Has Nigel Farage become a laughing stock?

An opposition MP, just two years after being elected, announces that he’s leaving Parliament to trigger a by-election, in which he will stand again as a candidate, and some in the media are jubilant: “The contest will stand out in history as a great political landmark.” The quote was from the Suffragette newspaper, the MP was George Lansbury, and the year was 1912. Lansbury came from a radical family, and he’d been campaigning for women’s rights since the 1880s. Then in the Liberal Party, he’d gone on to join the Social Democratic Federation, the country’s first socialist party, before being elected in December 1910 as the Labour MP for Bow and Bromley, in the East End of London. Once in Parliament, he was infuriated by the Liberal government’s refusal to extend the franchise to women and