I don't understand why the mainstream is celebrating the total collapse of any meaningful political opposition to populists. This kind of fluffed-up 2010's style optimism campaign is exactly how the establishment lost control in 2016 in both the US and the UK.
I think it's sad that Binface is the only one even attempting to engage in democracy at this point. He's a satire but he's also, seemingly, the only legitimate opposition that populists face. That should be concerning and embarrassing, but no one has learned anything over the past 10 years.
So, what happens when Binface loses? Are they just going to try to put Farage in prison like they're doing with the other populists? That'll surely help.
Neither Binface nor Farage have any answers for the problems the UK appears to be facing; this election feels like something specifically designed to create material for viewers of Have I Got News For You[0] to laugh at.
From The Atlantic: "The [UK's] output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi, America’s poorest state - and that slight lead is only achieved thanks to London. Outside the capital, in places where tourists do not visit, living standards fall well below Mississippi’s"[1]
According to the IEA, the UK has the highest industrial electricity prices of the 25 IEA countries reporting data.[2]
Hinkley Point C is routinely described as the most expensive nuclear power station ever built, four times the average for South Korean plants. Guaranteed pricing originally £92.50/MWh (2012 prices), now equivalent to around £133/MWh (2025 prices), inflation-linked for 35 years...[3]
HS2 is consistently ranked as the most expensive high-speed rail on the planet.[4]
I don't know what specifically is wrong with the US-centric numbers you are citing, but I know they don't match the lived reality of the UK, which compares favourably with not only Mississippi but with the US as a whole.
I think Farage and Reform/Restore have a solution to this:
From The Atlantic: "The [UK's] output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi, America’s poorest state - and that slight lead is only achieved thanks to London. Outside the capital, in places where tourists do not visit, living standards fall well below Mississippi’s"
This is what happens when you import low-skilled migrants (and their extended families) who are a net drain on the economy.
I think they're also against Net Zero, which is causing all the high energy costs.
"Harvey previously stood as a similar character, Lord Buckethead, but was forced to create a new character due to a dispute with the filmmaker Todd Durham, who owns the Buckethead character" [1].
(The videos on this website are worth the watch. Hilarious, of course. But also...Binface conjugates Latin to Sky News, and not just as a bit. I don't know how I feel about the British comedy candidate outclassing half of the American elected leadership–and a good fraction of its industrial leadership–on IQ.)
> I came to Earth in 2017 and stood against Prime Minister Theresa May (as ‘Lord Buckethead’). Then in 2018, after an unfortunate battle on the planet Copyright, I rewspawned in my true form as Count Binface.
> I don't know how I feel about the British comedy candidate outclassing half of the American elected leadership–and a good fraction of its industrial leadership–on IQ.)
Your entire political system has flirted with anti-intellectualism for over a century; it used to pretend to be uneducated simpletons to appeal to the electorate (witness, e.g. the folksy “ahhm just a simple mayynn” gurning schtick of Senator John Kennedy, who literally fakes his accent and demeanour despite having a sharp legal mind and Oxford degree, and who could likely conjugate latin; he is following a path trodden by Bill Clinton) and now it has refined the concept such that politicians can actually be simpletons for real: Tommy Tuberville isn’t faking being thick and neither is Markwayne Mullin.
I don’t know about conjugating latin specifically (I used to be able to do this but the memory has faded) but the standard of literacy in the UK was excellent.
We do now have a fairly similar literacy skills profile in the young as the USA and Canada, but unlike in the USA, older adults outperform them, partly because more of us were exposed to the (now essentially eliminated) selective education (grammar school) system that favoured advanced literacy.
We are thus as I understand it unique in having (ETA: or having had) declining literacy; it is declining to the US/Canada level rather than below it but it is rather sad.
Binface went to good schools and has an Oxford classics degree, I think. Much of our political class did. More recently they will have done the PPE degree (which is more or less training to be a politician). He is in that sense as “establishment” as Farage, but more importantly he is a product of that fading system. So it is this you are observing; writers, politicians, actors often come from that declining tradition.
Side note: even many politicians from a non-traditional background have gone through this path at some level; the famously working-class deputy prime minister John Prescott studied at Ruskin College, which was a college associated with the trade union movement based in and sort of orbiting Oxford University that specialised in providing PPE-type education to aspiring politicians from working class backgrounds (originally founded, incidentally, by two Americans)
There has apparently been a little bounce in the last few years, a sort of long term consequence of changes made to education policy by New Labour and the consequent movement of teachers from selective education into comprehensive education, but for example here is an article from twelve years ago:
We were, for decades, a country in considerable literacy decline, and the only one of its kind. Some of this might have been a consequence of scrapping the grammar school system without giving the comprehensive system access to the same resources.
I tend to think that when Americans observe that British politicians and actors speak with a larger vocabulary or more eloquently, the people they are observing are products of the tail end of the grammar school system and the growth of a bias towards private education that emerged in its wake; the school system that turned out men and women of letters used to be available to all and now is available only to those with money.
Again, I think, citation needed, since conservative media does like to bang on about this a lot, but I’ve not seen actual proof that education standards are falling, or worse than they were when I was at school.
What I think has happened since the close of grammar schools is that the gap between most educated and least educated has closed significantly. This government report from 2023 shows that gap closing, while also showing an improvement from previous years.
Isn’t it the democratic ideal though? Of the people, for the people. If a representative democracy is to truly be representative then the elected representatives should be… representative? Tuberville and Mullin I wouldn’t say were thick so much as they’re pretty average.
Goodness, if Tuberville is average then the USA is in much worse shape than it realises.
Mullin, like MTG, has some political instincts and some facility with the parliamentary process, as it turns out, and I almost feel bad about putting him in the same category as Tuberville, but he is not a smart guy.
Don’t get me wrong, we have many mediocre politicians in the UK, but few like these guys at the parliamentary level.
The difference is this whole flirting with anti-intellectualism thing. Pretending to be less educated or intellectual than you are has just not been a big part of our wider culture.
Why would Todd Durham have issues with a Lord Buckethead doing his thing in another country and continent, but apparently not with a guitar player named Buckethead in the United States?
FWIW I don’t at all think it’s wrong for people to pick up on whether this would make him a good representative of Clacton were he to win (which isn’t going to happen and he surely thinks it is not).
Part of Clacton is relatively well off; part of the constituency (Jaywick) is genuinely deprived on a national scale, and they really do need an MP that bothers to understand them and that they can relate to.
