Nigel Farage took 22,239 votes at the Clacton by-election counted overnight on Thursday 13 August, finishing 12,784 ahead of the satirical candidate Count Binface on a turnout of 44.37%1. Thirty-four names stood, the largest field recorded at a UK parliamentary election, and the other 32 candidates shared 3,417 votes between them.
Clacton is an Essex coastal seat that has returned Farage since July 2024. Every party with the machinery to campaign against him stayed off the paper: the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party and Restore Britain all declined to stand. What remained on the ballot was one Reform UK name and 33 candidates with no national organisation behind them.
Ian Davidson, chief executive of Tendring District Council and the Acting Returning Officer, called it "an unusual and high-profile by-election" whose "record number of candidates" brought "additional practical challenges"2. He had said on Tuesday 11 August that a paper that long would cost roughly four times a normal one. The field itself had been fixed when nominations closed on Friday 17 July.
Reform UK can point at an absolute figure and it is a real one: 22,239 people went out to vote for Farage in August, with no government at stake and no incumbent to remove. The night could not test how far past 22,239 that vote goes once a party campaigns against it. A contest the opposition declines to enter records the winner's supporters and nobody else's, which is why the four council wards fought over the same fortnight carry more information about the party's standing than the seat it won by 12,784.
