On a slow, muddy path, the pale yellow smoothie found its target: far-right political candidate and Donald Trump acolyte Nigel Farage on the opening day of his insurgent campaign for a seat in the British Parliament.
But no demonstration of voter discontent in the air was going to stop one of the country's most gleefully polarizing public figures from shaking up what had until then been considered a fairly quiet contest between Britain's two biggest parties. In a surprise announcement in early June, Farage inserted himself at a time when the ruling Conservatives were already predicted to lose decisively to the left-leaning Labor Party.
Some observers believe that the return of Farage, 60 (political flamethrower, key architect of Brexit, leader of a small stridently anti-immigration party) could lead to a takeover of the Conservative Party, which has played a preeminent role in the crisis, style MAGA. British politics for almost 200 years.
Nigel Farage, leader of the anti-immigration Reform UK political party, plays in a games room below his party's office in Clacton-on-Sea, England.
And his high-profile presence reintroduces an insistently clamorous voice into what has lately been a nationalist-populist surge in Western Europe and beyond, the full significance of which may soon become clear.
“He is good at attracting attention and is seen as a disruptor, someone who wants to overthrow the established order,” said Mark Wickham-Jones, a political science professor at the University of Bristol. “His policies don't have much coherence, but in terms of support, that doesn't really matter.”
Public opinion polls suggest Farage's party, Reform UK, will not come close to winning Thursday's general election. But after seven consecutive defeats, it looks set to triumph — at last — in elections to the House of Commons, the lower house of the 223-year-old parliament.
Farage, a native of a leafy village on the outskirts of London, is making his eighth parliamentary bid in Clacton-on-Sea, a ramshackle seaside town whose jangling arcades, shuttered shop fronts and bedraggled, darting seagulls can lend it the air of a distorted mirror of funhouse. (In Britain, parliamentary candidates do not have to live in their constituencies.)
Children on bicycles hang out near the main street in Clacton-on-Sea. The town and surrounding villages are plagued by high unemployment and poverty.
People walk past one of the many arcades near the beach in Clacton-on-Sea.
“Something's happening out there: momentum!” Farage said as much recently to a group of enthusiastic, sweating fans at his small home venue, situated above one of the many flashy arcades lining a seaside street.
“It’s like millions of simultaneous conversations are taking place – at the breakfast table, in the bingo hall, in the pub: ‘Oh my God, we were just talking about you!’” he said, sounding almost giddy.
In many ways, Clacton is a tailor-made electoral seat for Farage.
The town and its surrounding villages, while containing some affluent areas, suffer from generally high rates of unemployment and poverty. In the 2016 Brexit referendum, 70% of the constituency voted to leave the European Union. Two years earlier, Reform's predecessor, the UK Independence Party (UKIP), won a parliamentary election for the first time in Clacton.
In a political pattern that has become familiar in the United States and continental Europe, voters in Clacton, which is home to relatively few immigrants, tend to be far more vociferous than the general population in demanding that immigration be drastically reduced.
Farage “has been able to tap into people's fears,” Wickham-Jones said, “and concerns about identity: a sense that society has been changing rapidly.” Other politicians, she said, have struggled to articulate a counternarrative to the social benefits of immigration, or less drastic ways to limit it.
David Allum, right, campaigns for British politician Nigel Farage outside the Reform office above a gaming centre in Clacton-on-Sea.
The Labour candidate in Clacton is a charismatic 27-year-old named Jovan Owusu-Nepaul, born in the English city of Nottingham and of Jamaican and Ghanaian descent. He is seen as unlikely to overtake Farage, although some political observers believe his witty, social media-heavy campaigning style marks him out as someone who could rise to the national stage at some point.
On a side street in Clacton, Pushkar Dhasmala, a 40-year-old Indian immigrant, said he supported Owusu-Nepaul but knew most of his neighbours did not.
“The care sector relies on migrants,” said Dhasmala, who works in a privately run assisted living facility. Farage’s opponent, she said, “understands the situation” faced by newcomers trying to settle in Britain.
Labour’s expected dominance in the national parliamentary vote bucks a recent trend of nationalist-populist success elsewhere in Europe. The party has been buoyed by a wave of public discontent with the Conservatives, whose nearly 15 years in power spanned the pandemic and Britain’s chaotic exit from the European Union, formalized in 2020.