Farage is absolutely manipulating and exploiting them for his own benefit; he uses their concerns to give himself a way to play on the national stage but he is a pretty terrible MP (though he’s not the only politician to forget they have a local constituency).
But if Binface could win, I don’t think it’s at all wrong to question whether the man under the bin is going to be good for them.
His job, I think, is to expose Farage’s lies and insecurities.
I wonder how the legalities of this work. If people write in "Count Binface" or if that's the name on the ballot, then if he wins, does that mean Jonathan David Harvey (the actual name of the guy who plays him) is elected? Does Count Binface count as an alias? If not, he required to use that name while in office - or more precisely, is he not considered a member if he goes by his own name?
If he goes into the parliament building without his costume, it would be a bit awkward if, say, they were required to address him by his Count Binface alias.
Or, perhaps they wouldn't care too precisely about the naming aspect, since everyone knows who he is, but politics is vicious and I'm sure there are plenty who would use any possible legal maneuver to keep him out of parliament. Surely there are laws to handle these kinds of discrepancies around someone's identity... right? Laws that could get him kicked out?
If he actually wins, would he try to do some serious good or would he keep the joke going? Should he actually prepare a serious "if I actually win the election" policy list? It would conflict with his joke list since he would be asked more questions about the real one. Or would he just have one big mixed list split 50/50 between jokes and serious ideas?
In my experience in the UK aliases and names are used in a rather flexible way compared to other countries. Anybody can decide on a name and start using it. It's not illegal unless it is done for the purpose of deceiving people.
If people commonly use it to refer to them it makes it that person's name for most purposes. Changing the name officially also requires only an affirmation or an oath at a court, although I don't think this would be the case here.
I think nobody would care much and the majority of politicians would go along with Count Binface as the proper way of address, because it'd be rude to do otherwise. Not the least because picking a fight with Count Binface would be seen as getting themselves dirty in non-serious politics. Not a very attractive proposition to be perceived as such for most political parties no matter how ridiculous their actions might be otherwise.
Huh that's new. I knew you guys don't have any official government ID (and that it was an issue in Blair era) but I didn't knew you don't even have legal names.
The first name component of the name "Boris Johnson" is Boris. It's just as valid a name as any other name he goes by, for both social and legal purposes.
His birth name, and I believe still his legal name, is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. But he is "commonly known as" Boris Johnson, so that's what can go on the ballot paper, although his full name must still go on the registration documents. Count Binface is in the same situation.
Since he gave up his US citizenship in 2016, I don't think he's subject to a jurisdiction where "legal name" is a meaningful notion. Ultimately, this means his first name is whatever he says it is (provided that he isn't lying): you'd have to ask him. Supposing that his answer changes depending on the social context, then both "Alexander" and "Boris" would be valid answers for "what is this person's first name?".
Count Binface is in a different situation, because "Count Binface" is a stage name, which he (presumably) doesn't go as in his real life. However, stage names are still considered legal enough to go on your UK passport. Ultimately, whether he would be allowed to write "Count Binface" as his name on the registration documents would depend on what the Electoral Commission decides. I had a look last week, but couldn't find their rules.
The first word in the two word phrase "Boris Johnson" is indeed Boris.
The full birth certificate name of the former "born American" PM is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, so arguably that person's "first name component" isn't Boris alone.
We're super flexible on name law in the UK. I could change my name right now and just use it, I dont need any formal approval or anything to do so. It only becomes a legal issue if you do it for legally questionable reasons.
Also, parliament has a rule against wearing costumes like this. But Count Binface called that rule "binist" and claimed there was some wiggle room in the way the rule was worded :)
I think leaving the seat empty if he wins is the only possible choice, both legally and democratically. He should make it clear that this is what would happen if he gets elected so the people of Clacton know what they are voting for.
> If he goes into the parliament building without his costume
If the people vote for a man in a bin costume then he should have the right to represent them in that very same costume. On the other hand, to satisfy both his desire for a costumes as well as parliament's rules that basically allow its members to look at each other eye to eye, he might switch to a transparent bin. Something that would benefit the whole country as transparent bins allow its users as well as the bin (wo)men to identify bins that have been filled with the wrong waste.
The biggest practical obstacle, other than getting elected, is the dress code for the house of commons which disallows military uniform, disallows face covering (while voting), and requires smart business attire. You could argue that he might be in violation of all three!
It's the 10% chance they are worried about. Reform is very much the Farage party, and him losing to a bin in their heartland would be catastrophic; he would go from being the presumptive next Prime Minister to a national joke.
Binface, ridiculous though it may seem, is going to be the unity candidate for tactical voting, and that's deadly serious from the point of view of those who wish to get Farage out.
There was an interview with him the other day on LBC in which they asked if he wasn’t worried he might have his vote split with the MRLP - Monster Raving Looney Party - but he pointed out quite adroitly that they are just as likely to split reform’s vote, so the more the merrier.
The difference in this instance is that all of the major parties have stood aside, leaving the Clacton by-election as a race between Nigel Farage and Count Binface. Essentially it's turned into an election between Farage and anyone-but-Farage.
I don't understand what this is, can someone explain? Clacton seems to be a town in the UK, are they campaigning for mayor? What's the relevance, why is Farage even involved?
Farage received a "gift" of £5M. He didn't tell parliament about the gift, which breaks the rules. MPs or campaigning MPs need to declare gifts and donations, as there are strict rules on who you can receive money from. The media found out about the "gift", and Farage was going to be investigated. He resigned as MP for Clacton, which stops the investigation and triggers an election. I think his plan was for him to win again, and then be able to turn around and say "the people have decided, they don't care about gifts I get." However, all the other parties refused to stand candidates in the upcoming election. If Farage wins, then the investigation will start again. However, we have numerous comedic parties that will run in elections in the UK. Count Binface will challenge Farage. Farage won with something like 46% of the vote last time. With the negative coverage he's been receiving, and the option of sticking it to reform by voting for Count Binface, the people of Clacton might end up delivering a very embarrassing defeat for Farage. This is the country that voted to name a research vessel Boaty McBoatFace.
Thank you for the explanation, so this is basically for the election as MP. Does this mean that Farage's party also can't win in the next general election (and make him PM)? AFAIK him becoming PM was a worry.
Any party can win if it gets the majority of candidates across all parliamentary constituencies. However, a Prime Minister must be elected as an MP somewhere. If Reform got a majority without Farage being elected, they would be in a strange situation where the leader of the party couldn't become the PM. It's amusing to think about, in a schadenfreudish way, but the chances of that are slim. He would certainly stand in a general election for the same seat, other major parties would contest it, and it seems that Clacton-on-Sea supports him over the others. This by-election is special because the major parties are boycotting it for being a self-serving stunt that it is.
