Not a serious country

Nigel Farage has won the Clacton by-election with 22,239 votes. Second place, with 9,455, went to a man wearing a bin costume who campaigned on capping the price of croissants and moving the hand dryer in a local pub.

There were 34 candidates. That is a record, beating one set in 2008.

The whole thing is ridiculous, and everyone involved has earned their share of it.

Farage called the election himself, resigning a seat he already held, while under parliamentary scrutiny over his personal finances. He wanted the voters of Clacton as his judge rather than the press. Fair enough. But an election you call, against opponents you hope will be weak, to settle a question about your own conduct, is not a verdict. It is a commissioned reference.

And then the others declined to turn up at all. Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens all sat it out. Eighty thousand people were given a ballot paper on which not one major party was standing. Kemi Badenoch wrote to those voters saying they deserved better than Farage, having decided not to offer them anything better, or indeed anything at all.

So a comedian in fancy dress became the official opposition in an English constituency, and won more than nine thousand votes — many of them lent by people with nowhere else to put a cross.

Meanwhile, in the same week: a village of 400 was told to accept a camp of 1,200. A council that objected through the courts was ordered to pay the Home Secretary's legal costs. Firefighters attended 185 wildfires in ten days. The government convened COBRA on one of those things and issued a progress update on another.

That was the week our political class chose to spend on a stunt election in Essex, contested by one man defending his reputation and thirty-three others who were not seriously trying to win.

We are told repeatedly that the public has become cynical about politics, as though it were a mood that descended on us unprompted. It is not a mood. It is a conclusion, and this week Clacton was shown the evidence.