WHY Clacton? What makes this Essex seaside town ground zero for national populism in Britain?

When Nigel Farage made a screeching U-turn and announced his eighth bid to be elected to Parliament, he does not seem to have spent long pondering which lucky constituency to thrust himself on.

It is the seat which gave Ukip its only elected MP, Douglas Carswell, so there is form. But Carswell had originally won election as a Tory, and Ukip was anyway a single-issue party with that issue very much top of the Essex coastal agenda — Clacton voted for Leave by over 70 per cent.

So lucky Clacton now gets the chance to make Nigel Farage an MP. Many, probably most, people think that is a very bad idea.

But the word on the street is that the Labour Party is not among them. So here, among the ageing arcades and the tourist tat, is a tale of seaside skulduggery.

If you are London-centric, Clacton is the end of the line, literally — 90 minutes from Liverpool Street — and figuratively. If you live there, London is a place far away from which little good comes.

Little good, but quite a bit of its population. I am told by Pete Kotz, a Labour member of the district council of the pragmatic old-school left, that they have essentially been fleeing multiculturalism and make no bones about it.

As migration and diversity changed east London more deeply from one generation to the next, some residents, mainly older ones, simply packed up and moved, taking their hopes, fears, prejudices and not a lot of wealth with them.

There is a fairly modernist splendour about Clacton’s railway station and the town hall. The beach looks great and the council — controlled by a heterogeneous coalition of almost everyone-bar-the-Tories — is modestly proud of such regeneration as straitened times can afford.

But for the rest there is a pallor to the town, a sense of a community eking out an existence in the margins and, indeed, Clacton’s economically inactive population is at 59 per cent, which may be a record.

The constituency also includes Jaywick, a community just down the coast notorious as one of the most deprived in Britain. 

Kotz justifiably promotes the council-led conversion of an old Jaywick arcade into a business and retail hub, bringing a bit of hope to a place which has fallen victim to changing holiday habits as much as anything, with the chalet vacation market on which it depended long gone.

He adds that the anti-migrant mood is not shared by local farmers who “can’t find people to pick their crops.” Few people in the middle of town look as if they could manage a long shift in the fields.

So into the Reform campaign headquarters, up a dingy flight of stairs between two arcades to bare offices. Unsurprisingly, when Farage is in town he prefers to hold court in the Wetherspoons just around the corner.

He is elsewhere on the day I visit, but I am greeted by a most affable young man, who turns out not to be from Clacton at all, but down from London to assist Reform’s lift-off.

It seems I was lucky, in that a subsequent TV investigation has unearthed Reform campaigners in Clacton advocating the shooting of migrants and making homophobic rants.  

A reminder that behind Farage’s bonhomie and the earnest chap in front of me is a muster of the most violently prejudiced and proto-fascist characters in the country.

Again, why Clacton, I ask? The young Reformer rattles off a familiar set of reasons, not wrong for being cliched by now: deprived, forgotten, left behind, levelled down and, of course, end-of-the-line.

Since my interlocutor is clearly more Muswell Hill wine bar than Munich beer hall, I say to him after a few minutes chat that he doesn’t really seem like someone who hates migrants or black people.

“No, no, not at all; but people around here are very concerned at migration.”

“Why? There’s very few migrants here, unless you count people moving up from London.”

“No, but they are thinking about the country as a whole,” he replies before pleading pressing canvassing engagements.

That doesn’t sound like an answer. Clacton’s patriotic perspective may be beyond doubt, but there is no particular reason to believe that its view of the country’s interests is any broader than anywhere else.

It may, however, be broader than that of Labour’s high command. You would have thought the party would have been anxious to put itself at the head of a popular campaign to lay to rest the spectre of the notorious Farage at long last.

That is not the case. Farage may only be an occasional visitor to Clacton, but he is more of a presence than Labour’s standard-bearer Javan Owusu-Nepaul.

Owusu-Nepaul is a Labour Party employee and not from Clacton. He was not the local parties’ choice, since they were not given one. He was imposed as their candidate. 

He is young and black, which most of Clacton isn’t, so some in the Labour Party thought his candidacy unwise, although Kotz welcomed it as “forcing people to confront their prejudices.”

Now here is a fact with two, not incompatible, theories to explain it. The fact is that after a high-profile chance encounter with Farage in the town, leading to some flattering coverage of the Labour man including, of all places, in GQ magazine, Owusu-Nepal has disappeared from Clacton.

He was originally told to focus his efforts on nearby Colchester instead, and has since been sighted, according to local legend, in the Black Country nearly 200 miles away. As a party functionary, he goes wherever sent, while a locally chosen candidate may have been able to assert more independence.

What explains this lordly disdain for Clacton’s people that their Labour option be thus banished? After all, winning Clacton would be a stretch, but with a riven right-wing vote and with the national polls as they are stranger things have happened. Moreover, you would think democratic decency would warrant giving Farage a run for his money.

To the two theories. A local Labour activist, who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of Starmeroid reprisals, thinks the party actually wants Reform’s owner-leader to become an MP.

“The Labour Party want Farage to win here because he will split the Tories after the election. A resurgent Reform party will create turmoil for them.”

Indeed, a Farage on the opposition benches would be a fox inside the Tory hen coop, with “one nation Conservative” blood and feathers all around.

The alternative theory is that Owusu-Nepaul’s media profile — he was dubbed the election’s “best-dressed candidate” — had suddenly become all too high for the notoriously thin-skinned Labour leader.

It would only get higher still in a four-week head-to-head with Farage. Since Labour’s candidate is a young and articulate black man, the press story would really have written itself. 

That did not form part of Labour’s media grid, with its relentless focus on Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting and above all Starmer himself.

Machiavellian manoeuvring or vindictive vanity? Either are possible, but it leaves local Labour activists plugging on valiantly while their candidate is canvassing in Walsall or wherever.

All this is flying right by most voters out on a sunny day in the middle of town. If one can be aggressively apathetic, then the people of Clacton have it nailed. Even in an insipid and uninspiring election, they are notably unwilling to engage in political conversation.

One elderly woman does fret over the damage to Clacton’s reputation should it be associated with Farageism, but two younger men drinking beer on a bench feel that a famous politician is, regardless of programme, just what the town needs.

There’s the choice — either “on the map” or “off the wall” with the bigoted plutocrat seeking Clacton’s vote. My friend in the Reform HQ does not go further than “OK” when asked how the canvass returns look. 

Incumbent Tory Giles Watling is making the most of the Reform leader’s remarks on the Ukraine conflict, actually among his more sensible, to claw back those conservative voters who dislike foreigners generally but are particularly afraid of Russian ones.

It will go to the wire or, as Farage himself might prefer, to last orders. But if the blustering front-man for British nationalist populism finally gets to sit on the coveted green benches he may have the national Labour Party to thank.