Freshers Week on Sea

The Conservative Party has taken a bold position on elections. It will not fight the ones that exist. It will fight the ones that don’t. Thursday’s by-election in Clacton was real, had a returning officer, ballot boxes, the lot, and the Tories hid. The by-election they intend to win is the other one, the hypothetical one, date to be confirmed, universe to be announced.

For this phantom contest, preparations are apparently well advanced. The Telegraph reports a party girding itself for Essex. Young Conservatives are being promised the full campaign experience, which on close inspection is a lads’ weekend with lanyards. Battle bus down the A133, pints on the pier, a curry with the association chairman, and the sticky dance floor of a Clacton nightclub at one in the morning, where a boy in red chinos explains fiscal drag to a girl who is looking at the exit. It is freshers’ week by the sea, paid for by a party that treats the Essex coast as an away-day for people who summer in Tuscany. The only difference from university is that at university you eventually sit an exam. CCHQ has arranged things so the exam never takes place, which is wise, because on current form they would fail it to a bin.

The pretension is the best part. A party that could not find the nerve to put a name on an actual ballot paper is briefing, straight-faced, that it will storm the imaginary one. Kemi Badenoch called Thursday a fake by-election. There is something magnificent about boycotting the fixture and then claiming the cup. It is the logic of the man who refuses to enter the raffle on principle and spends the evening telling everyone which prize he’d have won, except the man in question is currently fourth in a two-horse race.

And the candidate-in-waiting for this triumph is, we are given to understand, Giles Watling. A perfectly nice man. He played a vicar in Bread. He owns two yachts, which the party once clarified were small boats, a distinction that has never once occurred to anyone in Jaywick. His electoral record in Clacton deserves a moment’s honest attention. Beaten by Douglas Carswell in 2014. Beaten by Nigel Farage in 2024. His victories came in the interval, and the grandest of them, the 2019 majority that CCHQ now cites as proof of deep Tory Clacton, has an asterisk the size of the pier. There was no Brexit Party candidate that year. Farage stood down 317 of them in Conservative-held seats, country before party, and handed Watling a clear run at his own voters. The high-water mark of Conservative Clacton was underwritten by the very man the party now calls a stunt artist. They are not merely fighting Farage for the seat. They are fighting him for the deposit he lent them, and they have already spent it.

Which brings us to Thursday, and to the bin. Farage took 63% of the vote, up on 2024. Second, on nearly 27%, came Count Binface, an intergalactic space warrior whose previous parliamentary best was 0.6% against Rishi Sunak. Nine and a half thousand people voted for a man with a dustbin on his head, more than Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens managed in Clacton combined at the general election, and within touching distance of the Conservatives’ own 2024 score. The main parties vacated the field to starve the contest of legitimacy and instead conducted a controlled experiment. Offered a free choice between the old parties’ absence and a bin, Clacton chose the bin, decisively. The electorate was asked to miss the Conservative Party and could not manage it.

So consider the petard, and the hoisting thereof. Should the “real” by-election ever materialise, which it won’t, Binface does not start as a novelty. He starts as the runner-up, the man with 9,455 votes and momentum, the second party of Clacton by any measure you like. The Conservatives would begin their glorious restoration campaign trying to overhaul a satirist they themselves elevated, having spent the summer teaching the electorate that Westminster’s finest couldn’t be bothered to turn up. Watling versus Binface for silver, with the freshers bussed in to knock on doors and ask the people of Walton-on-the-Naze to forget both 2014 and 2024 and remember only the year Nigel did them a favour.

And that would be the end of it. Not a setback, not a rebuild, the end. A party that scorns a real vote, loses the pretend one to a bin, and then asks Essex for its old job back does not get a hearing on the doorstep, it gets the door. Essex made the Conservative Party in its modern form, gave it Thatcher’s foot soldiers and the C2 revolution, and Essex can unmake it, seat by seat, association by association, until the last treasurer turns off the lights above the last raffle. Kemi included. She once went to war with lunch. This time she would be left with the mustard on the side of the plate, staring at where the steak used to be, insisting to nobody in particular that the contest wasn’t real.

The pier will still be there for the young Conservatives, though. Somebody should tell them the nightclub shuts at two.