Farage says he will resign as U.K. lawmaker to trigger a special election

LONDON — Nigel Farage, the leader of the populist right-wing Reform UK party, on Tuesday said he would resign his seat in Parliament and run for reelection in his Clacton seat to answer criticism of his financial affairs.

The unexpected move comes after recent revelations about gifts and financial support received by Farage, both from a cryptocurrency billionaire and from a political ally who was once convicted of fraud in the United States.

“I have decided that the people of Clacton should be the judges of my actions,” Farage said in a statement that was broadcast on his party’s YouTube channel. “This will be a ‘people versus the establishment’ by-election,” he added, referring to a special parliamentary election.

The success of Farage, whose anti-immigration party has led in opinion polls for more than a year, was instrumental in destabilizing Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who announced his resignation last month.

But Farage has suffered several setbacks lately amid growing scrutiny of his financial affairs.

In May, it emerged that he had received an undisclosed gift of 5 million pounds (about $6.7 million) from a cryptocurrency billionaire, Christopher Harborne, a Briton who lives in Thailand.

Farage argues that the gift was unconditional, was made before he won a seat in Parliament in the general election in 2024, and there was no requirement to declare it. However, Daniel Greenberg, Parliament’s standards commissioner, has opened an investigation into whether the money should have been made public under rules that require new lawmakers to declare some financial benefits received in the 12 months before their election.

Over the weekend, the Sunday Times of London reported that Farage had separately failed to declare benefits provided by a political ally, George Cottrell, a convicted fraudster who served prison time in the United States.

According to the newspaper, Cottrell’s support included providing social media staff members who worked for Farage in the year before he was elected, as well as the use of a property rented by Cottrell near Buckingham Palace.

Farage has insisted he followed all of the rules and has accused journalists of “despicable behavior” and of hounding his family.

However, in his statement Tuesday, Farage suggested that the Sunday Times article had now triggered a second investigation, saying that, “Despite the fact that many of the things that were written in the article were inaccurate or irrelevant, yet another standards investigation is underway.”

If Greenberg finds that the gift from Harborne should have been declared, Farage might, under British parliamentary rules, have been suspended from Parliament and forced to fight for reelection in his parliamentary constituency of Clacton, in eastern England. So the announcement Tuesday effectively preempts that possible outcome, although it would not stop the findings being published.

Farage, a highly effective campaigner and a longtime disrupter of British politics, will likely be confident of winning the seat again, having achieved a majority of 8,405 votes in the 2024 general election. Polling suggests he remains popular in the area.

However, even a convincing victory there would not guarantee an end to the scrutiny of Farage and his finances as he attempts to convince the country he should become its next prime minister. The next general election must take place by 2029.

Reform UK has recently faced competition on its right flank from a far-right party called Restore Britain, which was founded by Rupert Lowe, once an ally of Farage, after a bitter public rift with him.

Despite Reform’s success in May in local elections in Wales, Scotland, and British municipalities in England, the party has also suffered some reverses. Last month it lost a crucial special parliamentary election in Makerfield, in northwest England, which was won by Andy Burnham, who is expected to succeed Starmer.

Earlier this year, it lost in another special election in nearby Gorton and Denton to an insurgent Green Party. And last year, it suffered a similar fate in Caerphilly in Wales, in a special election to the Welsh parliament, which was won by the center-left nationalist Plaid Cymru party.

In national polls, Reform’s support has fallen from about 30% last year to about 25% now, with Labour and the Conservatives around 20% each.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.