To be prime minister you have to have support of 50%+1 of the MPs. This means either having them in your party, or having a deal with another party.
You also have to be an MP.
Currently Kier Starmer is a Labour mp in an area of London. He’s resigning and is being replaced by someone (Burnham) who was Labour Mayor for Manchester, but stood as MP in an area of Manchester last month after another Labour MP resigned.
Burnham beat reform in that election, and Count Binface. There was a discussion thy given how unpopular Labour is, that reform might win. In the end everyone who was anti reform (Farage’s party) voted Burnham and he got 55% of the vote.
While the sentiment in the U.K. is that if a general election were held tomorrow, Farage would win his seat, and reform would win a large number of votes. In reality polling puts Farage’s party around 25%, with four other parties on 10-20%. As the election isn’t proportional though it’s possible reform could get 55% of the seats with 25% of the vote, however last time they got 1% of the seats with 12% of the votes.
I don't think that's strictly true. You definitely don't have to be an MP in order to hold a cabinet office. I think that extends to the PM as well. It's never been tried obviously.
It's not strictly law, but at this point it might as well be. The last PM to be appointed without being an MP was Sir Alec Douglas-Home in the 1960s, and he immediately resigned his peerage and won a by-election to remedy that...
There are very few ways of becoming PM without also being an MP. The PM must be able to sit in the parliament, so he must either be an MP or a member of the Lords. In theory, the current PM or even the King could make him a Peer, and therefore a member of the Lords, but neither is likely :)
The last time a PM wasn’t in the commons properly was 1902, although technically Douglas Holme became PM before getting a seat, however Parliament didn’t resume until after he became an MP
A Lord can’t address the commons, which was most recently an issue when ex PM David Cameron was made foreign secretary in the dying days of the last Tory governemt.
Farage can't realistically be PM in the current parliamentary session anyway. His party needs to win, or do very well in, the next general election instead. At a national level this election is purely symbolic and dictates whether Reform will have 7 or 8 seats out of the 650.
I suppose that in theory if Reform could form a government after the next election, but Farage still didn't get a seat, a party colleague could become PM and appoint him as a peer. There's a rich history of politicians losing elections and getting appointed this way instead, though as far as I know none of them subsequently became PM.
Farage is the current MP for Clacton. He has resigned because he is being investigated for taking massive amounts of dodgy money and not declaring it. He thinks he claimed the upper hand by saying that the voters would decide if that was ok or not, but the other parties have declined to participate. Now, it is a battle between himself and an alien being with a bin for a face.
Notably, if he is re-elected, the Parliamentary Standards Committee will simply continue their investigation into his dodgy finances.
In addition to the other comments it’s worth pointing out that MPs are not allowed to resign. They’re elected by the people.
They can be moved into another public service role, and there are ceremonial roles designed to ‘shelve’ MPs, but other than that, criminal acts and incapacity, they can’t actually stand down. Starmer is resigning as Prime Minister, he is not resigning as an MP.
This is why the other parties see the whole thing as a farce. The chancellor approved the budget for the by-election by saying “if he wants to spend his summer talking to a bin, so be it” but it’s unclear if there’s any constitutional legality to it.
Representatives in the UK parliament are elected to represent a constituency, mostly the size of a town. In this case the constituency of Clanton is having a by-election (special election), because the representative resigned. With reading up on why this happened.
Nigel Farage is the incumbent Member of Parliament for Clacton and the de-facto leader of Reform UK, a populist right-wing party that has only a handful of MPs but is currently leading the polls. He is being investigated by the Parliamentary Standards Committee over personal donations he accepted prior to becoming an MP. In response to this investigation, Farage stood down as MP, triggering a by-election (a special election held when an MP resigns, dies or is otherwise removed from their seat mid-term).
Farage announced his intention to stand in this by-election (which he is entitled to do), arguing that only his constituents had the right to decide whether he was fit to be a Member of Parliament. He argues that the Standards Committee is fundamentally illegitimate because he would be judged by his political rivals; in any case, the greatest sanction the committee could impose would be his expulsion from parliament, which would trigger a by-election that he would be entitled to stand in. The other major parties have all decided not to stand candidates against Farage in the Clacton by-election, creating this slightly farcical contest between the incumbent and a joke candidate.
Basically Nigel Farage won the seat to become a member of parliament representing the Clacton district. Then, there was an ethics scandal, so Nigel Farage resigned his seat, but is running in the special election to fill the vacancy. All the other serious political parties (Greens, Labour, Conservatives, Restore) think this is a stunt and a waste of time, so they aren't running any candidates. So, Nigel Farage is the only "real" politician in the race, and the "silly" candidate with the most support is Count Binface. So the special election ends up being between Farage and Count Binface.
Clacton is a town in the UK. The election was triggered by Nigel Farage, the right-wing leader of the Reform UK party, resigning his parliamentary seat in early July amid a parliamentary investigation into an allegedly undeclared £5 million financial gift.
Instead of waiting out the inquiry, Farage decided to immediately run for his own vacant seat again, framing the sudden election as a "people versus the establishment" referendum to clear his name. All Britain's major political parties, including the governing Labour Party and the opposition Conservatives, are boycotting the race entirely.
Farage’s primary opponent is a man wearing a trash can on his head who goes by the name "Count Binface", a "beloved" staple of modern British democracy who regularly runs against prime ministers and prominent politicians as a satirical protest vote, armed with policies like capping the price of croissants and mandating functioning Wi-Fi on trains.
Nigel Farage is (was) the MP (Member of Parliament) for the Clacton area. He is currently under investigation by the parliament's standards watchdog after reports that he failed to declare some donations and benefits.
If he’s found to have broken the rules, it’s possible he’d be suspended from parliament and subject to a recall election. However, he has resigned from this position himself instead, which means there will be a by-election for that seat.
It’s widely perceived that he has done this to distract from the investigation, with the view being that if he runs, then wins, a parliamentary suspension looks like a coordinated attack on someone who has just proven he has local support.
The major UK parties have decided not to field candidates in this election, claiming it is a distraction tactic and a waste of resources. This will leave Farage campaigning head-to-head with a man dressed as a bin, neutering any claims that this is a “real” election win (as well as generating plenty of entertaining news footage over the next few weeks).
Imagine a senator decided to resign to avoid scrutiny into being bribed, there’s then a specialty election to replace them
However the senator decided to stand in that special election. If they win the bribery investigation resumes.
