Reform UK leader Nigel Farage gives a speech to supporters on Clacton Pier in Essex, while on the General Election campaign trail.The Reform UK leader won 21,225 votes, followed by Labour’s Jovan Owusu-Nepaul with 7,448 and the Lib Dem candidate Matthew Bensilum with 2,016.
The Conservatives’ Giles Watling, had been the Clacton MP since 2017. At the last election, he won the seat with a majority of 24,702.Farage’s win comes after the Brexiter suddenly announced he was taking over the leadership of his populist party and running for parliament in a major U-turn two weeks in the election campaign.
Only the month before, Farage had declared it was not “the right time” to run for parliament and that he wanted to focus on his “grassroots campaign” to get get his friend Donald Trump re-elected in the US. The far-right figure, who was previously the Ukip leader and an MEP, had tried and failed to run for parliament on seven different occasions between 1994 and 2005.
But he managed to return from the sidelines in the run-up to the EU referendum by backing both Leave campaigns.He continued to put pressure on the Conservatives by launching the Brexit Party in 2018 and pushing for a no-deal departure from the EU.In the last parliament, the party had just one MP, Lee Anderson, who defected from the Conservatives earlier this year.The exit poll also predicted Reform would take home a whopping 13 seats in this election, having split the right-wing vote.