British politics is in a convulsive state. After 14 years in power, the Conservative Party has lost public support, and the Tony Blair version of the Labor Party is out of gas. Centrist Keir Starmer has just resigned to make way for Andy Burnham, a former mayor of Manchester and champion of the people hit hardest by the collapse of manufacturing, mining and steelwork.
There are not many laughs to be had in any of this, and Starmer left his post in a polite British manner, answering questions in Parliament in his last Prime Minister’s Question Time. But mixed in with praise from his own party and barbed comments from Conservatives, there was something new. When Starmer said, “Put your votes in the bin,” it was seen by many as an endorsement of an intergalactic warlord from Sigma IX known as Count Binface.
By now, news has crossed the Atlantic about Binface. The man in a kind of homemade Star Wars costume, capped by the eponymous trash can, has stood in several British elections since 2019. Each time, he has presented a handful of votes as a major victory for his intergalactic conquest on behalf of his people, the Recyclons. A seasoned campaigner, he is particularly good on TV, being a television comedy writer in his Clark Kent life. He has a sharp eye for the issues and makes people smile.
There is a good reason Binface has risen above his usual obscurity: because of a backfired publicity stunt by Nigel Farage — Britain’s most prominent anti-immigrant and anti-EU politician —Binface is suddenly Farage’s main opposition candidate.
Farage entered the election facing official and media scrutiny for undeclared gifts of millions of pounds (or “your Earth pounds” as Binface puts it), and decided to deal with this threat, which could see him suspended from Parliament, by suddenly announcing his resignation from his Parliamentary seat in the run-down seaside town of Clacton. He thought he could take on the major parties on his home turf in the resulting Special Election (or By-Election as it is called in the U.K.), but a number of rapid and unforeseen developments have since complicated this calculation.
Binface is suddenly Farage’s main opposition candidate.
Firstly, all the major parties immediately said they would not take part in this farce, whose only purpose is to increase Farage’s visibility. Secondly, Count Binface announced his candidacy. Thirdly, many other joke and fringe candidates — including members of the venerable Monster Raving Loony Party — now also say they will stand, which so far means Farage will stand against some 33 candidates with policies even more ludicrous than his own. This field of 34 candidates will be a British record but includes nobody you could call a serious politician.
Farage had already declared that this election would be “the people of Clacton versus the Establishment,” but it is shaping up to resemble an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus instead. The Establishment is nowhere in sight.
Farage is best-known as the main activist behind Brexit. He communicated largely through humor and publicity stunts. Elected as a member of the European Parliament in 1999 on an anti-Europe ticket, he made regular hostile speeches in English that became very popular on YouTube. His original message was of minority interest. A former stockbroker, he was convinced, genuinely it seems, that British financial markets were being held back by European Union regulations. London, mainly because of the English language, had emerged as the natural partner of New York in international financial trade, leaving Frankfurt and Paris far behind.
This specialized message gradually transformed into general opposition to the European Union and all its works, including the presence of many workers from Poland, Lithuania and other countries of the former Eastern Bloc working in service industries and manufacturing in Britain (stealing British jobs, as Farage fans put it). By extension, that included the popular and successful Erasmus program, which allowed British university students to spend a year in a European university in return for European students having the same right in Britain. Brexit put a stop to all that.
There had always been an isolationist, anti-European and in fact antiforeigner element in Britain. By widening his appeal like this, Farage reinvented himself, with leaving the EU becoming the lead policy in a general Little Englander identity that attracted all kinds of racists and bigots. He himself puts his success down to YouTube.
“All of this is because of YouTube. None of it would’ve happened, in that I’d have probably walked away from politics in 2010. But suddenly YouTube came along,” Farage told British daily The Independent in 2022. His European Parliament speeches suddenly made him an internet star, and in another unforeseen development, found him a new audience in the United States, where his message widened again to embrace God and guns, and eventually MAGA.
Trump’s first election campaign made Farage the most visible British politician in the United States.
Britain has no constitutional right to bear arms, and neither does anywhere else in Europe, and there are no Mexicans at the border, but this was a marriage made in heaven.
Originally noticed by U.S. politician Jeff Sessions, Farage began to be invited to speak at events hosted by the Conservative Political Action Conference. He was soon adopted by another ambitious outsider, Donald Trump , who apparently watched hours of Farage’s speeches while preparing his first presidential run. Apparently Trump particularly liked Farage’s stand on “postal voting,” as it is called in the U.K., which Farage discovered was a button he could press to convince millions of people that their votes were being stolen. There is zero evidence of this happening in either the U.K. or the USA.
With Farage now remade as an all-purpose far-right antiforeigner figure, Trump’s first election campaign made Farage the most visible British politician in the United States, although he was still outside mainstream politics, linked to a succession of small far-right parties set up to capitalize on his internet success. This all changed with Brexit. Promoting leaving the EU as “Independence Day,” Farage staged publicity stunts including sailing up the river Thames with a fleet of fishing boats, claiming that the U.K. fishing industry was only held back by EU red tape.
In retrospect, these stunts look highly questionable. Closing off EU markets has damaged U.K. fisheries further. The loss of cheerful young Eastern Europeans in London hotels and restaurants, let alone U.K. students heading off to Germany or Spain for further studies, looks like a straight negative. A majority of British voters now say they regret leaving the EU. Farage himself claims it was a good idea ruined by his supposed allies in mainstream politics.