Add in that under the U.K. system it’s not just red va blue, it’s a multi party election. In 2024 Farage got 45% of the vote. Since then he came out pro Trump and pro Iran war, then went quiet as he realised nobody wanted that and he’s taken millions in “personal gifts”, he avoided tax by giving money to his floozy to buy a house for him (in cash), and he’s spent about zero days in the constituency he represents and about 6 days in parliament, and most of the time in the us furthering his media career.
Now imagine the only other candidate was a man dressed as a bin.
Nigel Farage was subject to at least two parliamentary standards enquiries about big, undisclosed personal payments he received from crypto-bros around the time he decided to stand to be the Member of Parliament (MP) for Clacton. Because he then lobbied the Bank of England as the leader of one of the parliamentary parties to drop their digital pound plans (which would undermine Tether's value proposition, and one of the donations, £5m/$6.75m, came from a Tether cofounder), the press were suggesting he is guilty of outright corruption.
By standing down as an MP, rather than letting the enquiry proceed, he hopes he has removed the parliamentary authorities' powers to look into his affairs too closely, but to avoid embarrassment, he's asserted in public that he stood down (and then immediately put himself forward as a candidate to stand in the special election that results) as a way to thwart the deep state's efforts to tarnish his reputation and to take away the power of the establishment to try him unfairly, and handed the power to determine his fate to the good people of Clacton (who now won't get the chance to find out if their local MP is corrupt, thanks to the parliamentary enquiry being halted).
In all honesty, it doesn't look like he knows what he's doing, but there was some suspicion that he was planning to drop out of the special election for personal reasons in due course, avoiding a return to parliament and the related scrutiny, and letting his seat fall to the Conservatives or Restore UK - but all the other parties refused to put up candidates, so now he's up against one comedy candidate and is probably going to win the seat regardless, unless he drops out and leaves the poor people of Clacton with a fiasco of some sort on their hands.
Nigel Farage is basically like the UK's Trump: he was the head of the UKIP party, which championed Brexit, and then became the dog that caught the car when Brexit actually happened. Since then, the Reform UK party has taken up the position of far-right-practically-Nazis in UK politics, and Farage is the head of that.
Farage is also an MP (Member of Parliament) for Clacton. Recently, he was embroiled in a scandal where he clearly took foreign bribe money. As an MP, Parliament can run an investigation of him for it. So he stepped down—pre-empting that investigation...but immediately stood in the by-election that was triggered. This way, either he loses the by-election to one of the other major parties—Labour or the Tories, which these days roughly count as "somewhat right of the US Democrats and a tiny bit left of the US Republicans", respectively—or he is returned to Parliament with a strong mandate, having defeated whatever candidates those parties sent to oppose him.
Except...they didn't send anyone to oppose him.
This means that he's basically a shoo-in to return to Parliament unopposed—meaning he has no mandate—to face his investigation.
...Enter Count Binface.
Now the options for him are "return to Parliament having faced no serious candidates, right into an official investigation", or "lose to the man with a bin on his head".
Neither of these are good options for Nigel Farage.
It is a disaster for Farage. He looks like ridiculous with almost every outcome. Last by-election he (Reform UK) won with about 45% of the vote. This is a big win in UK elections as there are typically about 4 parties with a decent number of votes - MPs often win with a lot lower figure than that. This was in the context of a General Election with huge publicity and was probably at the peak of Reform's popularity (they have slipped a fair way since then). Even then, almost 55% of the people didn't vote for him. That leaves a huge number of voters swilling around with nobody to vote for. Maybe they won't bother voting, but on the other hand, maybe they will. Recent elections have shown a lot of tactical voting (i.e. people voting for the party most likely to beat an unwanted candidate) - if people are motivated enough to do that, then they may well be motivated enough to vote for a Bin. There's a lot of publicity and the election is taking place August when all sorts of random things can happen (it's referred to as the Silly Season because there's a typically a bit of a new vacuum). That said, Farage will probably win, but unless he wins by an absolutely overwhelming marging (i.e. Binface only gets a few hundred votes) he is hugely diminished.
That's also before you consider who Binface actually is - he graduated in Classics from Oxford University, has been a script writer for the Thick of It and Have I got News for You (both popular political satires) and has a Podcast that gets some big names on it. Every interview he does, he comes across as extremely smart, sharp and articulate. If there is ever a face-to-face discussion between him and Farage, it will generate endless clips of Farage's humiliation.
Policital affiliation aside, it is good to see somebody arogant and entitled brought down to size.
This person is hilarious, for non-UK people who are wondering what this is, this is a joke candidate for an MP who is getting a lot of attention because of the political system in the UK not working very well. This YouTube video has sort of started this off recently and made him go viral
> This person is hilarious, for non-UK people who are wondering what this is, this is a joke candidate for an MP who is getting a lot of attention because of the political system in the UK not working very well.
What I find interesting is that he seems to be the only candidate? Aren’t there actual political parties that could have produced legitimate candidates?
The election was triggered because a populist politician being investigated for corruption decided to step down, triggering an election so that he could run again to theoretically prove that he was who the people wanted regardless of the corruption investigation. This backfired when every other party refused to field a candidate (that is, to go along with his plan), apart from Binface. So Farage’s “me vs the establishment” commentary is not going as he expected.
It's also worth noting that he's being investigated by the Parliamentary Standards Committee. Now that he has stepped down as an MP, that investigation would ordinarily be paused (and is from what I can tell). It would be resumed if he won but he gets a while to organise things before he has to face them again.
And if the Standards Committee find sufficient wrong-doing to suspend an MP for 10 days or more, the suspension automatically triggers a recall-petition.
If the recall-petition is signed by 10% or more of voters in that MP's constituency, this triggers a by-election.
So there's a reasonable possibility that once the investigation concludes, there will be another by-election in Clacton.
The election is a re-election vote triggered by the MP already in the very safe seat, as a distraction from "where did all this money come from" investigations around him (which are also conveniently paused by this byelection).
He's arguing that if he gets reelected then the investigation doesn't matter. The other parties are arguing it's a stunt, and so are fielding no candidates.
Binface's candidacy accurately represents the absurdity of the whole thing.
Those other parties all declined to compete in this by-election. They want Farage to stand to the rule of law on his corruption, and not endorse this procedural manoeuvre.
The timing of this by-election is also such that, were there an actual race, Farage would likely get his propaganda on the front of the newspapers throughout the summer months while everyone else in politics is on holiday.