Over the years, the Conservatives imposed harsh austerity measures that have gutted Britain’s public sector, including the revered but deeply troubled National Health Service. The Tory-held post of prime minister changed hands repeatedly during the fight to pass Brexit, culminating in the scandal-plagued reign of Boris Johnson, who resigned in disgrace in 2022.
Johnson's successors fared little better: first came the hapless Liz Truss, the shortest-serving leader in modern British history, whose 50-day tenure inspired memes about whether she would survive a wilting lettuce, and the current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who called the next vote when it became clear Conservative support could fall further.
Nigel Farage plays an arcade game. The anti-immigration politician, from a leafy village outside London, is making his eighth parliamentary bid in the run-down seaside town of Clacton-on-Sea.
The resurgence of Farage — who has thrown his hat into the parliamentary race after initially saying he would not stand — comes at a time of fraught times for mainstream politicians elsewhere in Western Europe.
In France, President Emmanuel Macron is trying to keep the floodgates of the far right closed in two rounds of parliamentary voting that end on July 7; Germany's centrist government suffered a major setback when a far-right party came second in the country's European Parliament elections this month.
There has at times been a certain synchronicity in American and British politics — the narrow approval of Brexit came months before Trump’s presidential victory in 2016 — and prominent Trump supporters have taken gleeful note of far-right advances in France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere.
Before, during and after the former US president's term in office, Farage worked tirelessly to insert himself into the Trumpian orbit, albeit as a kind of distant satellite.
Nigel Farage's slogan is reminiscent of Donald Trump's: “Let's make Britain great again.”
In a recent interview with Britain’s ITV, Farage said Trump had probably “learned a lot” from his own incendiary, insult-laden speeches in the European Parliament, where he previously sat, but added, magnanimously, that the tutelage went both ways.
Farage’s slogans echo Trump’s – “make Britain great again” – and he loves to describe the country as being in a state of terminal decay and to brand his opponents as “boring idiots”.
Trump, for his part, was an avowed Brexiteer, and his campaign revolves around many of the same social divisions that animated Farage's career: immigration, economic dissatisfaction and culture wars.
Some political commentators, and Farage himself, have suggested that the vote results could leave him in a position to essentially capture a hollowed-out Conservative Party, a scenario some compare to developments across the Atlantic, where Trump's MAGA movement has taken control of the Republican establishment.
“After the election, there may be an attempt by reformist forces to organize some kind of Conservative takeover, perhaps involving Farage if he is elected” as a member of Parliament, said Andrew Blick, professor of politics and contemporary history. at King's College London.
“I don't know if this will succeed, but if it did, the Conservatives would look more like Trump-era Republicans,” he said. That would leave the victorious Labour Party and the future prime minister, Keir Starmer, facing a much more extreme and intransigent political opposition.
For all the fandom on display on the campaign trail, Farage has drawn strong backlash across much of the political spectrum. He has been ridiculed for saying that NATO provoked Russia's war on Ukraine, for openly misogynistic comments and for repeated expressions of what critics call thinly veiled racist sentiments.
“You don't have to watch sheepdog trials to hear a dog whistle,” former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron said of Farage, speaking to the Times of London.
On the day Farage began his campaign in Clacton, a young female spectator, who was later arrested, splashed him with a milkshake on the steps of a well-known seaside pub, the Moon and Starfish. This was not the first milkshake of Farage’s career, and he handled the incident with some aplomb, smiling for the cameras later that day with an order of banana milkshakes in his hand.
Yet three weeks later, the man who made bellicosity his political trademark clearly still held a grudge.
“Politics has changed,” he said. “People launch things towards you”.
Their split was witnessed by a Clacton couple who were dining one recent evening on the terrace of the pub where the milkshake episode occurred.
Paula Bracegirdle, a part-time cook who said she hoped to retire soon, had qualms about Farage — “a bit extreme, I think,” she said. But her husband, Paul, 60, who works part-time with older people with dementia, called him a truth-teller.
“I think he is sincere in what he says,” he said.
They also disagreed on Brexit: she voted to remain in the EU in 2016. She supported the Leave campaign that Farage helped spearhead and, like Farage, now blames the Conservatives for failing to manage the exit effectively.
However, the couple agreed on one thing: Clacton, they both said, was no better than before.