Farage is less visible Stateside in the second Trump administration. He has put the focus back on Britain, where his more enthusiastic supporters think he should become prime minister, now as head of the Reform Party and as a member of the British Parliament since 2024. There is no more divisive figure. His supporters treat him like a heroic British Trump, something he has certainly encouraged, and his detractors point to the disastrous effects of the policies he has endorsed. But nobody can deny he is a major presence in national politics.
But his failed publicity stunt means Count Binface has suddenly emerged to national prominence, in a weird mirror image of Farage’s own success, though it is mainstream media attention that has done it more than YouTube so far. The man with the trash can on his head has been interviewed on “Newsnight,” “Good Morning Britain” and all the most popular TV shows that would normally cover electoral matters. After all, there are no serious candidates available.
Binface claims to be 5,900 years old and to travel by starship, but is well-known to be Jon Harvey, a 46-year-old Oxford-educated comedy scriptwriter. Given the problems of the Conservative and Labor parties at the moment, it looks quite possible he will become a unity anti-Farage candidate. It was not his original plan at all, but there is some small possibility that he might even win. Online betting companies have shortened the odds considerably.
There is a long tradition of joke candidates in British parliamentary elections, partly because of election rules that make it relatively cheap to announce your candidacy: 500 Earth Pounds a time, or $670.
Binface claims to be 5,900 years old and to travel by starship.
In 1963 a minor rock and roll singer called Screaming Lord Sutch stood as a candidate of the Teenage Party, financing his campaign with horror-themed rock and roll shows. His album ”Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends,” despite featuring such giants of the British Invasion as Jeff Beck, John Bonham and Jimmy Page, was declared the Worst Album of All Time by a BBC poll in 1998 .Even so he holds the record for unsuccessful parliamentary candidature, having failed to be elected 39 times between 1963 and 1997.
Sutch had discovered that the election rules meant that he and his friends could appear on stage in costume with all the other candidates for the final declaration of the count and its results, these events being photographed and often televised. In 1970, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” featured such an election in a TV sketch, “Election Night Special”, with a contest between the Sensible Party and the Silly Party. Ever since, Sutch candidates in entertaining costumes, promoting idiotic policies dreamed up in the pub, have become a regular feature of British elections. In 1982 he changed the name of his party to the Monster Raving Loony Party, which still exists today.
Sutch was not 100% pointless. His early appearances in particular aimed to get teenagers and young people interested in participating in politics, and he became something of a national institution. When he took his own life in 1999, obituaries mourned this sad loss to British politics. Slightly drunk men in funny hats still appear at many British election counts as Loony candidates, though Sutch’s only real political triumph is that one of his policies has been adopted nationally: passports for dogs.
Count Binface is a 21 st century version of this, though he is a one-man band and has no movement or party behind him. His father once played the drums in Sutch’s band, but he himself has no rock and roll shows, unfortunately. He does, however, have a highly developed sense of humor and a sharp wit, based more on the Monty Python parody version of Loony policies than on direct imitation of Sutch. This underlines the class basis of this kind of humor.
Britain’s Makerfield by-election candidate Count Binface poses for photographers during the election count in Wigan, England, Friday, June 19, 2026.(AP Photo/Jon Super)
Binface appeals mainly to university-educated cynics. Working-class people on the whole don’t see the point of him and don’t get the joke. He has not yet been to Clacton, and the irrelevant policies he has announced include nationalizing Adele and building at least one affordable house. However, on past form he will certainly also make detailed and witty attacks on Farage’s many failings. It remains to be seen whether the two of them will face off on TV. (Under strict U.K. election rules, broadcasters must give equal time to all the main candidates.)
Farage’s idea of making this election about Farage versus the Establishment has been reversed. It is Farage himself who now looks like the Establishment candidate, and his one big problem is only getting worse. Investigative journalists from the Insight team of the London Times and other legacy media have uncovered private gifts of millions of pounds from foreign governments and at least one prominent convicted criminal, all of which Farage has so far kept quiet about. Faced with the sudden publicity, he has implausibly claimed that “I have done nothing wrong.” From a strictly legal perspective, this may be true, but persuading unemployed poor white people to vote for him while he profits to the tune of millions of pounds from illegal crypto trading might not go so well. The fact that he owns five houses is also attracting unwelcome attention.
Farage as usual is trying to ride out the criticism with an easygoing man-of-the-people approach, batting off criticism with a laugh and a smile. So far, opinion polls and betting companies suggest he will win his seat back, but in the battle for laughs (Farage’s main political asset), the wind seems to be turning in Binface’s direction. Farage’s plan to make this the springboard for a national victory, possibly leading Reform all the way to the prime minister’s office, suddenly looks a lot less certain. A highly articulate intergalactic space warrior from Sigma IX is blocking the way with a shiny trash can on his head and an attractive mixture of style and substance. If he can somehow get the xenophobic voters of Clacton to laugh along with his jokes, on Aug. 13 he could inadvertently pull off the greatest upset in British parliamentary history.
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The Monty Python Election: Binface vs. Mr. Brexit
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