Politics
Who’s really to blame for Jason Arday’s death?
The Jason Arday story has ended in unspeakable tragedy. Yesterday, Arday was found ‘unresponsive’ at an address in south London. His death was unexpected, but is not being treated as suspicious, say the police.
He was just 41 years old. What devastation his family and friends must be feeling. The heartbreak. The lack. We can only hope they are now left to navigate their grief with some measure of quiet, peace and dignity.
Meanwhile, everyone else is left to work out how we got here. If the past 12 hours are anything to go by, ghoulish identitarians seem intent on rewriting history, drawing all the wrong lessons, and using a troubled man’s untimely death as a springboard to dunk on their opponents.
Last week, Arday resigned from his professorship at Cambridge University, following mounting allegations that he had plagiarised large sections of his PhD thesis, fabricated personal achievements, lied about racist intimidation he had suffered at Cambridge, and perhaps even exaggerated the extent of his autism in his youth.
Arday was more than an academic. He was a sensation. He guest-edited the Today programme, he was profiled on Good Morning America, a blockbuster memoir was in the works, all off the back of his incredible story – from a poor, illiterate, ‘neurodiverse’ boy to an all-conquering academic, ultra-marathon-runner and charity fundraiser.
And for Cambridge, he was a totem. When he was appointed in 2023, as a professor of sociology of education, Arday was presented as the embodiment of ‘the barriers faced by many under-represented groups across higher education’. Thus, his mere presence was proof that Cambridge was committed to ‘doing the work’ of demolishing the ‘structural racism’ that supposedly lurked among its ancient stone and lush lawns.
I repeat all this only to stress that this was a story – the thrust of which has been curiously omitted from many of the initial write-ups and accusatory ‘commentary’. For all the putrid bile on social media about this being a ‘public hounding’ led by a ‘right-wing reactionary media’, it all began with fellow academics, and a reporter at Times Higher Education, who dared to raise questions about Arday’s thesis, only to have the police called on them.
Arguably, the most devastating exposé on Arday was published in that noted hard-right outlet, the Guardian, establishing that his claims about a pig’s head being left at his parents’ door and being menaced with a knife in his faculty building were not borne out by the evidence.
Does the Guardian have ‘blood on its hands’, too? Is it wrong for journalists to expose the lies and wrongdoing of prominent public figures at elite institutions? Of course it isn’t. I dare say many of those throwing these accusations around don’t care one jot about Arday, or have paid much attention to this story at all. They are simply the sort of people who never let a horrific tragedy get in the way of scoring the cheapest of political points; who are all too happy to use a corpse as a soap box.
It’s also fascinating to see the identitarian left apparently so exercised about the horror of public shamings. After all, these are people who will join pile-ons, sign open letters, call for people to be sacked, and happily ruin their lives, even when the target in question has done the sum total of nothing wrong – people who say men can’t become women, for instance, or once told an off-the-cuff joke at a conference, or failed to delete some jokey, old tweets before taking up a plum new position. Do not not take any lectures from these vultures.
The journalists and dissenting academics did their job, because the Cambridge higher-ups didn’t do theirs. They chose to believe Arday’s story, because it furnished their worldview and lent them some pious PR. They rebuffed the allegations, until it was impossible to do so (Arday’s resignation came within hours of Cambridge finally announcing an investigation into his record). They put him on a pedestal, from which he was always going to be knocked off. Not because he was black, but because he was a fraudster and a fantasist, elevated by an academic system that has come to reward dazzling tales of victimhood, even outright lies.
This is what we mean by the cult of DEI – the racial elite ideology that has left a trail of injustice, and now tragedy, in its wake. There are the brilliant black academics who have been reduced to tokens, or dismissed as ‘coconuts’ when they utter the ‘wrong’ opinions. There are the students and academics who don’t belong to a ‘protected’ group, passed over for opportunities and promotion. And now there is the late Jason Arday, a man who became trapped in his own fantasy land, indulged by those who should have known better.
I won’t say Cambridge has blood on its hands, but it does have a lot to answer for.
When you take part in a card game like Bridge, even the best players have to work with the hand they are dealt. However bad a hand is, you must use your skill to achieve the optimum result.
