𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Nigel Farage has always been a political risk-taker, ever keen to lock horns with the metropolitan elite and stick two fingers up at Westminster. But this may be the biggest gamble of his career.

With his finances the subject of a story fast spinning beyond his grip, Mr Farage hopes to clear his name and cement his place at the top of the pile. Ever the storyteller, he has long battled what he sees as a liberal establishment determined to silence the views of ordinary Britons.

So for him this by-election is simply the next chapter in a book he has been writing for years.

He is not, he insists, on the run from questionable financial dealings, but from a ravenous establishment desperate to chew up and spit out a mortal enemy.

It may well work. Should he cruise to victory, he will have proved his people back him no matter what.

Whether that silences his accusers is another matter.

Yet any triumph is hollowed by the fact that he faces an all-but-empty field.

With every major party dismissing the contest as a stunt and refusing to stand, he may end up facing nothing but a circus of comics and cranks.

A win by a titanic margin is all but guaranteed. But a landslide against such opponents risks reducing the bad boy of Brexit to a standing joke.

That may suit his outsider act. But a man too easily won is a man too easily ignored, and the establishment he loves to bait may simply let the cogs of Parliament grind him quietly out of view.