It takes some considerable inability to call an election by resigning your seat as an MP to seek what you describe as a new democratic mandate in response to a parliamentary inquiry into your potential failure to comply with regulation, and then claim that you will not attend the count declaring the result of that by-election because you have allegedly been advised by the police that there may be some people present who might seek to protest about your behaviour, and then make the claim that this is fundamentally anti-democratic, but that is what Nigel Farage has done.

I am writing this before the declaration of the poll result, but it is apparent that Farage has won his seat for a second time, largely because his only recognisable opponent was a comedian describing himself as Count Binface. That was because all mainstream political parties, and Restore Britain, saw through what Farage was doing, undermining the credibility of his claim to deliver a new democratic mandate for himself at a stroke.

That was enough to make Farage look a fool for calling this election, but to now claim that it provides him with a new democratic mandate whilst simultaneously claiming that protest is anti-democratic says something deeper, and more sinister, about Farage's profoundly egotistical, supposed strongman approach to politics. It is now apparent that he believes that unless what he calls democracy is organised around his need for publicity, it is not democracy at all.

Others have, of course, made such claims in the past, but no one would describe them as democrats, and nor is he.

This fiasco has revealed a lot about Farage, but most of all it has demonstrated that he holds the whole process of parliamentary democracy in contempt.

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