In the same vein, the current parliamentary commissioner for standards has had to deal with the rules he inherited when he took up the job in 2022. Yet the simple fact is that these rules are not fit for purpose. They breach all reasonable views of natural justice, flying in the face of the concept of innocent until proven guilty. They must be reformed as a matter of urgency.
Under the current rules, an MP can face trial by media and the public, who base their views on the very limited information released by the commissioner’s office. Inevitably, this can lead people to make assumptions about those under investigation that often bear no relation to reality. This happened to me recently, when the commissioner announced that I was under investigation over, as one report vaguely put it, ‘a possible failure to declare an interest’. In truth, someone took issue with my support for Israel and was trying to imply I had been ‘bought’.
The system operates as follows. The decision to announce that an investigation into an MP is underway and whether to notify the media is in the personal gift of the commissioner. This means he can effectively play God with an MP’s reputation. The commissioner will notify an MP if they are under investigation, but he is under no obligation to tell him or her whether this fact will be released to the public or not. If his decision is to launch an investigation, he will not warn the MP in advance.
Incredibly, MPs are not supposed to respond publicly to news that they are the subject of an inquiry. They are expected to remain silent.
In my case, I was told on 28 July that I was under investigation. I was not told whether – or when – this information would be made public. Was it a coincidence that the commissioner’s office then decided to release details of the inquiry to the media on 3 August at about 10.15am, just 45 minutes before a major Reform UK press conference in London? And was it a coincidence that the BBC chose to announce it via a national push notification at exactly 11am, potentially disrupting our press conference and changing the headlines?
This announcement followed a weekend of totally unrelated press stories about donations involving Reform UK and myself. Many members of the public will have put two and two together and made five: the practical effect of the commissioner releasing this news was to erroneously suggest to the mainstream media that I was being investigated for the contents of the weekend’s press coverage.
The story was running within a few minutes on all mainstream broadcast, digital and print media, with wild inaccuracies being perpetrated, especially as the media did not bother to get in touch for clarification.
I was supposed to suck it up, stay silent, but I refused. If I am attacked, I will defend myself – especially against inaccuracies that could defame or damage me. If I had not clarified the situation on social media, those inaccurate headlines and stories would have run for days.
So I must ask: was this part of a deliberate stitch-up? It certainly felt like it. Or was it genuinely a total coincidence?
I have written to the commissioner asking why he decided to publish news of my investigation, why I was not given warning of it and why it was released at that particular moment. I also want to know whether any heads-up was given by the commissioner’s office to the press at the time or just beforehand. I have alerted the Commons speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, to my concerns. I do wonder if the time has come for the investigator to be investigated.
This episode was completely unacceptable for me personally, but more widely, it proved the rules need root-and-branch reform.
I would strongly suggest there needs to be a standard set of rules on what is published by the commissioner and when. MPs should be notified in advance. In a sane world, surely the fact of an investigation would be publicised with sufficient details to steer the media, just as media outlets reporting on active criminal cases are able to follow a standard set of details that do not prejudice a criminal inquiry.
Secondly, investigations are not currently subject to a timetable. This means they can run for many months, despite relating to simple matters. One sitting MP has been under investigation for almost a year over a single letter in one tweet. Even the Parliamentary Committee on Standards has no requirement to meet on a regular or timely basis to consider recommendations from the commissioner. I have heard it can take months for the committee to meet. Again, unacceptable.
Inquiries should be limited to, say, two months, barring exceptional circumstances. This is crucial because at present, any MP who is under investigation can always be referred to publicly in media reports as being ‘under investigation’. The cloud of suspicion hangs heavily over them, regardless of the outcome.
Furthermore, because of the way the system operates, the commissioner’s office is itself being abused. It has become a sort of ‘smear service’ in which vexatious complaints are lodged against an MP and then immediately publicised by the complainant, regardless of whether the commissioner considers them worthy of investigation. This happened to me two weeks ago when a vexatious complaint was made by a Liberal Democrat MP, working in conjunction with the Guardian, which splashed on the story at the moment of submission of the complaint; even though it was rapidly rejected, the damage was done by more lurid headlines that were not then corrected or apologised for.
Ultimately, the current system means that MPs are presumed guilty until the commissioner decides they are innocent. The cards of this parliamentary standards game are stacked against MPs in a way that defies any reasonable form of justice. It needs reform.
