Nigel Farage, the Clacton by-election and parliamentary standards

The Reform UK leader claims he is appealing to the voters over the heads of the Establishment—but he is trying to short-circuit Parliament's standards régime

The man on the Clacton omnibus

Nigel Farage’s decision to trigger a ‘people versus the establishment’ by-election in Clacton has largely been framed as a political story. While the unsuccessful Reform UK candidate Matt Goodwin has described Farage’s move as “4D chess”—raising the question of how many dimensions his own losing campaign in Gorton and Denton in February had employed—more astute observers think that a six-week contest with Count Binface is more likely to turn into a fiasco.

But behind the political theatre of an election campaign pitting Farage against a masked crusader, some broader questions arise that have important implications for Parliament and the constitution.

These questions relate to the investigations which have been opened by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Daniel Greenberg, into Farage’s alleged failure to declare millions of pounds in financial gifts and other benefits, including travel, accommodation and security received in the 12 months leading up to his election.

In a typical investigation, the Standards Commissioner will send an ‘initiation letter’ to the Member of Parliament concerned, setting out the complaint against them and any evidence in support of the allegations. The Commissioner can ask the MP questions and request that they attend for formal interview. He can also ask the House of Commons Committee on Standards to exercise its powers to send for persons, papers or records. The accused MP facing the allegations is under a duty to co-operate with the investigation.

If the Commissioner concluded that there had been a sufficiently serious breach of the Code of Conduct for Members of Parliament, he would be entitled to refer the matter to the Committee on Standards to make a formal determination. If the committee concurred, it would have wide-ranging powers to recommend sanctions, including suspension and expulsion from the House of Commons. However, it is for the House of Commons itself to determine whether such a sanction should be implemented. If an MP is suspended for 10 sitting days or more (or 14 calendar days) the provisions of the Recall of MPs Act 2015 will be triggered.

In such cases a recall petition is launched. If at least 10 per cent of the eligible electorate in that constituency sign the petition, it succeeds. The MP’s seat is then vacated and a by-election takes place; the unseated MP may stand in that by-election.

The investigation by the Standards Commissioner into Farage is currently paused under paragraph 40 of the Procedural Protocol in respect of the Code of Conduct, as he has ceased to be an MP. However, assuming that Farage is returned to Parliament in August, the investigation will recommence. So asking the electors of Clacton to absolve him of any allegations of wrongdoing will have no practical effect on Greenberg’s inquiries, other than delaying them for several weeks. (In the rather unlikely event that Farage is not returned to Parliament, the Commissioner will have to decide if it is “appropriate and proportionate” to resume the investigation).

In theory at least, there is every possibility that once Farage is returned to Parliament, if he is subsequently found to have committed a serious breach of the code of conduct, the recall provisions could be triggered.

The bigger picture—letting the people decide?

In those circumstances, one has to ask what Farage hopes to achieve by staging this circus. He may think that if he wins the by-election, and is then sanctioned by the House of Commons, voters might be sufficiently fatigued that they will not be inclined to sign the recall petition which would trigger a second by-election; or he may use the result of the first by-election as a spurious mandate to undermine the need for or legitimacy of a second poll. In essence he may be attempting to short-circuit Parliament’s internal processes to his own benefit: the tactic so succinctly described by British and Irish Lions captain Willie John McBride as getting your retaliation in first.

The timing of Farage’s actions raises a number of questions. Perhaps the most important is how Parliament should respond to this spectacle. If Farage wins a fresh democratic mandate, it has absolutely no effect, and does not extinguish Parliament’s responsibility to uphold its own standards. Moreover, although publicity may focus attention on the allegations against Farage, the voters of Clacton are being asked to reach a judgement without knowing the full facts. They will hear the Reform UK leader’s version of events hammered home ad nauseam, but the Standards Commissioner is hardly going to take to the airwaves to present the facts as known in a dispassionate and neutral manner.

In forcing the by-election by stepping down from the House of Commons, Farage, a masterful tactician in politics—even if he was finally elected for Clacton at his eighth candidacy over 30 years for the Commons—has to an extent been able to frame the debate in his favour by invoking this “people v. Establishment” rhetoric. He wants that, not potential attempts to conceal millions of pounds in cash and gifts, to be the fundamental issue. It is like being driven to the Old Bailey in a car plastered with slogans proclaiming your innocence and good character.

The other political parties have condemned Farage’s decision as a farce and there will be no candidates from the Labour Party, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party of England and Wales or Restore Britain. The fact that Farage will be facing a clutch of independents and joke candidates has allowed the best known of them, Count Binface (a comic character created and played by Jonathan David Harvey), to attract more attention than usual.

The idea was floated that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, who is formally responsible for appointing MPs to disqualifying offices of profit under the Crown which allow them to give up their places in the House of Commons, could prevent the by-election altogether by declining to make such an appointment for Farage. However, with uncharacteristic wit, she declared on Wednesday that, while she disagreed with his decision to force the election, she would not frustrate him.

I will accept Nigel Farage’s request to be appointed Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead. It is a farce and a desperate distraction, and the people of Clacton deserve better. But if he wants to spend the summer arguing with a bin, I won’t stop him.

On Friday, Reform UK’s Treasury spokesman and disappointed Conservative leadership candidate Robert Jenrick told GB News that Farage had had no choice but to force a by-election, because he could not expect a fair hearing from the House of Commons authorities and especially the Committee on Standards.

He wasn’t prepared just to allow this stitch-up, this kangaroo court, to unfold in the months ahead. He wasn’t prepared to waste the rest of this year. He wants to settle this matter once and for all in the hands of the people—not bureaucrats or officials over in the Palace of Westminster.

Supposedly supporting this sceptical position was the argument put forward by GB News that “several MPs on the committee have previously taken public positions sharply critical of Farage or Reform UK”.