Other interested candidates can submit their nomination from tomorrow to Friday and I think one needs the support of only 10 constituents and a hundred quid
Yeah no, if thats your takeaway then you've severely misunderstood the situation. They dont expect, nor want to win that seat. They want Nige to win it back so he's held accountable as thats in their interest. And then when he's likely ousted later this year they'll all run when theres another election.
The system has proved to be quite dynamic, really. The electorate have had real choices over the past 10-15 years. Stay in the EU or don’t. Elect a genuine socialist or a centre-right conservative as Prime Minister. And unpopular or incompetent Prime Ministers have been removed quite promptly.
It’s time to get rid of FPTP, but the real problem seems to be that people just keep voting for the wrong policies.
Novelty candidates sometimes get elected, e.g. Stuart Drummond.
> Drummond immediately decided to concentrate on politics and ceased being H'Angus; he was quoted as saying, "I am Stuart Drummond, I am the Mayor of Hartlepool, not the monkey." Drummond was re-elected in 2005, more than doubling his vote (up to over 16,000)
He was re-elected once more in 2009 and because the English have a really weird political system, the direct election of mayor was abolished by a vote in 2012 making him the first, last and only directly elected mayor the town ever had.
The Ipsos poll cited in the first image was a survey of 1,000 uk citizens 18+. It wasn't a poll of 1,000 people in Clacton. It's meaningless and I'm surprised they used it.
In case you're wondering why there's so much interest in the Count, the reason is his opponent.
Nigel Farage is a populist gobshite. He's in trouble because he refused to declare a £5 million donation from a crypto billionaire, Christopher Harborne. MPs are expected to declare any "gifts" that might sway them.
After Farage took that "gift", he became an MP and lobbied the Bank of England to adopt a stablecoin that Christopher Harborne was heavily invested in.
Recently, the press found years and years of undeclared dodgy donations to Farage and his party, many from convicted fraudster "Posh" George Cottrell, author of book How to Launder Money.
Sleazy MPs who take bribes are investigated, can be reprimanded, can be recalled by their constituents.
Farage is trying to get ahead of the curve by resigning now, then competing in the election for his successor. He's hoping to pause the investigation into his finances, and wants to pull the populist move of "The People support me!"
Every major party sees this trap and have boycotted Nigel's self-election. They'll fight him in the next election, after he's recalled for sleaze.
Effectively he is standing unopposed... except for the joke candidates. And who better a joke candidate than a quick-witted comedian in a ridiculous outfit? £500 to rip the piss out of Farage for a month is a bargain.
The thing populists hate most is being ridiculed and not taken seriously. It really pricks their ego. Will Nigel spend summer arguing with a bin? Will Nigel lose to a bin? That's for the people of Clacton to decide.
Yes but in the USA a "bin" usually refers to a generic category of containers, often rectangular. A "recycling bin" is a specific kind of bin, and it's almost always qualified as such. If you called it a "bin" out of context people would be confused or think you're trying to be British or something.
Yeah, I'd say it exists in a linguistic grey-zone where understanding is a lot more common than usage.
Practically no American ever calls a garbage can a "bin" (though like you say we do have a concept of generic 'bins') but a lot of Americans will immediately know what you mean if you say it, sort of like "flat" and "apartment" (nobody calls them flats in the US, but many people know what you're talking about if you say it).
Farage is polarising. I think there is a genuine chance that tactical voters can rally behind a candidate who feasibly can get the votes. However, you have to remember this is an election for a representative of a constituency. The people in Clacton are voting for a candidate that will represent their needs in parliament. I don't think the left are going to vote for Binface as although it would be the biggest FU in history, the antidote to Farage-ism, it won't offer them change in their area - and won't give them a voice in parliament, which Farage has done.
Farage has not given them a voice in parliament. He’s barely been in the country.
He’s spoken 41 times in parliament in 2 years, almost entirely on national issues.
My own back bench opposition MP (lib dem) has spoken over 400 times. The next constituency over (Tory) has spoken 1000 times, both raising local issues.
Binface would give Clacton a far higher profile. A literal bin would.
There’s no other candidate those anti Farage could vote for.
I just want to preface this by saying he's a repugnant, awful human being and potentially is going to be one of the worst things that ever happens to the UK.
But... that's exactly what people in Clacton voted him in for. He was never going to represent their local interests - I think a lot of the locals realise that now. They care more about "immigration" and race-baiting than they care about the pot holes on their roads. This is the reality of modern politics.
My comment was more about the people who will never vote Reform, than the people that did.
£3-6 croissants are a travesty and £1.10 price capping is the most sensible thing I've heard for decades. And that hand dryer is in an AWFUL position
More seriously, he actually seems like a decent guy. This is a really touching and personal history which gets into his motivations and his life https://archive.ph/61Ecw
Actually the prior art is Screaming Lord Sutch of the Monster Raving Looney Party[1] who started in 1963.
As a former Monster Raving Looney I have decided to defect to the Binface Party based on their sensible policies on the hand dryer in the Uxbridge Crown & Treaty pub.
A joke candidate with a bincan head has about 15-20% odds of winning this election. A serious candidate from a real party could have a real chance of defeating Farage but seems noone was brave enough. Better play it safe, take no risks and run away from fights. Thats the way forward for UK.
I think it's sad that Binface is the only one even attempting to engage in democracy at this point. He's a satire but he's also, seemingly, the only legitimate opposition that populists face. That should be concerning and embarrassing, but no one has learned anything over the past 10 years.
So, what happens when Binface loses? Are they just going to try to put Farage in prison like they're doing with the other populists? That'll surely help.
From The Atlantic: "The [UK's] output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi, America’s poorest state - and that slight lead is only achieved thanks to London. Outside the capital, in places where tourists do not visit, living standards fall well below Mississippi’s"[1]
According to the IEA, the UK has the highest industrial electricity prices of the 25 IEA countries reporting data.[2]
Hinkley Point C is routinely described as the most expensive nuclear power station ever built, four times the average for South Korean plants. Guaranteed pricing originally £92.50/MWh (2012 prices), now equivalent to around £133/MWh (2025 prices), inflation-linked for 35 years...[3]
HS2 is consistently ranked as the most expensive high-speed rail on the planet.[4]
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mkw3
[1] How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi - A case study in self-sabotage https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/07/uk-productivity...
[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/68da5e91dadf7...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
[5] https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/hs2-reset
That is so sad and even somewhat shocking.
