The staggering classism of the Count Binface campaign
From Westminster to the New York Times, ‘liberal’ snobs cheered on the trashcan against the working classes.
BRENDON O’NEILL
So the bin has been put out. Count Binface – the Oxbridge-educated cracker of shite jokes who gets a weird kick from standing in elections – has lost to Nigel Farage in the Clacton by-election. As every sane person knew he would. Commiserations to the not-so-sane who swell the ranks of the tosserati, like the windbags over at academic mag The Conversation, who got craft-beer Britain jizzing with eager glee with their headline: ‘Could Count Binface actually win?’ When did the educated become so dumb? Come get your trash, Remoaners, he’s cooked.
The result is exactly as those of us whose brains weren’t melted by Brexit expected. Farage, leader of Reform UK, retook the seat with 63 per cent of the vote. He secured the ballots of 22,239 people, a thousand more than he got in the General Election in 2024. Binface won 9,455 votes, which has caused excitement in that section of society that donates to Wikipedia and tweets ‘DYING’ about every Marina Hyde column. ‘What a slap in the face for Farage!’, they’re probably saying on Bluesky. Dream on. What the Clacton spat really revealed is the staggering lameness of the flagging anti-populist crusade.
That Count Binface got fewer than 10,000 votes is hilariously underwhelming when you consider the entire cultural establishment waved pom poms for him. The by-election was triggered by Farage himself. In response to media stories about his allegedly shady finances, he stood down in Clacton in order that he could stand again, his point being that it should be voters, not SW1 dirt-diggers, who decide his fate. In a shameful snub to the people of Clacton, the other parties refused to stand. Instead they threw their weight behind a man with a bin on his head. He became the running dog of the elite, and still he couldn’t break 10k.
Binface was the ideal mouthpiece for Britain’s death-rattling political class. His real name is Jonathan David Harvey. He’s 46 (maaate). He went to Oxford. He’s a longstanding regime comedian, penning safe gags for knackered shows like Have I Got News For You. He poses for selfies with Ian Hislop for heaven’s sake. And – you won’t believe this – he hates Brexit. One of his policy proposals is to have a referendum on whether we should have another referendum. My splitting sides. Little wonder this state-sanctioned edgelord, this lapdog in a leather cape, was embraced by the elite as the ideal shit-stirrer to send down to Clacton.
The chattering-class swooning over Binface was insane. ‘I am supporting Count Binface’, said Lib Dem leader Ed Davey. The then PM, Keir Starmer, backed him too. Then there was all the maniacal cackling in the ‘liberal’ media. Every bald podcast dad frothed over the prospect that Farage might ‘lose to a bin’. Is Binface ‘the hero the country needs?’, wondered a nutter at the Guardian. Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart – the kings of turbo-smug centrism – gushingly interviewed him, which I guess is a step up from gushingly interviewing former psycho jihadists whose armies butchered ‘infidels’. Better a man in a bin talking shit than a man in a mask slaughtering Christians.
Binfacemania went global. The New York Times ran piece after piece on the ‘trashcan’ threatening to unravel Mr Brexit. Time did a fawning interview. What united the Binface fanatics, from Westminster to Manhattan, was the dream of giving British populism a black eye. They hoped the trashcan piss-taker would dent Reform and rap the knuckles of the knuckle-draggers who vote for it. Some said Binface was the ‘anti-establishment candidate’. LOL, he was the precise opposite. He was the tinman mercenary of an establishment that dreads nothing more than the anger of working-class voters.
There was something breathtakingly classist in the Binface spectacle. Sending an Oxbridge comic and loather of Brexit to a working-class seaside town where close to 70 per cent of people voted Leave – it wasn’t even subtle, was it? (During his Rest is Politics interview, Binface quoted The Iliad in its original Homeric Greek, and quick as a flash the hosts said: ‘I don’t think you should go round the streets of Clacton spouting [Greek], ha ha.’) To turn Clacton into a stage for bourgeois snark, and its inhabitants into NPCs in an Oxford graduate’s elaborate and unfunny joke, was pretty sick-making actually. It was snobbery in the rags of satire. The working classes are more than the fleshy punchline to woeful middle-class humour.
The bin metaphor was perfect, because that’s what these people would like to do with working-class votes for populism – bin them. Indeed, Starmer openly said to the people of Clacton: ‘Put your vote in the bin.’ He meant ‘Vote Binface’; he really meant ‘Stop casting your ballots for things that I disapprove of, you morons’. It was anti-populism summed up: swarms of sarcastic grads telling working-class people to flush their stupid views down the toilet. But it didn’t work. Count Binface might have honked the moral horn of the transatlantic haters of populism but he ran aground against the common sense of the good people of Clacton. Who’s laughing now?
