In it to bin it: Nigel Farage v Count Binface
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The Economist. Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.
Today on the show, fed up Africans turn to Starlink for their internet and our culture editors take on the new Odyssey adaptation.
First up, though.
Listeners outside Britain probably don't know about one quirky facet of the country's political system. It's really easy, practically speaking, to run for office. What that means is you sometimes get fringe parties and fringe individuals campaigning. The official monster-raving Looney Party. The Church of the Militant Elvis Party. The list is long, and the media love this stuff. Now, when one of those fringe candidates goes head-to-head against the country's poll frontrunner in a surprise by-election, oof, media gold dust. We don't need to review the rise and rise of Nigel Farage, leader of the Populist Right Reform Party. He has stepped down and is running again to be a member of Parliament in Clacton-on-Sea.
The people of Clacton should be the judges of my actions. This will be a people versus the establishment by-election. It's a chance to stick two fingers up to the entire establishment. and evidently the representative of the establishment in the contest?
Count Binface here, intergalactic space warrior, and I'm speaking to you from my starship, the Albaretta, which is now parked nicely in orbit.
Count Binface. He claims to be thousands of years old. He wears a cape and a helmet shaped like a dustbin, a garbage can. and he's taken to the likes of BBC Breakfast to lay out his policies.
I will tailor my manifesto to the local area as always, but most of my national policies will remain, building at least one affordable house, nationalising Adele, bring back CFAX, and of course... On the country's flagship morning news programme today, he showed disarming honesty.
What is your appeal going to be to the people of Clacton?
I'm not Nigel Farage.
It would be laughable, or more laughable, if not for the serious reasons behind the by-election.
Technically, there is no reason that Count Binface could not be the next MP for Clacton. Hugo Jai is our British political correspondent. All he has to do is pay a £500 deposit, get the signatures of 10 voters, and he's there, he's on the ballot paper, taking on Nigel Farage directly. If Count Binface can persuade the voters of Clacton to give him more votes than Farage, he will become their MP.
So, before we get on to Count Binface, tell me how we ended up in this situation in the first place.
Nigel Farage has been under growing and increasingly intense scrutiny over his finances, particularly over a number of donations that he has received and not reported. £5 million from a crypto entrepreneur called Christopher Harbourn and a series of donations from a close friend and convicted fraudster called George Cottrell, known as Posh George. He says he didn't have to register these gifts because they were just personal gifts rather than political donations. But there are investigations underway by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner to work out whether he has actually followed the rules. As I repeat, I've done nothing wrong. He triggered this by-election to try and, in his words, clear his name.
The problem he has, though, is that the rest of the main parties, the Conservatives, Labour, etc., want nothing to do with it. They've said they're not even going to stand a candidate, leaving essentially just Farage himself versus Binface.
Well, then let's get into the political meat of Count Binface. Who is he?
So he's not actually a 6,000-year-old space warrior, you'll be surprised to hear.
How did a Clacton by‑election end up as Nigel Farage versus Count Binface?
Don't tell me he's not a count either.
His aristocratic claims are exaggerated, I'm afraid. He is a 46-year-old comedian, scriptwriter, author called John Harvey. He's stood in multiple elections before, actually. He first came to fame in 2017 when he stood against then Prime Minister Theresa May. He repeated the trick against Boris Johnson in 2019, Rishi Sunak. 2024, and against Andy Burnham in the Makerfield by-election, which brought Burnham back to the Commons just a few weeks ago.
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