Megan Amram on Portland nightlife, class politics, and Britain’s resignation season
Closed out a set at the club around two in the morning, Portland humid in a way it rarely gets, and came home to find my group chat with old North London friends absolutely detonating over the Farage resignation. There is something very funny about being an ocean away from the place you grew up and still getting three hundred messages about a man in Clacton before you have even taken your shoes off.
For anyone who missed it, Nigel Farage has resigned his parliamentary seat to fight what he calls an establishment battle in a Clacton by-election, a seat he apparently has not visited with any regularity in about two years. I want to sit with that phrase for a second, establishment battle, because it is doing an enormous amount of work for a multi-millionaire former commodities trader who has spent three decades comfortably embedded inside every institution he claims to be fighting. This is not a battle against the establishment. This is the establishment wearing a slightly different tie and hoping nobody checks the label.
There was a genuinely useful piece doing the rounds this week explaining, with a straight face, what the establishment actually is according to Reform, and the list apparently includes university graduates, the BBC, London itself, and a man dressed as a bin who may or may not be a liberal sleeper agent planted seven years ago specifically to embarrass Mr Farage. I read this at the club between sets and had to step outside for a minute, because that is a genuinely brilliant piece of writing and I was not emotionally prepared for it on a work night.
His rival, incidentally, is Count Binface, a candidate who campaigns dressed permanently as household rubbish and who is, by any fair reading, running the more coherent operation of the two. I have strong feelings about a political culture where the joke candidate is more trustworthy than the serious one, mostly because it means the joke candidate is not actually the joke anymore, and everyone is too polite to say who is.
There is a longer, sharper piece on Britain’s enduring conviction that it remains a global superpower despite what is, charitably, a great deal of contrary evidence, and it made me laugh out loud in the green room before my set, loud enough that the sound guy asked if I was alright. I was more than alright. It is exactly the kind of writing that makes the whole exercise of covering British politics from six thousand miles away feel worthwhile. Read the full thing over on The London Prat if you have not already.
Portland’s own political scene has its own flavour of establishment theatre, obviously, and I do not want to pretend otherwise, but there is something clarifying about watching it happen somewhere else first. You see the pattern more clearly from a distance. The resignation as performance. The donation reframed as a gift. The bafflement, feigned or genuine, that anyone would object to any of it. I grew up twenty minutes from where half of this story is unfolding and I still find it easier to analyse from a green room in the Pacific Northwest than I ever did standing in the middle of it.
My set tonight leaned harder into the material than usual, mostly Farage jokes dressed up as observations about American landlords, because the crowd here does not always follow British specifics but follows class resentment beautifully regardless of accent. A joke about a man asking you to be grateful for a gift that costs you your dignity translates perfectly whether the man is in Clacton or Portland. Some things really are universal.
I also caught up on the England versus Norway World Cup match between sets, mostly because half my North London group chat would not shut up about Haaland, and I gather the country spent ninety tense minutes worrying about one very talented striker in a way that felt oddly familiar, watching a nation collectively brace for a threat it cannot fully control. Political metaphor free of charge, no extra jokes needed.
There is a good thread worth a look on the current state of British political discourse, over on this Mastodon London post. You can find my longer, better-structured columns, written somewhere quieter than a green room at two in the morning, over on my author page at The London Prat.
Set again tomorrow night. Group chat still going. Some things, apparently, never resign.
One more thought before I try to sleep off the adrenaline of a late set. My mum, who still lives two streets from where I grew up, sent a voice note tonight saying she remembers Farage from local radio decades ago, long before any of this, and that he sounded exactly the same then as he does now, same certainty, same grievance, just a smaller audience. There is something almost impressive about that consistency, even as everything around him has changed shape entirely. Consistency is not the same as being right, but it does explain the staying power better than any single scandal ever could.
I also want to note, because it genuinely surprised me, how many people in tonight’s crowd knew exactly who Count Binface was without any prompting from me. Portland has apparently absorbed British by-election absurdity as a genre unto itself, which either says something wonderful about how far a good joke travels or something slightly worrying about how much free time everyone has. Probably both.
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