From The Atlantic: "The [UK's] output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi, America’s poorest state - and that slight lead is only achieved thanks to London. Outside the capital, in places where tourists do not visit, living standards fall well below Mississippi’s"
This is what happens when you import low-skilled migrants (and their extended families) who are a net drain on the economy.
I think they're also against Net Zero, which is causing all the high energy costs.
(The videos on this website are worth the watch. Hilarious, of course. But also...Binface conjugates Latin to Sky News, and not just as a bit. I don't know how I feel about the British comedy candidate outclassing half of the American elected leadership–and a good fraction of its industrial leadership–on IQ.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Binface
He studied Classics at Oxford. He'd be in trouble if he couldn't.
> I came to Earth in 2017 and stood against Prime Minister Theresa May (as ‘Lord Buckethead’). Then in 2018, after an unfortunate battle on the planet Copyright, I rewspawned in my true form as Count Binface.
Your entire political system has flirted with anti-intellectualism for over a century; it used to pretend to be uneducated simpletons to appeal to the electorate (witness, e.g. the folksy “ahhm just a simple mayynn” gurning schtick of Senator John Kennedy, who literally fakes his accent and demeanour despite having a sharp legal mind and Oxford degree, and who could likely conjugate latin; he is following a path trodden by Bill Clinton) and now it has refined the concept such that politicians can actually be simpletons for real: Tommy Tuberville isn’t faking being thick and neither is Markwayne Mullin.
I don’t know about conjugating latin specifically (I used to be able to do this but the memory has faded) but the standard of literacy in the UK was excellent.
We do now have a fairly similar literacy skills profile in the young as the USA and Canada, but unlike in the USA, older adults outperform them, partly because more of us were exposed to the (now essentially eliminated) selective education (grammar school) system that favoured advanced literacy.
We are thus as I understand it unique in having (ETA: or having had) declining literacy; it is declining to the US/Canada level rather than below it but it is rather sad.
Binface went to good schools and has an Oxford classics degree, I think. Much of our political class did. More recently they will have done the PPE degree (which is more or less training to be a politician). He is in that sense as “establishment” as Farage, but more importantly he is a product of that fading system. So it is this you are observing; writers, politicians, actors often come from that declining tradition.
Side note: even many politicians from a non-traditional background have gone through this path at some level; the famously working-class deputy prime minister John Prescott studied at Ruskin College, which was a college associated with the trade union movement based in and sort of orbiting Oxford University that specialised in providing PPE-type education to aspiring politicians from working class backgrounds (originally founded, incidentally, by two Americans)
https://www.ons.gov.uk/explore-local-statistics/indicators/e...
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/oct/08/england-yo...
We were, for decades, a country in considerable literacy decline, and the only one of its kind. Some of this might have been a consequence of scrapping the grammar school system without giving the comprehensive system access to the same resources.
I tend to think that when Americans observe that British politicians and actors speak with a larger vocabulary or more eloquently, the people they are observing are products of the tail end of the grammar school system and the growth of a bias towards private education that emerged in its wake; the school system that turned out men and women of letters used to be available to all and now is available only to those with money.
Again, I think, citation needed, since conservative media does like to bang on about this a lot, but I’ve not seen actual proof that education standards are falling, or worse than they were when I was at school.
What I think has happened since the close of grammar schools is that the gap between most educated and least educated has closed significantly. This government report from 2023 shows that gap closing, while also showing an improvement from previous years.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/675330e020bcf...
Look on it as a hiring process. Don't you want to select someone competent?
Mullin, like MTG, has some political instincts and some facility with the parliamentary process, as it turns out, and I almost feel bad about putting him in the same category as Tuberville, but he is not a smart guy.
Don’t get me wrong, we have many mediocre politicians in the UK, but few like these guys at the parliamentary level.
The difference is this whole flirting with anti-intellectualism thing. Pretending to be less educated or intellectual than you are has just not been a big part of our wider culture.
Ultimately it is all for the good; clearly a -face name is much more quintessentially British.
Part of Clacton is relatively well off; part of the constituency (Jaywick) is genuinely deprived on a national scale, and they really do need an MP that bothers to understand them and that they can relate to.
Farage is absolutely manipulating and exploiting them for his own benefit; he uses their concerns to give himself a way to play on the national stage but he is a pretty terrible MP (though he’s not the only politician to forget they have a local constituency).
But if Binface could win, I don’t think it’s at all wrong to question whether the man under the bin is going to be good for them.
His job, I think, is to expose Farage’s lies and insecurities.
Edited to add: Some of my favourite commentary around this by-election is along the lines of:
A fundamentally un-serious candidate with no coherent policies or political experience running against Count Binface.
I wonder how the legalities of this work. If people write in "Count Binface" or if that's the name on the ballot, then if he wins, does that mean Jonathan David Harvey (the actual name of the guy who plays him) is elected? Does Count Binface count as an alias? If not, he required to use that name while in office - or more precisely, is he not considered a member if he goes by his own name?
If he goes into the parliament building without his costume, it would be a bit awkward if, say, they were required to address him by his Count Binface alias.
Or, perhaps they wouldn't care too precisely about the naming aspect, since everyone knows who he is, but politics is vicious and I'm sure there are plenty who would use any possible legal maneuver to keep him out of parliament. Surely there are laws to handle these kinds of discrepancies around someone's identity... right? Laws that could get him kicked out?
If he actually wins, would he try to do some serious good or would he keep the joke going? Should he actually prepare a serious "if I actually win the election" policy list? It would conflict with his joke list since he would be asked more questions about the real one. Or would he just have one big mixed list split 50/50 between jokes and serious ideas?
If people commonly use it to refer to them it makes it that person's name for most purposes. Changing the name officially also requires only an affirmation or an oath at a court, although I don't think this would be the case here.
I think nobody would care much and the majority of politicians would go along with Count Binface as the proper way of address, because it'd be rude to do otherwise. Not the least because picking a fight with Count Binface would be seen as getting themselves dirty in non-serious politics. Not a very attractive proposition to be perceived as such for most political parties no matter how ridiculous their actions might be otherwise.
Count Binface is in a different situation, because "Count Binface" is a stage name, which he (presumably) doesn't go as in his real life. However, stage names are still considered legal enough to go on your UK passport. Ultimately, whether he would be allowed to write "Count Binface" as his name on the registration documents would depend on what the Electoral Commission decides. I had a look last week, but couldn't find their rules.
The full birth certificate name of the former "born American" PM is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, so arguably that person's "first name component" isn't Boris alone.
I think leaving the seat empty if he wins is the only possible choice, both legally and democratically. He should make it clear that this is what would happen if he gets elected so the people of Clacton know what they are voting for.
