Nigel Farage resigned his Clacton seat while under parliamentary scrutiny over financial support and declarations. He denies wrongdoing and says the people who elected him should judge his actions.
Now he is asking them to elect him again.
Labour will not stand against him. Neither will the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Greens or Restore Britain. They say Farage created the contest for his own purposes, resigning and immediately trying to win the seat back while questions over his declarations remain unanswered.
They may well be right about his motives.
But this election does not belong to Farage or to the people in party headquarters deciding where campaign money should go. It belongs to Clacton.
The vote gives Farage rallies, interviews and television cameras. It allows him to turn a dispute about parliamentary rules into the story he knows best: Nigel Farage against the system.
If he wins, he will say the voters have cleared him. The absence of serious opponents will make that claim easier to sell.
Clacton has every right to send him back to Westminster. A strong result would show that his support in the constituency is real, and nobody should pretend those votes do not count. But beating protest candidates after every major party has stayed away is not the same as surviving a serious electoral challenge. Nor would it answer the questions that led to the parliamentary scrutiny.
Farage has created an election and asked the public to deliver a verdict. His opponents are refusing to test him.
For years, he has claimed that the established parties are frightened of him. Now they condemn the contest, question his motives and refuse to face him on the ballot paper.
He will say they ran away. Plenty of voters will look at the missing Labour and Conservative candidates and think he has a point.
The parties have their reasons. Elections cost money, activists are stretched and none of them wants to help Farage turn Clacton into another national media event centred on himself. That may look sensible in a strategy meeting. To voters in Clacton, it means being told that giving them a proper choice is not worth the expense.
Labour supporters should be able to vote Labour. Conservatives should be allowed to decide whether they want the party that held the seat before Farage. Liberal Democrats and Greens should be prepared to make their case even where defeat looks likely.
Political parties are forever telling people that every vote matters. Apparently, the duty to compete matters most when the seat looks winnable.
This has happened before. David Davis resigned his seat in 2008 to campaign against plans to allow terrorism suspects to be detained for 42 days without charge. Labour refused to stand. The Liberal Democrats also stayed away because they broadly agreed with his position. Davis won easily against minor candidates, but the result proved little beyond his ability to hold a safe seat without serious opposition.
Zac Goldsmith faced a real contest in Richmond Park in 2016. He resigned over Heathrow expansion and stood again as an independent. The Conservatives did not oppose him officially, but the Liberal Democrats fielded Sarah Olney, who beat him. Goldsmith asked voters for another mandate. A credible opponent challenged him, and the voters rejected him.
Clacton is not being offered the same test.
Count Binface and the other protest candidates will provide costumes, jokes and photographs on polling day. British elections have always had room for eccentrics, and sometimes they make a sharper point than the professionals. What they cannot do is replace parties that claim to be capable of governing the country.
The Conservatives and Restore Britain say they would stand in a later contest if another followed the parliamentary process. That at least recognises that Clacton should not be left without serious competition indefinitely. It does nothing for the people choosing an MP now.
The parties appear to believe that staying away will weaken Farage’s claim to legitimacy. It may do the opposite. He can now say that his opponents were willing to condemn him in Parliament and on television, but not prepared to face him before the electorate.
They could have called it a stunt and fought it anyway. They could have challenged Farage over his declarations, his record as an MP and his decision to trigger an unnecessary election. They could have made him defend himself in debates, public meetings and on the doorstep. Instead, the man who says the old parties have abandoned ordinary voters can point to a ballot paper on which most of them will not appear.
Winning would not make the questions over his declarations disappear. Those still have to be answered through the parliamentary process. But Clacton should not have been asked to hold an election without being given a serious contest.
The major parties call it a farce. By staying away, they are helping to make it one.