Nigel Farage resigned his Clacton seat on Tuesday afternoon, not as Reform UK leader and not in defeat, but to force a by-election he intends to fight himself. The resignation lands in the middle of a parliamentary standards investigation into unregistered donations and questions about the source of his personal wealth, and it is engineered to answer neither.
He told viewers he had done nothing wrong, had broken no law, and would let the voters of Clacton rather than the standards watchdog be the judges of his conduct, which is another way of saying he would rather be tried by an electorate than by the body that actually examines the books.
