The Clacton by-election has been unorthodox from the start – and results day has been no different, with winning candidate Nigel Farage choosing not to turn up to the result of a contest he himself triggered. Not only that - I got up this morning anticipating being in the audience, on your behalf, for a Farage victory speech, here in Clacton, and then doing an interview him afterwards. Neither of those things have happened.
The Reform UK leader cancelled all of the interviews he had planned, with the BBC and others. He said his no show at the declaration, in the Clacton Leisure Centre, was because the police had warned him of an attempt to "disrupt and degrade the result" and he did not want to be "demeaned and humiliated by nobodies". His aides emphasise too his ongoing, deeply held worries about his security.
It is also true that by vanishing rather than publicly celebrating his win he has avoided, for now at least, all of the questions about Reform's finances that led to the by-election in the first place. Instead, the focus has been on his victory and the oddities of the race and its aftermath. Farage's team point out he got more votes in this contest than he did two years ago at the general election, even though it was pretty clear all along that he would win.
And for a by-election in mid summer, there was a decent turn out too, of 44%, which suggests many people locally took the contest seriously. Speaking to folk in Walton-on-the-Naze and in Clacton-on-Sea today, there is no doubt Farage has his vociferous local critics, but plenty do share Reform's view that this result matters far more than the resumption of the investigation by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. "We consider this matter closed," is how one aide put it to me, punchily.
Except, of course, it isn't - the commissioner's inquiry is up and running again and Farage is likely to be interviewed by him in the coming weeks. And yes, it is possible that the eventual consequence of that process is yet another by-election. Farage faces renewed watchdog probe after Clacton by-election victory Farage's by-election victory won't stop questions about finances Count Binface gets almost 10,000 votes in Clacton by-election What do Nigel Farage's constituents think of his re-election?
It is a question prompting at least some debate within the party. "When he goes down this angry route he doesn't help himself," the prominent Reform activist Tim Montgomerie told Radio 4's The World At One. Montgomerie, the founder of the ConservativeHome website, defected to Reform two years ago.
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