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.
See Related Article Below
Count Binface the would-be saviour of British Political Establishment
How the garbage bin became the symbol of the UK’s legacy media
FRANK FUREDI
The moment that Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform Party announced that he will resign as MP for Clacton and stand in the subsequent by-election, the legacy Political Establishment and their media declared that this resignation was a desperate gimmick by a discredited politician. The mainstream political parties – Labour, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens stated that they will not run a candidate in the by-election. In this way they hoped to turn the by-election into a non-event, whose outcome would prove to be irrelevant.
There were several reasons why the Uniparty decided to boycott the Clacton by-election. First of all, they knew that they would be beaten by Reform and they wanted to prevent Farage from achieving a triumphant result. Secondly, they hoped that their boycott would undermine the legitimacy of this by-election. In this way the outcome of this election would prove to be not only irrelevant but also a source of embarrassment for Farage.
However, the political establishment and their media could not entirely ignore the Clacton by-election. And although they could not openly stand candidates, they found a proxy who could be used to discredit the election.
The proxy candidate of the mainstream media of the Uniparty turned out to be Count Binface. Binface – who is a veteran serial joke candidate- suddenly found himself in the media limelight. Politico described Binface as a ‘satirical candidate who sports a silver cape, wears a rubbish receptacle on his head, and claims to be from outer space’[i]. But there was nothing satirical about the role that the media assigned to Binface. By constantly focusing on Binface and treating him as Farage’s main opponent, the media sought to turn the whole event into one big joke.
After a couple of weeks of dining out on Binface and numerous other joke candidates who felt encouraged to join the fray it became evident that he was no longer depicted as an old-fashioned joke candidate. Egged on by the media Binface became the willing accomplice of the Uniparty and its media. For its part the media began to treat him increasingly seriously. It began to hint that Binface was gaining ground amongst the electorate and was now in a position to give Farage a hard time.
Increasingly the election was billed as Farage vs Binface. A headline in The New York Times read, ‘What to Know About Today’s U.K. Special Election: Farage vs. Binface’[ii]. The New York Times also ran a video under the by-line asking ‘Why is Nigel Farage Running Against a ‘Thrash can’.[iii] For its part The Independent reported on the day of the by-election that ‘Nigel Farage casts vote as polls open in battle with Count Binface to reclaim his seat’[iv]. The narrative representing Binface as the political equivalent of Farage sought to diminish the moral standing of the latter.
‘By ramping up his campaign to maximum volume, it could pick up momentum and possibly persuade a significant number of normally Tory, Labour, Green and Liberal Democrat voters to back him.
Theoretically, it is possible for Count Binface to scoop up a huge chunk of the anti-Farage vote and to win’.
Binface had clearly emerged as the saviour of the old legacy political Establishment. The media even attempted to portray Binface as more popular among the voters of Britain than Farage. The Independent wrote that ‘Britain backs Count Binface to beat Nigel Farage in Clacton by-election, poll shows’[vi]. A comment piece in The Independent noted that ‘Clacton could do a lot worse than having Count Binface as an MP’[vii].
As far as the Uniparty opponents of Reform were concerned Binface ceased to be a joke candidate the minute he announced his candidacy in the by-election. Through framing the by-election as a contest between Binface and Farage they sought to represent the leader of the Reform Party as possessing the moral status of his opponent.
Historically joke candidates play to the cynicism, indifference and apathy of sections of the electorate. By their very presence they communicate the idea that the democratic political process does not deserve to be taken too seriously. That the mainstream parties opted to hide behind Binface serves as testimony to their political cowardice. It should be remembered that by their very public withdrawal they bear responsibility for turning Clacton into an unserious melodrama.
Despite an organised media campaign against him, in the end Farage had the last laugh. He came away with 63 per cent of the vote and was delighted to note that there increase in the number of people who voted for him previously.
[i] https://www.politico.eu/article/nigel-farage-paints-himself-as-local-hero-in-fight-for-clacton/
[ii] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/13/world/europe/farage-binface-uk-byelection-clacton.html
[iii] https://www.nytimes.com/video/watch
[iv] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/clacton-by-election-live-updates-nigel-farage-count-binface-b3031788.html
[v] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/nigel-farage-count-binface-clacton-byelection-thursday-b1292884.html
[vi] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/count-binface-nigel-farage-clacton-by-election-poll-b3012680.html
[vii] https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/count-binface-clacton-by-election-nigel-farage-b3032426.html .
(UKR)