the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Before we get started, I just want to make it clear I’m no fan of Farrago. To me, he’s little more than a snake-oil salesman in a double-breasted jacket. He’s great at saying the things that people – now – want to hear. But for quite a while, no-one did. Fair play though, he still kept on saying them. 

The problem for me is that whilst he’s busy banging on about this and that – and while other politicians and the media are busy amplifying the ‘controversy’ they create – all of the other topics he doesn’t talk about aren’t talked about. 

He deals in soundbites – pithy, direct and spoken in ‘human’ to be sure – but soundbites nonetheless. And don’t go looking on the Reform UK website for details. There aren’t any. I’ve just checked. Imagine if Hallmark made political greetings cards. That’s essentially it.

I voted to ‘Remain’ in 2016. Only because I believed that European regulations to slow down the amount of greenhouse gasses and carbon emissions released into the atmosphere, and thus decrease the speed of global warming, would be more effective than if we left. Turns out, I was right.  

But putting all of that the one side, I can’t help but feel that Farrago has essentially called everyones bluff and they’re none too happy about it. How is the fact that neither Labour, the Conservatives or the Lib-Dems, are going to contest the by-election that his resignation as MP has triggered any different to an angry toddler throwing all her toys out of the pram? 

This is in no way related to the election of 2024, when Farrago won the seat comfortably. So comfortably, in fact, that he got almost as many votes as three main parties combined. No. It is a matter of principal for them; the principal of not wanting to be associated any democracy in which they’ll all lose. 

Perhaps then, their thinking is this. That the voters of Clacton will follow the examples of the voters of Caerphilly and of Gorton and Denton who abandoned them, preferring instead to vote for the candidate most likely to beat Reform. To me, this thinking is inherently flawed. 

If he wins the election, he can claim to have a mandate from the people of Clacton, a mandate which he can say Andy Capp doesn’t have from the people of Britain. But if he loses, he also wins. He can point to the fact that because all the main parties didn’t take part – leaving the way clear for a novelty candidate to win instead – and then allow him rage against what he’ll see as an establishment stick up. He knows his supporters will love that. They already think that shadowy forces are conspiring to thwart them at every turn. To do the all things that they imagine shadowy forces do.

So he wins either way.