Even Trump Voters Might Not Be Able to Resist Voting for This Candidate Instead

Politics Consider Count Binface I’ve never loved the U.K.’s penchant for joke candidates in elections. Until now. Count Binface, and the other guy running. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. The United Kingdom is a serious country. This week, the leader of our second-most-popular political party could be unseated in an election by a man who wears a floor-length cape and a bin over his head. It is the battle of living in this country to try to hold these two truths in one’s mind simultaneously. In brief: Nigel Farage, the leader of our most far-right, anti-immigrant major political party, Reform UK, won a seat in Parliament in the most recent general election, as MP for Clacton, a seaside town in Essex. Then, over the summer, a scandal broke after it emerged that Farage had accepted but not declared 5 million pounds in donations from a crypto billionaire before his 2024 general election campaign, something that is against the House of Commons code of conduct. He contested whether he had done anything wrong, then decided that what he would do to clear his name would be to stand down from his seat and immediately run again for that very same seat in what is called a by-election. This is a PR stunt, essentially, one that has been recognized as such by all the other major political parties, which have therefore refused to run a candidate in the race. One man, however, has not refused. And that man goes by Count Binface. English eccentricity has long and strong roots. There are weirdos in other countries, of course, but there is a kind of baffled respect given to the practice of being really strange here in the U.K. that I’m struggling to think of an equivalent for elsewhere in the world: Morris dancers. Pearly kings and queens. That one guy who lives ’round the corner who has three pet ferrets and wears flip-flops all year long. That sort of thing. One particularly odd branch of this element of British culture is the longtime existence of joke political candidates, even whole political parties. There is, I think, a tradition in the U.S. of appointing dogs as mayors of small towns, but in the U.K. we take the nonsense political candidate to another level entirely. In 2002 the port town of Hartlepool elected as mayor the mascot of its football team, H’Angus the Monkey, who went on to serve three terms. There’s Lord Buckethead, not to be confused with Count Binface. There’s the Monster Raving Loony Party, established in 1982, which has now run in 11 general elections and is currently headed by someone calling himself Howling Laud Hope. Its candidates wear things like suits printed with playing cards and steampunk-inflected top hats. Count Binface is one such candidate, an “independent space warrior” persona invented by Jonathan David Harvey, a comedian who has run as an independent in elections since 2019, when he stood against Boris Johnson in Uxbridge and South Ruislip. Now he’s taking on Farage. Binface has characterized his Clacton campaign as “people vs. the establishment,” a framing that is no doubt irksome to Farage, who views himself decidedly as the people, not the establishment. Joke campaigns are possible here partly because in order to stand as a candidate in a parliamentary election, you need just a 500 quid deposit, which is less than some of these people must be spending on novelty bow ties and synthetic wigs. You get the money back if you win more than 5 percent of the vote, which most do not. A woman called Catherine Taylor Dawson, who ran in Cardiff North in 2005 for the Vote for Yourself Rainbow Dream Ticket party, won a single vote there, for instance. Mostly they knowingly forfeit the cash to have their 15 minutes in the limelight, sending up the pageantry of British politics. It’s fun because it regularly means that “real,” “serious” politicians like Johnson get photographed on election night standing next to Elmo, or that Tory ghoul Jacob Rees-Mogg is pictured somberly awaiting the count beside a man wearing a baked-bean mask. The thing about the joke candidates, though, is that they usually don’t get many votes. They don’t win. And Count Binface is unlikely to win in Clacton either, sadly. But he won’t do that badly. The latest polls suggest that a full 20 percent of the electorate intends to vote for the bin, a gigantic improvement on any of Binface’s past showings, and in any case an embarrassment for Farage. More embarrassing still is that polling of the general public reveals that, as a whole nation, we would actually rather the bin got it. I don’t have much time for the Count Binfaces of this world, not because they’re weird, but because their particular kind of oddity has an outdated, cringe-inducing, dad-joke mustiness to it. But I must say, it would be delightful to me if Farage, our latest proto-Trump, had to stand there and clap while a man with a bin on his head, whose campaign promises include “Nationalize Adele,” took over his seat and made him look like the real joke candidate after all. Get the best of news and politics Sign up for Slate's evening newsletter. Comedy Donald Trump Elections United Kingdom