If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise. Because the way things are going, you’re going to find a bunch of fighting-age migrant men, fresh off the super-dinghies, being treated to a Teddy Bear’s Picnic, with Paddington himself (surely the new spirit animal of our de-fanged nation, having replaced the rather-too-pleased-with-themselves lion and unicorn) doing the honours with the tea pot.
And if Edwina Currie has anything to do with it, they’ll be able to take a lovely trip to a makeshift local brothel to exploit sad sex workers when the cucumber sandwiches run out.
Currie is currently giving Dawn French and Narinder Kaur a run for their money in the gaga online-posting stakes. She was always a showboater – in 1988, as a junior health minister, she made egg sales drop by 60 per cent when she proclaimed that most of them were riddled with salmonella, leading farmers to destroy a whopping 400million of them and slaughter four million hens. She also appointed Jimmy Savile, expressing her ‘full confidence’ in him, to run a taskforce in charge of Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital, where he went on to rape female patients.
At least she could be forced to resign when she was a politician, which she did a fortnight after the salmonella scandal. Now nothing can shut her up. I blame sex. Once she was revealed as former prime minister John Major’s mistress, she re-invented herself as a somewhat ‘racy’ lady and milked it for all it was worth. As the BBC put it in 2002 in a report called Westminster’s Odd Couple, ‘The man who tucked his shirt into his underpants had a four-year affair with the most outspoken and sexually interested woman of her political generation – a sort of Essex girl Margaret Thatcher’. Though Major somewhat embarrassingly issued a statement saying that he was ashamed of their fling, she hung on in there, calling him ‘the love of her life’.
She has written six novels stippled with sex, but stopped in 2001; that would tie in with the rise of the internet, when a lot of media blabbermouths discovered that sitting in front of a camera in your ‘study’ for a few minutes every morning is far easier than bashing out thousands of words about throbbing members. The words ‘gob on a stick’ invariably come to mind when thinking of Currie, and never more than this week on Times Radio.
Whereas once delightfully common, she has grown into the most patronising Lady Muck this side of Emily Thornberry, and the first thing she did was correct the presenter who called them migrants – ‘I think you mean asylum seekers!’. The second was to say of the current controversy about whether it is wise to put over a thousand young male migrants next to a small village: ‘The obvious thing that 1,200 young men are gonna need is a brothel!’
I’ve heard it all now. I thought that Care4Calais was bad enough. Its annual report boasted that it had handed 62,000 items to would-be migrants to Blighty on French beaches, including ‘snug-packs’ and SIM cards. ‘Asylum seekers’ can get free laptops, on which they can while away the hours watching pornography, from charities and ‘inclusion’ programmes like Screen Share UK and Solidaritech. Other donors will provide free mobile phones, chargers and, ahem, internet access.
If the people who do these things weren’t be-clowning themselves enough, there are also actual clowns for Calais, charity workers on the appropriately named ‘Loon-Plage’. The Telegraph reports that 67-year-old Laurence Quetel and her dungaree-clad troupe’s attempts to entertain migrants while they waited to be served lunch, made for an ‘incongruous performance in the squalid camp of Loon-Plage on the outskirts of Calais… Only 50 metres away, gangs of Kurdish people smugglers huddled in tents and plotted the next batch of crossings over the English Channel.’ The accompanying photographs show lines of baffled migrants, clearly wondering why anyone would make such a show of themselves. The one upside is that Quetel trained as a hospital clown but has for some years moved her skills to migrant camps – so that’s a bunch of sick children who don’t have yet another trial to endure.
Getting a far better reception are the young female charity workers who sometimes go to the beaches to dance for the young men. You can see the migrants grinning at them and thinking: ‘You absolute slag – I bet all Western women are like you!’ These are the sort of women who would have a nervous breakdown if a white man called them ‘darlin’. And now Edwina Currie is opining that opening brothels in areas where there are high numbers of migrants would be a useful move. I’ve heard of ‘the Pull factor’ but this is ridiculous.
Offering an unreserved welcome to fighting-age men from cultures that see women as a cross between children and chattel and who come into your country illegally does not seem like a very smart move. It’s like someone – with a sad backstory, maybe even homeless – breaking into your house and you react by giving them soup, a SIM card and your spare room for an indefinite period. And, if Currie gets her wicked way, a bunk-up seems likely too. Now, there’s an offer many a sex-starved lad from a sexually segregated society will find hard to resist.
