Fear and loathing in Clacton

“If you want pantomime, I hear Clacton’s nice this time of year,” Sir Keir Starmer recently observed, and Farage does not disappoint. The great showman (some would say conman) enters the auditorium from the back, flanked by bodyguards, and makes his way forward through deafening music and roars of approval. There, flanked by two large Union flags, he holds his hands aloft, soaking in the adulation as fireworks erupt each side of the stage.

“Good evening, Clacton!”, he cries before launching into his usual 40-minute schtick. Brexit – his Brexit – has been “betrayed” by the Conservatives, he protests. “Britain is broken,” he complains. Mass immigration amounts to a “national security crisis”, he proclaims before adding, tongue in cheek: “The good news is only 800 young men crossed the English Channel today.”

The quips come thick and fast. “I’m told ‘Nigel, you’re wrecking the Conservative Party’s chances’. Well, they don’t need any help from me. They’re doing it themselves.”

So do the applause lines. The faithful jeer as he berates the BBC, Ulez and identity politics. They cheer as he demands that Britain quits the European Convention on Human Rights, the police use their stop and search powers, and schools cease “poisoning the minds of our kids”. Trump-like, he mocks “Slippery Sunak” and “Call Me Dave” Cameron.

Then comes the peroration. He’s a “fighter”, a “warrior”, he says. He’s afraid of nothing and nobody. He’ll be the “champion of the little men and little women”, the leader of the “people’s army”, the “voice of the silent majority” in parliament and the country. “The establishment’s terrified. The Conservatives are terrified. Labour aren’t scared yet, but by the time I’ve finished with them, they will be,” he declares, to a thunderous standing ovation.

No banana milkshakes are propelled his way this time – only adoration. Public-school educated and wealthy, Farage has once again managed to pose as the champion of the marginalised and downtrodden. “I feel he’s given a voice to the people who’ve been ignored,” says Tracey Neil, a credit controller. “He says what most people think and other politicians haven’t the guts to say,” said Karl Sergeant, a retired builder. “He talks the truth and says it like it is,” says Phil Murrell, a retired London underground worker.

Farage has one last surprise before he starts autographing placards and posing for selfies. He summons to the stage and embraces, one by one, four Conservative councillors who have chosen this moment to defect to his Reform UK party.

There is no doubt about it. At his eighth attempt, Farage is set to win a parliamentary seat in a constituency where the Conservative incumbent, a former actor named Giles Watling, secured a massive majority of 24,702 just five years ago.

The bookmakers certainly think he is: they’re offering odds of 1-3 or less on a Farage victory. The electoral predictors think he is: the website Electoral Calculus gives him a 72 per cent chance of winning. So do the pollsters. Ipsos gives him a 29 per cent lead over Labour, YouGov a 20 per cent lead over the Tories and Survation a 15 point lead over the Conservatives with a record-breaking swing.

And so do I, having spent a day accosting random people in and around Clacton: umpteen voters told me they were switching from Conservative to Reform.

This coastal constituency is perfect territory for Farage. Neglected, run down and stuck at the far end of a very slow railway line from London, it seethes with a sense of grievance and victimhood that this ultimate purveyor of snake oil exploits with consummate skill.

Once a thriving working-class resort, Clacton was clobbered by the advent of budget airlines and cheap package holidays to Europe (Butlins closed its camp there in 1983). Behind the seafront, once fine homes have been converted into flats, many of which are now in poor condition, or boarded up. The shops are dingy. Much of Clacton’s population are pensioners in poor health, living on benefits or lacking qualifications.

On Clacton’s westernmost fringe is Jaywick, a jumble of 1930s holiday chalets that were built on salt marshes and which morphed into permanent homes after the Second World War. It is now, officially, the most deprived community in England. You can buy a home there for £50,000.

Matthew Goodwin, the University of Kent professor who has charted the rise of Britain’s right-wing populism, calls Clacton “Ground Zero of Britain’s populist revolt”. It is, he says, “filled with the kind of voters who have consistently been most likely to vote Reform and back Farage in the past: working class, non-graduate, older, white, very concerned about the small boats that are bringing illegal immigrants into counties like Essex and Kent, and very keen to see legal migration reduced.”

Matthew Parris, the Times columnist, got into trouble a few years back for describing Clacton rather less charitably. He called it “a town called Hopeless… This is Britain on crutches. This is tracksuit and trainers Britain, tattoo-parlour Britain, all-our-yesterdays Britain”.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, Clacton fell for the chimera of Farage’s Brexit. Indeed it was the inspiration for Brexit.

Back in 2014 its fervently eurosceptic Conservative MP, Douglas Carswell, defected to the UK Independence Party, Reform’s predecessor, also led by Farage, and immediately won a by-election with a huge majority, to become Ukip’s one and only MP.

He won again in the 2015 general election. Desperate to protect the Conservatives’ right flank from Ukip’s growing appeal, David Cameron called a referendum on leaving the EU. Clacton voted 73 per cent for Brexit – the highest Leave vote anywhere except for Boston and Skegness, another run down, end-of-the-line seaside town, up in Lincolnshire.