If the people vote for a man in a bin costume then he should have the right to represent them in that very same costume. On the other hand, to satisfy both his desire for a costumes as well as parliament's rules that basically allow its members to look at each other eye to eye, he might switch to a transparent bin. Something that would benefit the whole country as transparent bins allow its users as well as the bin (wo)men to identify bins that have been filled with the wrong waste.
The name isn't really that much of a problem.
The actual politician he’s standing against is an asshole
Binface, ridiculous though it may seem, is going to be the unity candidate for tactical voting, and that's deadly serious from the point of view of those who wish to get Farage out.
Farage left fighting a trash can as the UK populist's election gamble backfires
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48848034
There's even some talk of a potential Loony-Bin alliance.
I sincerely hope the best alien wins.
Farage received a "gift" of £5M. He didn't tell parliament about the gift, which breaks the rules. MPs or campaigning MPs need to declare gifts and donations, as there are strict rules on who you can receive money from. The media found out about the "gift", and Farage was going to be investigated. He resigned as MP for Clacton, which stops the investigation and triggers an election. I think his plan was for him to win again, and then be able to turn around and say "the people have decided, they don't care about gifts I get." However, all the other parties refused to stand candidates in the upcoming election. If Farage wins, then the investigation will start again. However, we have numerous comedic parties that will run in elections in the UK. Count Binface will challenge Farage. Farage won with something like 46% of the vote last time. With the negative coverage he's been receiving, and the option of sticking it to reform by voting for Count Binface, the people of Clacton might end up delivering a very embarrassing defeat for Farage. This is the country that voted to name a research vessel Boaty McBoatFace.
You also have to be an MP.
Currently Kier Starmer is a Labour mp in an area of London. He’s resigning and is being replaced by someone (Burnham) who was Labour Mayor for Manchester, but stood as MP in an area of Manchester last month after another Labour MP resigned.
Burnham beat reform in that election, and Count Binface. There was a discussion thy given how unpopular Labour is, that reform might win. In the end everyone who was anti reform (Farage’s party) voted Burnham and he got 55% of the vote.
While the sentiment in the U.K. is that if a general election were held tomorrow, Farage would win his seat, and reform would win a large number of votes. In reality polling puts Farage’s party around 25%, with four other parties on 10-20%. As the election isn’t proportional though it’s possible reform could get 55% of the seats with 25% of the vote, however last time they got 1% of the seats with 12% of the votes.
I don't think that's strictly true. You definitely don't have to be an MP in order to hold a cabinet office. I think that extends to the PM as well. It's never been tried obviously.
A Lord can’t address the commons, which was most recently an issue when ex PM David Cameron was made foreign secretary in the dying days of the last Tory governemt.
I suppose that in theory if Reform could form a government after the next election, but Farage still didn't get a seat, a party colleague could become PM and appoint him as a peer. There's a rich history of politicians losing elections and getting appointed this way instead, though as far as I know none of them subsequently became PM.
There have been non-MP (ie non-Commons) PMs.
Notably, if he is re-elected, the Parliamentary Standards Committee will simply continue their investigation into his dodgy finances.
They can be moved into another public service role, and there are ceremonial roles designed to ‘shelve’ MPs, but other than that, criminal acts and incapacity, they can’t actually stand down. Starmer is resigning as Prime Minister, he is not resigning as an MP.
This is why the other parties see the whole thing as a farce. The chancellor approved the budget for the by-election by saying “if he wants to spend his summer talking to a bin, so be it” but it’s unclear if there’s any constitutional legality to it.
Farage announced his intention to stand in this by-election (which he is entitled to do), arguing that only his constituents had the right to decide whether he was fit to be a Member of Parliament. He argues that the Standards Committee is fundamentally illegitimate because he would be judged by his political rivals; in any case, the greatest sanction the committee could impose would be his expulsion from parliament, which would trigger a by-election that he would be entitled to stand in. The other major parties have all decided not to stand candidates against Farage in the Clacton by-election, creating this slightly farcical contest between the incumbent and a joke candidate.
Basically Nigel Farage won the seat to become a member of parliament representing the Clacton district. Then, there was an ethics scandal, so Nigel Farage resigned his seat, but is running in the special election to fill the vacancy. All the other serious political parties (Greens, Labour, Conservatives, Restore) think this is a stunt and a waste of time, so they aren't running any candidates. So, Nigel Farage is the only "real" politician in the race, and the "silly" candidate with the most support is Count Binface. So the special election ends up being between Farage and Count Binface.
Instead of waiting out the inquiry, Farage decided to immediately run for his own vacant seat again, framing the sudden election as a "people versus the establishment" referendum to clear his name. All Britain's major political parties, including the governing Labour Party and the opposition Conservatives, are boycotting the race entirely.
Farage’s primary opponent is a man wearing a trash can on his head who goes by the name "Count Binface", a "beloved" staple of modern British democracy who regularly runs against prime ministers and prominent politicians as a satirical protest vote, armed with policies like capping the price of croissants and mandating functioning Wi-Fi on trains.
If he’s found to have broken the rules, it’s possible he’d be suspended from parliament and subject to a recall election. However, he has resigned from this position himself instead, which means there will be a by-election for that seat.
It’s widely perceived that he has done this to distract from the investigation, with the view being that if he runs, then wins, a parliamentary suspension looks like a coordinated attack on someone who has just proven he has local support.
The major UK parties have decided not to field candidates in this election, claiming it is a distraction tactic and a waste of resources. This will leave Farage campaigning head-to-head with a man dressed as a bin, neutering any claims that this is a “real” election win (as well as generating plenty of entertaining news footage over the next few weeks).
However the senator decided to stand in that special election. If they win the bribery investigation resumes.
Add in that under the U.K. system it’s not just red va blue, it’s a multi party election. In 2024 Farage got 45% of the vote. Since then he came out pro Trump and pro Iran war, then went quiet as he realised nobody wanted that and he’s taken millions in “personal gifts”, he avoided tax by giving money to his floozy to buy a house for him (in cash), and he’s spent about zero days in the constituency he represents and about 6 days in parliament, and most of the time in the us furthering his media career.
Now imagine the only other candidate was a man dressed as a bin.
By standing down as an MP, rather than letting the enquiry proceed, he hopes he has removed the parliamentary authorities' powers to look into his affairs too closely, but to avoid embarrassment, he's asserted in public that he stood down (and then immediately put himself forward as a candidate to stand in the special election that results) as a way to thwart the deep state's efforts to tarnish his reputation and to take away the power of the establishment to try him unfairly, and handed the power to determine his fate to the good people of Clacton (who now won't get the chance to find out if their local MP is corrupt, thanks to the parliamentary enquiry being halted).
