Will Farage’s Trumpian Resignation Stunt Backfire?

**Alastair Campbell** (0:01)
Nigel Farage, who rarely visits Clacton, thinks that what Clacton needs is a by-election. Beset by questions about where all his money comes from, losing his rag with reporters as he returns from the United States, and apparently with some of his own supporters losing faith in him, he clearly thinks he needs a new narrative. Is this a big ball move to show he's the victim of an establishment stitch up, as he claims? Is it about trying to stop the investigation into his finances in parliament? Or is it just Nigel Farage being Nigel Farage and getting us all talking about him? One thing is for sure, just as in recent weeks we were talking all the time about Makerfield, in the coming weeks it's going to be Clankton. Welcome to The Rest Is Politics Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell.

**Mehdi Hasan** (0:51)
And me, Mehdi Hussle in Washington DC.

**Alastair Campbell** (0:53)
And the reason Mehdi is here is because Rory, as you know, is on his annual silent retreat. Mehdi and I are not going to be silent as we talk about all sorts of things. Now Mehdi, while we were recording the main episode, we had one eye on a television in the background because Nigel Farage was speaking. And the reason we're putting out a question time ahead of the main episode is because, as he expected, he was announcing that he was stepping down, not stepping down as reform UK leader, not stepping down as the man who thinks he can be the next prime minister, but stepping down and sparking a by-election in his own constituency.
Let's kick off with that question from Matthew. What is Nigel Farage up to? Do you want me to have the first go at that or would you want to have a go at that?

**Mehdi Hasan** (1:40)
I mean, it's very clear what he's up to.
This is classic distraction and deflection. Nigel Farage worships at the altar of Donald Trump, where I am in Washington, DC. Trump has mastered the art of distracting from scandals and controversies by making you look over there, by flooding the zone with shit, as Steve Bannon famously put it a few years ago. This is the classic response. Nigel Farage is facing the worst media he's ever had, which isn't that high a bar because he's had such soft and good media for the last 15 years. It's the first time he's really ever faced any serious, sustained scrutiny or criticism of his finances, of his leadership, of his background, of his allies. Instead of addressing it head on, we first saw him hide from media interviewers during the recent elections. And now, doing this kind of David Davis-esque gimmick, if you remember the Shadow Home Secretary at the time, David Davis resigned. Was it Holton, Priest and Howden? I think it was his by-election.

**Alastair Campbell** (2:32)
Well done. Well done, Mitty.

**Mehdi Hasan** (2:33)
2008 I was a British journalist.

**Alastair Campbell** (2:35)
Yeah, but you've been away a long time.

**Mehdi Hasan** (2:38)
He quit over some Civil Liberties issue, and it was a ridiculous thing.
We did a whole by-election. By-election has cost a lot of money. This is what Farage is doing. He's not giving the people what they want, which is goodbye, Nigel Farage, go away. He is actually doing this gimmick whereby, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't know what happens to his parliamentary investigation into this five million pound donation. Does that get put on hold while this by-election goes on? Do we stop talking about it? Because that's what he wants us to do.

**Alastair Campbell** (3:05)
We don't have to. Nobody can tell us what we talk about, people can talk about it. I don't know about the election because of course, the minute you do the Chilton hundreds, as they're called, and you're no longer a member of parliament. So if you're no longer a member of parliament, are you being investigated?
I don't know is the answer to that, but the parliamentary investigation is not going to go away if he becomes an MP at the end again, at the end of the by-election process. But the issues of farage and money are not going to go away.
And if anything, even though you're right, this is very Trumpian in saying, you know, let's create another drama over here and then you go over there. That's true. But at the same time, it also elevates the scrutiny that people want to give him. And I think you're right, by the way, I've been raging for ages about the extent to which they talk about two-tier care in relation to policing. The only two-tier that we really have in our political culture is in the way that the media have covered historically people on the right of politics, particularly Farage. Very interesting to me, for example, one of the reasons he's losing the plot at the moment is because it was the Sunday Times that did this big thing at the weekend about so-called post George, this guy George Cottrell, who's a kind of very weird, flamboyant, colorful gambling character. Even when he got done for fraud in the United States and I think was even with Farage, who was out there when he was when he was nicked. A bit like Mark Rutter with Donald Trump, he says that Nigel Farage is like a father to him. Farage and he are very, very close. There's a picture which frankly, again, with a sort of serious grown up media landscape, this picture would be as well known as any other picture of modern times. It's Farage and post George, and who's between them in the background? Nathan Gill, currently in jail for essentially being a Russian plant in the European Parliament. So the issue is not going to go away, but we're going to talk as you say about something different. There's going to be a race, there's going to be a by-election.