As Farage told the throng at the Princes Theatre: “Clacton has a very special place in my heart”.

That the hard Brexit he demanded and got has actually made Clacton poorer, and that immigration has soared since Britain left the EU, does not matter to most people here. They blame the Conservatives for that, not Farage.

“I don’t blame him. He’s not been in charge,” said a woman called Katy who runs a sweet shop in Jaywick. “The elite’s stopped it,” said Phil, the retired London Underground worker as he queued outside the theatre. Even Chris Griffiths, a Conservative councillor, admitted: “A lot of us bought into the Brexit project and feel very, very betrayed by people in Westminster.”

Nor does it matter that Farage offers simplistic, unworkable, populist solutions to complex political problems. Or that he proposes swingeing cuts to the public services on which Clacton depends in order to pay for tax giveaways. Or that he actively supports Donald Trump and admires Russia’s president Putin. Or that he ruled out standing for parliament earlier this year, sarcastically asking: “Do I want to spend every Friday for the next five years in Clacton?”

Farage has also segued seamlessly from blaming the EU to blaming mass immigration for all Britain’s woes – from housing shortages to rising rents, the scarcity of doctors and the difficulty in getting a dental appointment.

That plays especially well in an overwhelmingly white constituency that is eager to find a scapegoat for its struggles, and to which many residents came as part of the “white flight” from increasingly multicultural East London.

In coded language the issue comes up time and again. “The country is full up,” says Linda Demirkol as she stands outside her tiny home in Jaywick. “People just want to see change in a direction that benefits English and British people,” says Mark Adams, a seaman. “Farage says things you’re frightened to say in case it’s portrayed as an ‘-ism’,” Jeanne Bennett, a civil servant, tells me. Yes, she means “racism”, she admits when pressed.

Sometimes the language is not so coded. “If someone gave me a machine gun I’d sit on the beaches and shoot the boats,” declared Gary Swann, an unemployed window cleaner, as he queued outside the theatre.

I feel almost sorry for Giles Watling, the Tory incumbent. With his huge majority in 2019, and despite the unpopularity of his party nationally, he must have been reasonably confident of re-election until Farage suddenly and unexpectedly declared his candidacy on June 3, shunting aside Reform’s existing candidate in Clacton. Tony Mack, a former drug addict who recovered to become a psychotherapist, tells me he was informed of his demotion 15 minutes before Farage’s announcement. He is now running as an independent.

Watling is by all accounts a diligent, moderate MP who lives in the constituency. He has served as a local councillor, voted Remain in 2016 and helped secure £20 million in levelling-up funds for Clacton. Tory luminaries like James Cleverly and Kemi Badenoch have come from London to campaign for him. He claims, with some justification, that Farage “doesn’t give two hoots about Clacton. This is all about Nigel, as ever… I don’t want to see the residents of Clacton taken for granted and sacrificed on the altar of his vanity”.

But for all that, you can almost feel Watling’s support evaporating. That’s reflected in the polls. It’s reflected on tactical voting websites like Best for Britain’s GetVoting.org which now suggests that voting Labour is the best way to defeat Farage (Labour secured less than 7,000 votes in 2019, barely 15 per cent of the total).

It’s reflected in the councillors’ defection at the Farage rally, and in the buzz at Farage’s headquarters above the Gaiety Amusements arcade on Pier Street. It’s reflected on the doorsteps where voter after voter said they were switching to Reform. Even Peter Carlane, an electrician who is a member of Clacton’s Conservative association and rents the flat above its Station Road office, said he might switch. “I’m a fan of Nigel’s and his plain talking,” he told me.

Farage is not the only beneficiary of the collapsing Tory vote. Jovan Owusu-Nepaul, the nattily-dressed Labour candidate, is 27, just two years out of Cambridge and standing in his first election. His team plausibly contends that many of Clacton’s disgruntled Tories are switching to Labour rather than Farage. Indeed it still harbours faint hopes of winning if the right remains split and progressives unite behind him.

What Owusu-Nepaul, the Birmingham-born son of a Jamaican father, has enjoyed rather less is the racism he has encountered. While he insists that Clacton is not racist, and that most people are friendly, he’s also been told to “go home”, “we don’t want you here” and “immigrants out”. He believes Farage’s “dog whistle stuff” has inflamed tensions, and for him the election is about “what sort of country do we want to live in?”

There’s the rub. On the face of it a Farage victory wouldn’t make much difference at Westminster, with Reform UK expected to win a handful of seats at most. He would be, in his own words, “a bloody nuisance”, but Farage would have no real power.

But the rump of the defeated Conservative Party might well see Farage’s success as evidence that it needs to move even further to the populist, nativist, intolerant right, perhaps even merging with Reform.

That would be a serious mistake. Marooned on the east coast, its best days behind it, and wallowing in the nostalgia of the “D-Day Darlings”, Clacton is tailor-made for Faragist exploitation. But it is scarcely typical of modern Britain.