Early in August, a by-election will take place in the British seaside town of Clacton. The by-election is occasioned by the resignation of Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform Party and the sitting MP for Clacton, who declared upon resigning that he would contest the seat again.The closest thing to a farce, this by-election has been characterised as a ‘stunt’ by Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and Farage’s ultra-right-wing rivals who broke from reform to form the ‘Restore’ Party.None of these parties will contest what they call Farage’s ‘stunt’ because they claim it’s designed to distract from the very public and publicised investigation that he is undergoing by the Parliamentary Standards Commission (PSC).The facts: Two years before Farage was elected as MP for Clacton, he received a £5-million gift from Bitcoin and cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne, who lives in Thailand as a tax-refugee from the UK and has even adopted the Thai name Chakrit Sakunkrit. At the time Farage received the gift and several other donations from Harborne for his Reform Party, he was not an MP and now he and spokesmen for Reform contend that he didn’t have to declare the gift as it was not given to a sitting MP, but to a politician whom Harborne ‘respected and admired’. There are two levels of potential ambivalence in this claim of ‘innocence’. Farage says he broke no rules. At least not the one that requires all MPs to declare any gifts, free tickets, dinners, flights, etc. that they are given. The Tory Party, which brought the gift to the notice of the Parliamentary Standards Committee, after reports of it surfaced in the national press, contends that the rules declare that any gifts above £300, whether in cash or kind, given to sitting MPs have to be declared by them. The ambivalence arises because the rule doesn’t formally state that it can be retrospective and if the gift is still unspent when Farage enters Westminster as an MP, then it needs to be declared and he has failed to do so. The other ambiguity that pertains is that Farage has been and remains, now that he is an MP, an ardent advocate of policies favourable to cryptocurrency and certainly, if circuitously, to Harborne’s financial interests. Conflict? Is the Pope a Catholic? That’s not all. Farage has also allegedly accepted donations from another ‘friend’ called George Cottrell, another cryptocurrency millionaire benefactor, without declaring them. Cottrell claims to be a descendant of the British aristocracy. In 2017, he was convicted and jailed in the US for fraud.Cottrell provided Farage with assistants to run his 2024 parliamentary campaign, paid thousands of pounds for Farage’s trips to the US and elsewhere, and accommodated Farage in the Georgian house he owns near Buckingham Palace.Is this a transgression of the spirit, if not the letter, of parliamentary rules?Even so, Farage and Reform spokespersons insist he has not transgressed the ‘letter’ of the law. His ‘stunt’ is to resign as an MP, saying that in Britain’s democracy he leaves judgement on him in the hands of the electors of Clacton. He characterises the election as a contest of “people versus establishment”.By the establishment he means the newspapers and TV presenters who have exposed his conflicts of interest and his alleged breaches of parliamentary rules. In ‘establishment,’ he includes the political parties who oppose him and clearly accuse him of wrongdoing and massive, morally illegitimate, though not illegal, profiteering. And his definition certainly includes the indispensable institution, the PSC.This ‘anti-establishment’ contention is a song from Farage’s hymn-sheet. He came to prominence as a British elected Member of the European Parliament when Britain was still a member, even though he had assumed that position to undermine Britain’s membership. In the 2016 Brexit referendum, which the then Tory Prime Minister David Cameron called, Farage assumed the leadership of what he named the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). His campaign promised the voters that leaving the European Union would liberate Britain from the control of foreigners and would of course stop ‘Johnny foreigner’ coming here, taking British jobs and marrying British women. The Brexit campaign made several completely false predictive promises about the massive windfall, waterfall, torrent, avalanche or whatever, of pounds that would pour into the laps of British fishermen, farmers, consumers, voters, Uncle Tom Cobley and all.No such thing happened. Brexit was and remains an out and out liability, if not a disaster, on several counts. So much so that the present Labour government has set out to redefine Britain’s relationship in what the likes of Farage see as a creeping pseudo-membership of the continent. The UK’s Liberal Democrat Party openly canvasses for rejoining, and several polls have concluded that there is now a majority for such a policy and that a second referendum would vote ‘rejoin’.Politicians like Farage may mouth various and varied ideologies, policies and objectives, but their appeal is, without a doubt and absolutely on its own, their opposition to ‘foreigners’, asylum-seekers, refugees and, with some evidence from elected council members of Reform, deep racism and anti-semitism. Of course Farage denies such charges, but as he was campaigning to be elected, the story broke that as a pupil in high school at the prestigious (P.G. Wodehouse went there) South London Dulwich College, he abused and distressed Jewish fellow-pupils, several of whom testified to the press. Farage denies that he ever did more than joke during his school years, and says he certainly did not intend to offend anyone. I suppose chanting “gas ‘em all” and “Hitler was right”, as even some staff members at the time have testified he went around saying, may be seen as affectionate banter by Farage. Farage has also openly expressed deep admiration for Enoch Powell, who attempted a bid for the leadership of the Tory Party with a notorious speech in 1968, which has come to be known as the “Rivers of Blood” episode. Powell didn’t succeed. Following his dog-whistle, eloquent speech quoting Latin, a few dockers and a gaggle of meat-porters from a London market marched in support, but even the Tory Party recognised his statement as racist and he had to leave his constituency of Wolverhampton and join the ultra-Protestant Party of Northern Ireland. How the mighty jump off a racial (not glacial) cliff? Now Farage’s stunt proceeds and descends into farce, as all proper political opponents have declined to afford any legitimacy to his by-election. Several individuals, though, have said they are applying to be candidates in opposition to Farage. The most notable one amongst them is a fellow who wears a silver-coloured mini dustbin over his head with a slit to look out of. He calls himself Count Binface. There are five other declared candidates, all of them parodists who want to ridicule the electoral process or make some single point, apart from one local who pleads that he understands the needs of the constituency and if elected will look after them. One candidate who put himself forward and then withdrew wears a fox’s costume and contends that Farage, with all his bluster against the ‘establishment’, is a member and supporter of it as he is an ardent advocate of fox-hunting.Clacton is on the south coast, which faces France and the continent, and in recent years there has been a clamour against boat-loads of refugees, asylum-seekers, most of them desperate people from war-torn countries or those who face persecution where they come from. Reform’s central appeal is designed to ‘stop the boats’ or immediately deport those arriving, regardless of where they are sent – most likely be jailed, tortured or executed.The voters of Clacton in 2024 probably elected Farage, falling for his genuinely false rhetoric about the asylum-seekers invading the UK and destroying the country by living luxuriously off the tax-payer and of course committing heinous crimes. But, so much has been revealed about Farage and about Reform since he was first elected and since his party won hundreds of seats in local elections – so much dirty water under so many bridges, that Clacton could have changed its mind. Hope springs eternal?I don’t live there and so have no vote, but if I did, on the ‘anyone but Nigel’ ticket, I would probably vote for Count Binface. I don’t know if he’ll accept the slogan, but I would urge him to campaign with posters saying: I AM NOT AS FULL OF TRASH AS FARAGE.I can provide no evidence that the voters of Clacton would see through Farage’s ‘stunt’ and assess his fascist rubbish as unacceptable trash, but the British public has been known in the past to reject Nazi-istic policy. A fellow called Oswald Mosley, who led a British fascist and neo-Nazi party in the 1930s, disappeared into the cracks between the pages of British history. Enoch got nowhere. Yes, Brexit was a reverse and so is the rise of Reform, but one awaits the result in Clacton and hopes that Farage’s vote will demonstrate a significant decline if not a wipe-out? Jai Binface.Farrukh Dhondy has published several books. His latest book The Hawk and the Hyena has a more detailed account of his conversations with Sobhraj.