Police give Farage free pass over election overspend

Essex Police have given Reform UK leader Nigel Farage a free pass on his alleged overspending in his campaign in Clacton in the 2024 general election. No details have been released about the scale of the overspending. The police have declared that too much time has elapsed for the case to be pursued.

Farage, the main front-man of the Brexit campaign — who also allegedly applied for German citizenship the day after the leave vote and has never denied doing so or, indeed, obtaining one — won the Clacton seat after Keir Starmer nobbled Labour’s hugely popular candidate Jovan Owusu-Nepaul.

Farage repaid the favour. Of the 98 seats in which Reform came second, Labour won 89. This is more than Starmer’s eventual parliamentary majority of 86 seats. Reform allegedly ran non-existent candidates in around sixty seats. It used AI-generated images and fake bios, with at least one confirmed. Police took no action on those either.

The more than 280,000 votes gathered by these phantoms often had a huge impact in seats previously held by Tory MPs. In South Dorset — where a fake candidate ‘stood’ — the combined Tory-Reform vote far outstripped Labour’s narrow ‘winner.’ Reform voters would be most likely to vote Tory in the absence of their own. This almost certainly would have prevented Labour’s win:

Farage could theoretically still face an investigation by the Electoral Commision and questions over who funded his almost £900,000 house in Clacton, but it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see the long grass where those will end up.

Like Starmer over Savile, ‘Beergate‘, Assange and so much more, Nigel Farage seems to lead a charmed, you might even say protected, life.

Featured image via the Canary