Of course, it won’t be Edwina or any of her female friends and relatives (certainly not her ghastly lookalike daughter Debbie) staffing these grim sex factories. It’ll be the youngest and poorest and most easily exploited women, many of them from overseas themselves, the nature of prostitution being what it is. Importing female migrants to be used as sexual spittoons by male migrants – O brave new world, that has such people in it! Put that in your next ‘Isles of Wonder’ pageant, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, between the NHS and the Blitz Spirit!
Can you imagine how Edwina Currie’s throwaway line – while she goes about the business of mouthing off to earn her daily sourdough – will add to the lure of our tiny island? We’ve already got economic migrants masquerading as asylum seekers; now we’ll have sex migrants pretending to be economic migrants.
If Currie seeks to persist with her crusade to facilitate illegals getting their end away, perhaps she might posit the notion that – just as at many sex clubs – no man is allowed in without being accompanied by a female. It would certainly give pause for thought to the cowards leaving all their mothers, sisters and girlfriends at home (in ‘war zones’, don’t forget, according to the aid workers) while they rush to fill their boots with all the bounty – booty, even – that our ineffably degraded old country has to offer.
The post Andy Burnham’s I’m Not Listening Tour appeared first on spiked.
We’ve written before at HuffPost UK about how spotting “SSSS” on your boarding pass could mean your flight will take a little longer.
That’s because the four letters stand for ‘Secondary Security Screening Selection’, which might mean you go through a more involved scanning and searching process when passing security.
But it turns out that the numbers following your “SEQ”, or “sequence”, letters could affect your ability to board a flight on some airlines, especially budget ones, Simple Flying shared.
What does your SEQ code mean on a boarding pass?
It simply refers to when you checked in.
If you have a SEQ/10, that means you were the 10th person checked onto that flight.
Often, this has no effect whatsoever on your journey – it just reveals where you were in the queue to board. Passengers who pre-booked a seat ought to still keep it, etc.
But sometimes, per the U.S. Department of Transportation, this number might land you in trouble in cases of overbooked flights or first-come, first-served deals.
“If there are not enough passengers who are willing to give up their seats voluntarily, an airline may deny you a seat on an aircraft based on criteria that it establishes, such as the passenger’s check-in time, the fare paid by the passenger, or the passenger’s frequent flyer status,” they shared.
In other words, those who checked in last might be selected to step off of an overbooked plane first.
This depends on the airline you’ve picked, however. Each one will have different protocols.
Your SEQ code could land you a worse seat, too
Again, those who’ve pre-booked a seat need not worry about losing it thanks solely to their SEQ code.
But according to Simple Flying, some airlines pick seats for passengers in order of arrival.
In that case, they shared, those who check in last might be left with the least desirable seat.
I’m quite proud of how far I’ve come with accepting house spiders.
They’re not going to hurt us, after all, and though we might see more of them in autumn than any other time of year, they’re not “coming indoors” – they’ve likely always been there, and cannot usually survive outside.
But I confess I’m not so zen about craneflies – the winged, giant mosquito-looking critters I’ve always known as “daddy longlegs”.
These flitting, eerily spindly insects are terrifying for a reason. As a child, playground chatter had it that they carry the most powerful venom of any spider, yet they can’t break our skin to administer it.
Wrong on both counts, experts say
Speaking to HuffPost UK, ecologist, conservation scientist, and entomologist Professor Adam Hart of the University of Gloucestershire said this myth is wrong on more levels than I expected.
Firstly, he told us, craneflies “aren’t spiders”.
“They are in the same insect group as house flies and mosquitoes,” he said.
And not only do they not bite or sting people, but they “are not venomous in any way” – never mind being the most venomous spider in the world.
Granted, some people – especially those in America – use the term daddy longlegs for other species, like cellar spiders and harvestmen.
Harvestmen have poison (not venom), which they spray all over themselves when attacked, but this can only kill insects and spiders – and is far from the most powerful toxin in the world.
Cellar spiders can bite and do have venom, but not enough to kill us. The British Arachnological Society said “this species presents absolutely no danger to humans or to pets”.