Since the Committee on Standards, like all Commons select committees, is cross-party, it is inevitable that some of its members will have been critical of MPs who may come under its jurisdiction. The committee has 14 members, of whom seven are Members of Parliament and seven are “lay members”; of the Commons members, two (including the Chair) are Conservatives, four are Labour MPs and one is a Liberal Democrat. There is no Reform MP on the committee, but there are only seven Reform Members in the 650-strong House of Commons, a shade over one per cent.

To include the party without making its representation hugely disproportionate, the committee would need to comprise around 100 MPs; currently the Scottish National Party (which has more MPs than Reform UK) is not represented, nor are 10 other parties which have MPs. Would they all have to be directly represented to give the committee legitimate authority and jurisdiction over any Member of the House? Would a Reform UK member of the committee be uniquely able to exercise impartiality when making a decision on an MP from “the uniparty”?

Jenrick took the argument to its logical conclusion. As stated earlier, any recommendations by the Committee on Standards for sanctions on Farage would not be imposed unilaterally, but a motion implementing them would have to be submitted to the House of Commons as a whole. Here too Jenrick insists that there would not be a fair and impartial procedure.

Ultimately, it would go to a vote in the House of Commons, where we’ve got our doughty band of eight Members of Parliament, but everybody else obviously is against Reform.

We are left with the peculiar situation in which a party whose leader has spent decades stressing the inviolability of parliamentary sovereignty now saying that the House of Commons cannot be trusted to exercise that sovereignty in one respect, where it touches on the conduct of Reform UK, because it is inherently and irreparably biased; its Members are so blinded by their opposition to Reform and Farage that it is impossible for them to exercise their quasi-judicial function and make an impartial finding on the matter of Farage’s financial declarations.

This is the Reform UK argument, wholly consistent with Farage’s statement on Tuesday when he announced his decision to resign his seat, force a by-election which he would contest and seek a definitive imprimatur.

I’ve decided that the people of Clacton should be the judges of my actions. This will be a people versus the establishment by-election. It’s a chance to stick two fingers up to the entire establishment, to frankly tell them where to go, and that is why I will be putting my name forward to stand in this by-election. I will fight to win. I will fight to continue the political revolution that Reform has started… if I lose, they win, and we will never, with the two old parties, get the type of fundamental change that we need to fix broken Britain.

He barely even pretended that the by-election would be principally about the specific allegations made against him; instead Farage painted a narrative of consistent grievance and victimhood, he and Reform UK being uniquely sinned against, the “mainstream” parties willing to put aside everything that divides them and to compromise any principle simply to damage the Reform insurgency.

It is the solipsism of paranoia which allowed Farage in his announcement on Tuesday to claim he was “the most physically and verbally attacked public figure or politician of modern times”; this sees him take a position ahead of Labour MP Jo Cox, shot and stabbed to death by a white supremacist in her constituency in June 2016, and veteran Conservative Sir David Amess, who was stabbed fatally by an Islamic fundamentalist in October 2021. It ignores the four Members of Parliament murdered by Irish Republican terrorists during the Troubles, Airey Neavy, Rev Robert Bradford, Sir Anthony Berry and Ian Gow, and those badly injured in terrorist attacks like Norman Tebbit and John Wakeham; Nigel Jones, Liberal Democrat MP for Cheltenham, who was wounded and his constituency aide Andrew Pennington killed in a sword attack in January 2000; and the current Minister of State for Social Security and Disability, Sir Stephen Timms, who was stabbed twice in the abdomen, suffering lacerations to his liver and a perforated stomach, by an Islamic extremist at a constituency surgery in May 2010.

Subverting to procedures on standards

The hazard here is not simply Nigel Farage, who is always accompanied by an element of the carnival sideshow, but the wider implications for the House of Commons’s standards régime. It would be deeply corrosive for a system which has become significantly more robust over the last decade if Reform UK’s leader demonstrated a playbook by which a Member even accused, let alone guilty, of breaching the Code of Conduct could potentially nullify a sanction he or she might be given. That would be a deliberate distortion of the regulation of MPs’ conduct and propriety, a misuse of parliamentary procedures and, most seriously of all, a co-option of the electorate into a trick. Voters would be asked to pull the wool over their own eyes.

Reform UK argue, of course, that this playbook is unique to it because it has been and is uniquely badly and unfairly treated by “the Establishment”, however defined. But Nigel Farage, Robert Jenrick and Matt Goodwin know as well as anyone how irreversible is the process of releasing a genie from a bottle. If ‘doing a Farage’ was perceived to be effective in frustrating investigations into standards by the House of Commons authorities, it would not remain the privilege of one particular party but would swiftly become generalised.

Underlying lack of public trust in politics and politicians is at the root of so many dysfunctions in current public life. There never was a golden age universally peopled by honest-as-the-day-is-long and respected statesmen, but we absolutely cannot shrug casually and see public trust diminish further. Following the course of action upon which Nigel Farage has decided does two dangerous things: first, it asserts that Parliament’s standards procedures cannot be trusted and Members of Parliament are so partisan that they can never suspend their party political mindsets to judge a clear question on the basis of facts. Secondly, it places Parliament not as the representative of the electorate but as some malign and subverting filter, an institution so steeped in self-interest that it will work against voters’ interests to look after the Establishment.

Chipping away like this, with no grounds whatsoever, in order to go over the heads of Parliament to the people, and telling the people they can trust you and only you, is not the act of people who believe on or even care about a sustainable pluralistic political culture. It bears the mark of those who believe that opposition to them is by definition and must be not only illegitimate but anti-democratic. Democracy is not judged by your attitude to those who agree with you. It is how you treat those who disagree that determines the health of civil society.