Nigel. She’s Binface all the way.”
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