Why do craneflies exist?
Though I find the creatures – which apparently love to fly in your face for no reason other than looking menacing – petrifying, Prof Hart points out that they have their place in the ecosystem.
Especially during the start of the colder season, he said, when they can help to provide a vital food source for birds and pollinators.
“They are totally harmless and provide a huge energy boost for insect-feeding birds and mammals at a difficult time of the year,” he shared.
They can also reveal the health of an ecosystem. More craneflies might mean a more diverse and flourishing natural environment, the Natural History Museum said.
“But,” Dr Hart conceded, “they can be really annoying! Keep windows shut and they will mostly stay outside.” You don’t have to tell me twice.
Nicole Kidman is getting reflective about her past relationship with fellow A-lister Tom Cruise.
The Eyes Wide Shut co-stars were married for more than a decade between 1990 and 2001, with the Australian performer looking back on this time during an interview with British Vogue.
“Because of who I married at such a young age, I was thrust into [the spotlight when] I was 22,” she claimed.
“I got married so young,” she continued. “Suddenly I was 22, 23 years old and I had this huge movie star husband. But it just seemed completely natural. We just fell madly in love and it was that simple.”
Nicole admitted: “I remember people saying to me, ‘OK, well this is really going to affect your career.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t care. I’m in love. I want to be married.’ And then I was his ‘wife’ and they were like, ‘See, we told you.’ I’m like, ‘So what? I wasn’t meant to marry the man I love? Of course I’ll throw my career away. I don’t care’.”
Back in 2015, Nicole reflected on how the breakdown of her first marriage led to her career entering a new phase.
“I was running from my life at that time, I wasn’t able to handle the reality of it and as an actor you have this wonderful thing where you can go and get lost in somebody else’s life,” she recalled.
“Out of my divorce came work that was applauded so that was an interesting thing for me.”
Nicole later married fellow Australian star Keith Urban, to whom she was wed for 20 years until their divorce was finalised back in January.
She told Variety earlier this year: “I am [doing well], because I’m always going to be moving toward what’s good. What I’m grateful for is my family and keeping them as is and moving forward. That’s that.”
“Everything else I don’t discuss out of respect,” she claimed. “I’m staying in a place of, ‘We are a family’, and that’s what we’ll continue to be. My beautiful girls, my darlings, who are suddenly women.”
Read Nicole Kidman’s full interview in the September issue of British Vogue.
Vodafone has rejected Zia Yusuf’s call for them to stop donating mobile phone SIM cards which are then given to asylum seekers.
Reform UK’s home affairs spokesman has written to the company’s board of directors warning them that they face jail if his party wins the next election.
It emerged recently that Vodafone has given more than 2,000 SIM cards to the Care4Calais charity, which gives them to migrants arriving in the UK.
Yusuf said: “Vodafone’s CEO is paid £10 million a year while her company hands thousands of SIM cards to illegal migrants in Calais, helping them break into Britain and putting British women and girls at risk.
“I have given her and Vodafone’s board the opportunity to publicly disavow this activity and cut ties with Care4Calais.
“Under a Reform UK government, there will be serious consequences for companies that knowingly facilitate illegal entry.
“Those responsible, including Vodafone’s CEO and company directors, will face criminal sanctions and prison. The company would be removed from government contracts and face regulatory sanctions.
“The days of gilded elites enriching themselves while ordinary British communities pay the price are coming to an end.”
But a spokeperson for Vodafone defended the company’s policy.
He said: “VodafoneThree’s programme provides mobile SIMs to registered UK charities – against strict programme criteria – for distribution to vulnerable people in the UK.
“Participating charities, regulated by the Charity Commission, distribute the six months connectivity to those they identify as being in need.
“All calls, texts and data are for UK use only.”
Listen to Commons People, the podcast that makes politics easy. Every week, Kevin Schofield and Kate Nicholson unpack the week’s biggest stories to keep you informed. Join us for straightforward analysis of what’s going on at Westminster.
Anne Hathaway attended the premiere this past week of her new movie, The End of Oak Street, in Los Angeles, but online, conspiracy theorists were not focusing on the film or Hathaway’s style. Their target was on the actress’ pregnant body.
