Welcome (back) to Clacton, the fading seaside Essex town that became famous in October 2014 – the site of an apparent political revolution.
Clacton was where the incumbent Conservative MP Douglas Carswell triggered a by-election after resigning from the party and winning it under Ukip candidate. It represented the party’s first ever parliamentary by-election win, and rightful entry into the House of Commons.
Yet by 2017, the seat was voting Conservative again and Ukip was left with no MPs.
The party’s parliamentary legacy is almost non-existent but its political one has been totemic – the shockwaves are still reverberating today. Clacton was identified by the academics Rob Ford and Matt Goodwin as one of the most Ukip-friendly seats in the country in their defining work Revolt on the Right (2013). The east coast of England remains perhaps the most probable location for a comeback by the right as voters flee the Conservatives.
Modelling by myself and pollsters suggests that the Tories would still hold Clacton at the next election – though their vote share would almost halve from 72 per cent in 2019, with Labour just behind on 30-something per cent. Reform UK, the successor to the Brexit Party, which in a way was the personality-successor to Ukip, would finish third with a vote share in the high teens, if not twenties. That seems plausible, and would mark the locale as the best projected result for Reform of any seat.
But what if Nigel Farage stood? In such a scenario, Survation in polling some time ago found that Farage might well win (having tried and failed seven times to win election to parliament). Prompt for parties, not candidates, and the Conservatives win, as you can see above. But prompt for Giles Watling, the incumbent Tory MP (who lost against Carswell in 2014 and 2015), and all other candidates, with Nigel Farage as Reform’s choice, and Farage wins.
One could easily dismiss this as merely a consequence of name recognition. And you’d be right. Candidate polls focus voters’ minds in a way that party polls sometimes don’t. And though of course electors do cast votes for candidates, by and large it is the party that voters look to.
The risk with named polls is that they distract from other key factors, such as who the public wants as prime minister, and, indeed, the preferred the party for power.
Nevertheless, Farage has the name recognition. While Watling elicits an opinion from 52 per cent of voters, Farage attracts the attention of 70 per cent. Rishi Sunak, by contrast, has the attention of 62 per cent and Keir Starmer 63 per cent.
For good or ill, Farage has currency. He is more popular than Sunak among the Conservative base and speaks more to their anxieties and emotions than the current leader does. It smacks of 1993 in Canada, when Reform's Preston Manning spoke more like a Conservative to the then Progressive Conservative base than their more technocratic leaders ever could. And that’s not the wishful thinking of some Breitbart keyboard warrior hyping up their man. That’s what the polls are telling us.
Farage has become the comfort-eating companion of Tory party members, and more importantly - Tory voters. That has implications for a future Conservative leadership election. And were he to stand for parliament, he would be in with a chance in Clacton.
But as with any insurgent campaign, organisation is essential. And in Ukip’s time, their ground game was more haphazard rabble than Prussian drill. In the party’s key seats in 2015, activists were sent to town centres to make noise rather than knock on doors, denying their organisers valuable voter data for polling day. Farage is a noise master. He can poll well. But to win under first past the post, he needs to organise well. The noise suggests he can. But history suggests he won't.
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