Nigel Farage gambles on resignation and re-election ‘stunt’ to quiet the critics in donation scandal

For weeks, Nigel Farage, leader of the populist right-wing Reform UK party, has been on the defensive after a series of damaging revelations about his financial affairs, including undisclosed gifts from a cryptocurrency billionaire and from a political ally once convicted of fraud in the United States.

On Tuesday he tried to reclaim the narrative, unexpectedly announcing that he would resign from Parliament and run for re-election for his seat in Clacton, eastern England.

He appears to be calculating that a win with voters there will quiet his critics, give him a very visible victory and allow him to position himself as the victim of a campaign orchestrated by the political establishment.

“I have decided that the people of Clacton should be the judges of my actions,” Farage said in a statement broadcast on his party’s YouTube channel.

“This will be a ‘people versus the establishment’ by-election,” he added, referring to a special parliamentary election.

The success of Farage, an architect of Brexit whose anti-immigration party has led in opinion polls for over a year, was instrumental in destabilising Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who announced his resignation last month.

But Farage’s growing profile and the possibility that he could become prime minister at the next general election has attracted scrutiny of his financial affairs.

In May, The Guardian revealed that he had received an undisclosed gift of 5 million pounds ($A9.6m) from a cryptocurrency billionaire, Christopher Harborne, a Briton who lives in Thailand.

Farage argues that the gift was unconditional, that it was made before he won a seat in Parliament and that there was no requirement to declare it.

However, Daniel Greenberg, Parliament’s standards commissioner, has opened an investigation into whether the money should have been made public under rules that require new lawmakers to declare some financial benefits received in the 12 months before their election.

Over the weekend, The Sunday Times of London reported that Farage had separately failed to declare benefits provided by a political ally, George Cottrell, who served eight months in prison in the United States on the fraud conviction.

According to the newspaper, Cottrell’s support included providing social media staff members who worked for Farage in the year before he was elected as well as the use of a property rented by Cottrell near Buckingham Palace.

Farage insisted he followed all of the rules and has accused journalists of hounding his family and “despicable behaviour”.

He also suggested Tuesday that the Sunday Times article had now triggered a second investigation, saying: “Despite the fact that many of the things that were written in the article were inaccurate or irrelevant, yet another standards investigation is underway.”

If Greenberg finds that the gift from Harborne should have been declared, Farage might, under parliamentary rules, have been suspended from Parliament and forced to fight for re-election in Clacton.

But his announcement Tuesday effectively preempts that scenario. It does not, however, block the investigation, which could be suspended pending the special election in Clacton and then resumed if Farage wins.

That raises the possibility that the Reform UK leader could be forced into a second contest in Clacton later in the year.

In comments to reporters Tuesday, Starmer described Farage’s move as “a desperate stunt” from a politician “up to his neck in sleaze”.

Starmer’s likely successor, Andy Burnham, called it a “gimmick designed to distract from serious allegations about Farage’s funders.”

Despite Reform’s success in May in local elections, the party has also suffered some reverses.

Last month, it lost a crucial special parliamentary election in Makerfield, in northwest England, which was won decisively by Burnham.

This year it also lost a special election in nearby Gorton and Denton to an insurgent Green Party. And last year, it suffered a similar fate in Caerphilly in Wales, in a special election to the Welsh parliament, which was won by the center-left nationalist Plaid Cymru party.

In national polls, Reform’s support has fallen from about 30 per cent last year to about 25 per cent now, with Labour and the Conservatives around 20 per cent each.

Reform has recently faced competition on its right flank from a far-right party called Restore Britain, which was founded by a former ally of Farage.

Farage, a highly effective campaigner and a longtime disrupter of British politics, will be confident of winning the Clacton seat again, having achieved a majority of 8405 votes in the 2024 general election.

Polling suggests he remains popular in the area, which voted for Brexit by a large majority in 2016.

But Tuesday, Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative Party leader, said she would not run a candidate in what she called a “fake” special election.

Her party would, however, contest any vote that followed the investigation by Greenberg, she said. The centrist Liberal Democrats and Restore Britain gave similar indications.

And Farage’s gambit seems unlikely to end the scrutiny of his finances before the next general election, which must take place by 2029.