Britain must now unite behind Count Binface
A court without fools is a dangerous place
By Will Dunn
Photo by Benjamin Cremel/AFP via Getty Images
Ten years ago last month, two rival flotillas of pleasure cruisers faced off on the Thames outside Westminster. A fleet of anti-EU demonstrators, led by Nigel Farage and Kate Hoey, went up against a pro-Remain armada commanded by Bob Geldof in what many people thought of as the nadir of British political dignity. Those people were wrong. Our country is always looking for a more embarrassing disagreement, and now it has found one. Nigel Farage has called a referendum on whether he should be allowed to accept millions of pounds from a secretive donor based in Thailand without declaring it properly, and it looks as if the only person who is prepared to have this argument with him is a man with a bin on his head.
The other political parties have all declined to contest the Clacton by-election because they see it as a publicity stunt designed to delay the investigation that the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards had been conducting into Farage’s failure to register a £5m gift – a gift which was reported to the National Crime Agency over money laundering concerns. This seems a reasonable complaint, both on a technical level – the Standards Commissioner’s procedural protocol states that if an MP “ceases to be a Member while an investigation is in progress, the Commissioner will suspend their investigation until the Member is re-elected” – and on a political level, in that this does look very much like an attempt by Farage to gain as much attention as possible, in order to make the story about him fighting a by-election and not about him fighting allegations of corruption. It’s not in the interests of other parties to help him do this. The only other candidate appropriate to participate in such a malodorous contest is a man with a bin on his head.
For most of his career, Nigel Farage has presented himself as the option for people who are disappointed in politics itself. Among the many risible claims in his resignation speech yesterday was the assertion that voting for him – a former commodities trader, a man with his own TV show, a promoter of gold bars, the multi-millionaire leader of the highest-polling political party in the UK – would be an opportunity to “stick two fingers up at the entire establishment”. This is obviously not true when there is another candidate who exists purely to register discontent with other candidates, and who is also literally a man with a bin on his head.
Count Binface belongs to a proud British tradition – much longer and prouder than any British tradition Nigel Farage can claim to represent – of candidates who exist solely to allow the electorate to express how inadequate they find the other options. Rather than not voting, or voting for someone they don’t actually believe should hold power, the people can send a message that they consider the other candidates so insufficient as representatives that they would rather vote for a man with a bin on his head.
This is a tradition that predates our democracy by at least nine centuries, since the days of Hitard (jester to the Anglo-Saxon king, Edmund Ironside) and his successors Roland the Farter (Henry II), Will Somers (Henry VIII) and Liz Truss (Elizabeth II/Charles III). England does not bow to its leviathan without smirking. Part of the deal that power makes with us is that the power structure will occasionally be exposed as a joke on everyone involved. This is not an affront to those in power, but a service: fools remind the powerful of their limits, of how flimsy their dignity is. Count Binface is not just a novelty candidate. He occupies an important political role, a role that can only be fulfilled by putting a bin on his head.
A court without fools is a dangerous place. In California in the 1980s, a drag artist who performed as Sister Boom Boom, in a nun’s habit, ran for office (giving the electorate the chance to vote for “nun of the above”). In response, a law was passed requiring candidates to use their real names. Clearly, however, this did not impose dignity upon American politics. Quite the opposite. Without fools, indignity in US politics went unregulated. Senators and presidents had no-one to show them what was ridiculous and what wasn’t, and so their politics became ever more ridiculous, until America descended into the madness we see today. The barring from office of Sister Boom Boom is the sole cause of American political madness, and that country would return to sanity if it had the chance to vote for – and was perhaps ruled, for a time – by a man with a bin on his head.
But Count Binface has a job to do here, first. He could simply decline to contest the Clacton by-election, to dismiss it as a stunt too ridiculous even for him, and that would be fair enough. But it would be better for him to go the distance, to provide the people of Clacton with an option. To show the political class – the entire establishment! – that anyone who considers themselves above the rules can be taken down by a man with a bin on his head.
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