In all honesty, it doesn't look like he knows what he's doing, but there was some suspicion that he was planning to drop out of the special election for personal reasons in due course, avoiding a return to parliament and the related scrutiny, and letting his seat fall to the Conservatives or Restore UK - but all the other parties refused to put up candidates, so now he's up against one comedy candidate and is probably going to win the seat regardless, unless he drops out and leaves the poor people of Clacton with a fiasco of some sort on their hands.
Nigel Farage is basically like the UK's Trump: he was the head of the UKIP party, which championed Brexit, and then became the dog that caught the car when Brexit actually happened. Since then, the Reform UK party has taken up the position of far-right-practically-Nazis in UK politics, and Farage is the head of that.
Farage is also an MP (Member of Parliament) for Clacton. Recently, he was embroiled in a scandal where he clearly took foreign bribe money. As an MP, Parliament can run an investigation of him for it. So he stepped down—pre-empting that investigation...but immediately stood in the by-election that was triggered. This way, either he loses the by-election to one of the other major parties—Labour or the Tories, which these days roughly count as "somewhat right of the US Democrats and a tiny bit left of the US Republicans", respectively—or he is returned to Parliament with a strong mandate, having defeated whatever candidates those parties sent to oppose him.
Except...they didn't send anyone to oppose him.
This means that he's basically a shoo-in to return to Parliament unopposed—meaning he has no mandate—to face his investigation.
...Enter Count Binface.
Now the options for him are "return to Parliament having faced no serious candidates, right into an official investigation", or "lose to the man with a bin on his head".
Neither of these are good options for Nigel Farage.
That's also before you consider who Binface actually is - he graduated in Classics from Oxford University, has been a script writer for the Thick of It and Have I got News for You (both popular political satires) and has a Podcast that gets some big names on it. Every interview he does, he comes across as extremely smart, sharp and articulate. If there is ever a face-to-face discussion between him and Farage, it will generate endless clips of Farage's humiliation.
Policital affiliation aside, it is good to see somebody arogant and entitled brought down to size.
The _Official_ Monster Raving Loony Party (http://www.loonyparty.com/), you mean?
Wikipedia (of course) has a page on it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Monster_Raving_Loony_...) and also has a list of frivolous political parties worldwide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_frivolous_political_pa...)
Ok you have my vote.
Mine too.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MCCVt8IhJkA&pp=ygUHQmluZmFjZQ%...
Yes and he’s running against Count Binface
(sorry)
If the recall-petition is signed by 10% or more of voters in that MP's constituency, this triggers a by-election.
So there's a reasonable possibility that once the investigation concludes, there will be another by-election in Clacton.
He's arguing that if he gets reelected then the investigation doesn't matter. The other parties are arguing it's a stunt, and so are fielding no candidates.
Binface's candidacy accurately represents the absurdity of the whole thing.
The timing of this by-election is also such that, were there an actual race, Farage would likely get his propaganda on the front of the newspapers throughout the summer months while everyone else in politics is on holiday.
More info should follow here today:
https://www.tendringdc.gov.uk/content/13-august-2026-electio...
It’s time to get rid of FPTP, but the real problem seems to be that people just keep voting for the wrong policies.
> Drummond immediately decided to concentrate on politics and ceased being H'Angus; he was quoted as saying, "I am Stuart Drummond, I am the Mayor of Hartlepool, not the monkey." Drummond was re-elected in 2005, more than doubling his vote (up to over 16,000)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H'Angus
Nigel Farage is a populist gobshite. He's in trouble because he refused to declare a £5 million donation from a crypto billionaire, Christopher Harborne. MPs are expected to declare any "gifts" that might sway them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_UK_financial_allegation...
After Farage took that "gift", he became an MP and lobbied the Bank of England to adopt a stablecoin that Christopher Harborne was heavily invested in.
Recently, the press found years and years of undeclared dodgy donations to Farage and his party, many from convicted fraudster "Posh" George Cottrell, author of book How to Launder Money.
Sleazy MPs who take bribes are investigated, can be reprimanded, can be recalled by their constituents.
Farage is trying to get ahead of the curve by resigning now, then competing in the election for his successor. He's hoping to pause the investigation into his finances, and wants to pull the populist move of "The People support me!"
Every major party sees this trap and have boycotted Nigel's self-election. They'll fight him in the next election, after he's recalled for sleaze.
Effectively he is standing unopposed... except for the joke candidates. And who better a joke candidate than a quick-witted comedian in a ridiculous outfit? £500 to rip the piss out of Farage for a month is a bargain.
The thing populists hate most is being ridiculed and not taken seriously. It really pricks their ego. Will Nigel spend summer arguing with a bin? Will Nigel lose to a bin? That's for the people of Clacton to decide.
Practically no American ever calls a garbage can a "bin" (though like you say we do have a concept of generic 'bins') but a lot of Americans will immediately know what you mean if you say it, sort of like "flat" and "apartment" (nobody calls them flats in the US, but many people know what you're talking about if you say it).
Eh? Most commonly uttered words in UK English: "Have you put the bins out?"
Almost no words are exclusively "British English" as it is the original and oldest dialect of the language.
He’s spoken 41 times in parliament in 2 years, almost entirely on national issues.
My own back bench opposition MP (lib dem) has spoken over 400 times. The next constituency over (Tory) has spoken 1000 times, both raising local issues.
Binface would give Clacton a far higher profile. A literal bin would.
There’s no other candidate those anti Farage could vote for.
But... that's exactly what people in Clacton voted him in for. He was never going to represent their local interests - I think a lot of the locals realise that now. They care more about "immigration" and race-baiting than they care about the pot holes on their roads. This is the reality of modern politics.
My comment was more about the people who will never vote Reform, than the people that did.
More seriously, he actually seems like a decent guy. This is a really touching and personal history which gets into his motivations and his life https://archive.ph/61Ecw
As a former Monster Raving Looney I have decided to defect to the Binface Party based on their sensible policies on the hand dryer in the Uxbridge Crown & Treaty pub.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screaming_Lord_Sutch
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Drummond
If what you think is true, why did Farage step down call the election in the first place?
It seems rather clear it was a PR stunt he knows he'll win in this district, which lets him distract from his own corruption scandals.
But if you think there is some other reason I'd be interesting to hear the theory.