Nigel Farage has finally won a parliamentary seat on his eighth attempt, securing victory in Clacton as his hardline right-wing Reform UK party also captured four seats in the UK general election, according to media reports on Friday.
The 60-year-old defeated Conservative candidate Giles Watling, who had represented the coastal constituency in Essex since 2017, The Guardian newspaper reported. Farage garnered 21,225 votes compared to Watling’s 12,820, winning by a margin of 8,405 votes. Clacton had previously been won by UK Independence Party MP Douglas Carswell in 2015, making it Reform UK’s prime target.
In his victory speech at a leisure centre in Clacton, Farage declared his party’s intention to focus on challenging the Labour Party, which was poised for a landslide majority in the election, dealing a significant blow to incumbent Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party.
“We are coming for Labour … be in no doubt about that,” Farage asserted, reveling in the Conservative Party’s widespread losses across the country. He criticized his former party, stating, “This is the beginning of the end of the Conservative Party.”
Farage emphasized that Reform UK would not collaborate with the Conservative Party in Parliament but expressed openness to Conservative MPs defecting to his party. When asked about his ambitions to become prime minister, he humorously remarked, “Whatever happens, happens, and probably by 2029 this movement will have found someone younger and better looking than me.”