Hathaway wore a blue top and low-rise jeans that revealed the bottom of her pregnant stomach. Social media comments from the event questioned whether her bare bump was real.
“That belly looks fake,” one top comment from Entertainment Tonight’s post reads, while another on X declares, “Is this what a fake bump looks like? Why does her tummy look so odd?”
In her Instagram post sharing her premiere photos, Hathaway seemingly addressed the conspiracy with her caption that included a peace sign and a kissing emoji: “Fake hair, real bump.”
This is not the first “bumpvestigation” targeting a powerful, famous woman in the public eye. There have also been online conspiracy theories that Beyoncé and Meghan Markle faked their pregnancy bumps or used surrogates.
So why do so many people on the internet believe that women are faking their pregnancies?
The most generous interpretation is that people are confused with what they see online. The ease with which people can make artificially generated photos is making people mistrust photos and videos. Just last week, an AI-generated pregnant photo of Zendaya circulated on the internet before being debunked.
But it’s also likely that these conspiracy theories are in bad faith. Bumpvestigations are a tool to question and challenge the success of women, according to gender and pregnancy researchers.
In the comments, people used the physical shape of Hathaway’s belly button and the size of her bump as proof that she is faking it. And this real judgment about a fake conspiracy is yet another example of how so many people believe they’ve got a claim on a person’s pregnant body, said Elizabeth Weigle, a scholar at the University of Georgia who has researched maternity wear.
“To me, every baby bump looks beautiful,” Weigle said, but noted that people can hold unrealistic beliefs of what a “perfect” bump on a celebrity should look like.
People use “bumpvestigations” to question the status of women
What might also be fueling the internet backlash is that Hathaway, who is expecting her third child, appears happy.
When Hathaway reveals her pregnant body, “it’s a proud-mother flaunt of ‘I feel good in my body, and I’m carrying child.’ That’s why they don’t like it because it is a display of our power and people want to squash that,” Weigle said.
Questioning someone’s pregnancy as fake “is a way to try to upend and delegitimise their status and power and to keep the gender hierarchy of men above women firmly in place,” said Amy Diehl, a gender equity researcher and co-author of Glass Walls.
“It is also another way to send a message to all women that they should stay out of public roles, or their lives, their bodies and their families will be publicly scrutinised in the same way.”
In this way, making people wonder if a bump is fake is meant to shame a woman who doesn’t fit this mould of what a pregnant woman should do or look like, said Jay Daniel Thompson, a senior lecturer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Victoria, Australia, who researches conspiracy theories.
“The ‘fake pregnancy’ allegations might also reflect a deep discomfort at seeing a pregnant woman – and a famous one at that – in public, living her life,” Thompson said.
This policing of pregnant bodies does not just happen to famous ones. “A bare baby bump draws overt attention to the femaleness of one’s body, which is why bump images draw intense scrutiny,” Diehl said. “For this reason, many women at work feel compelled to hide their pregnancy bump for as long as possible.”
One 2022 survey found that one in five mothers have experienced pregnancy discrimination at work, and the finding held across race, income and other demographics.
That’s why women styling their pregnancy so that the bump is the focal point is still radical. How singer and business mogul Rihanna dressed during her pregnancies created a “Rihanna effect” in the evolution of maternity dress because it modelled the message of “Just because I have a protruding bump doesn’t mean I’m not sexy,” Weigle said.
In 2022, Rihanna wore a sheer black, fishnet teddy dress to Paris Fashion Week while pregnant with her first son, and is known for her iconic maternity looks that displayed her bare stomach and used haute couture.
Hathaway, who is dressing more “straight-edge” than Rihanna did, is showing how normal and popular it now is for women to show their pregnant bodies fashionably, Weigle added.
And yet that same normalcy might be causing more fake pregnancy rumours. Weigle doesn’t think bumpvestigations will ever die, because people interpret pregnant women showing their bodies as “a flaunt,” and that bothers people.
The best way to keep the internet ablaze is to keep living your life unbothered, after all.
Since her new movie premiered, Hathaway has continued to highlight her pregnancy during her press tour, more recently in a black top that revealed her bare bump during a Jimmy Kimmel appearance.
“I’m sure she’s going to have fun with this now,” Weigle said about the conversation Hathaway’s maternity wear has started, but noted that she wishes the actress didn’t have to in the first place.
