The Desperation of Nigel Farage

"This is 4D chess!!" shouted Matthew Goodwin into the howling void that is Twitter. With such an endorsement, you just know he was heaping praise on stupidity. And so it was. At 2pm Tuesday afternoon, Nigel Farage fielded a press conference about his political future. Was he going to resign? Yes! Sort of. Viewers were treated to a self-pitying whine about how terribly unfair it was that he wasn't allowed to trough on the freebies, gifts, and cash windfalls showered on him by billionaires, gold bullion companies, and convicted fraudsters without declaring them as per parliamentary rules. It's all a stitch up, he moaned, the establishment are out to get me! And so he's quitting his Clacton seat to force a by-election, showing the world that ordinary people back him.The Des A masterful gambit this is not. For one, the formal investigation into his troughing does not go away. Assuming Farage is returned to the Commons it simply picks up where it left off. The possibility of a recall…