Hathaway’s comeback statement about her “real bump” shows she is “being playful about it, but also, it just makes me mad that she even felt like she had to do that,” Weigle said.
Nigel Farage has easily won the Clacton by-election – but refused to turn up for the result being declared.
The Reform UK leader told a rally of his supporters that he had been advised by Essex Police that “there is an organised campaign to disrupt” the announcement.
A spokesperson for the party said: “Essex Police advised Nigel not to attend the count tonight due to a credible threat against him.”
However, the force denied telling any of the by-election’s 34 candidates not to attend the count.
A spokesperson said: “We have a proportionate and robust policing operation to ensure the safety and security of all participants in the count.”
Farage received 22,239 votes, 12,784 more than his nearest rival, Count Binface, who received an astonishing 9,455.
The bottom line, however, is that Farage has been re-elected to the seat he originally won at the 2024 general election with a majority of 8,500.
The Reform leader resigned as an MP last month amid the furore over his failure to declare to a £5 million gift he received from a Thailand-based crypto billionaire shortly before that election campaign.
Parliament’s standards commissioner has launched an investigation, prompting Farage to claim he is the victim of a “witch-hunt”.
That probe, which was paused when the Reform leader resigned, will now re-start and could result in another by-election if he is found to have broken Commons rules and is suspended for more than 10 days.
Labour, the Tories, the Lib Dems, the Green Party and even Restore Britain refused to put up candidates in the by-election.
Labour chair Bridget Phillipson said: “Let’s be clear: this is no victory for Nigel Farage. The mountain of sleaze and scandal he and Reform are now engulfed in has grown and grown while he’s been trying to distract the public by fighting a by-election against a bin.
“This morning, Nigel Farage shouldn’t be celebrating – he should wake up and smell the coffee.
“He must come clean with the public and put all the facts on the table over his secret £5 million gift, his relationship with a convicted fraudster, and the other scandals his party is drowning in.
“Farage’s distraction by-election doesn’t clear his name – it just shows he likely has so much more to hide.”
Lib Dem Cabinet Office spokesperson Lisa Smart said: “Like most people who win a fight against a bin, Farage has come away looking daft and smelling of yesterday’s chip paper.
“Now that he’s heading back to Westminster, the investigation into his shady financial affairs and £5 million ‘gift’ must crack on. Reform claims to fight for the people, but they answer to crypto-billionaires.”
Listen to Commons People, the podcast that makes politics easy. Every week, Kevin Schofield and Kate Nicholson unpack the week’s biggest stories to keep you informed. Join us for straightforward analysis of what’s going on at Westminster.
Count Binface stands among other candidates at the Clacton by-election count.Count Binface claimed victory in the Clacton by-election after securing his best ever result.
The self-styled intergalactic warrior received the most votes of any candidate who turned up for the result announcement, after Nigel Farage snubbed the declaration.
The Reform UK leader was comfortably re-elected as the constituency’s MP, with a majority of 12,784 over second place Binface, who received 9,455 votes – 27% of the overall total.
But that was far more than his previous best result, when he was backed by 308 voters in Rishi Sunak’s Richmond constituency at the 2024 general election.
In a video posted on X after the Clacton result was announced, Count Binface said: “I can officially say that I am the winning candidate, of the candidates who bothered to turn up for the result.
“That’s right, 9,455 actual votes. Just eight weeks ago in Makerfield I got 95.
“That means I’ve got, against Nigel Farage, 10,000% more votes than I got against Andy Burnham.
“What does that tell you? Well it tells you that Nigel, who said he didn’t want to be humiliated, maybe has been.
“As for me, I’m over the moon – I’m over your moon, I’m over my moons, and what comes next? We shall see.
“But we know this for a fact. Over one in four people in this constituency would rather have Count Binface as their MP than the leader of Reform UK.”
I came first in the Clacton by-election! Of the candidates who bothered to turn up for the results. Here is my victory speech! pic.twitter.com/PBaLO10P2j
— Count Binface (@CountBinface) August 14, 2026
Listen to Commons People, the podcast that makes politics easy. Every week, Kevin Schofield and Kate Nicholson unpack the week’s biggest stories to keep you informed. Join us for straightforward analysis of what’s going on at Westminster.
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