First came the Loonies. As counting agents at long trestle tables unfurled each ballot paper like an ancient scroll – which were three feet long, and cost the council four times more to print than usual – they glanced up at a procession entering the gym hall. Three of the 34 candidates running in the Clacton by-election had arrived, and they were all from the same party. The first wore a chimney-high top hat, another a pith helmet, and, last in, old Howlin’ Laud Hope – leader of the Official Monster Raving Looney Party – beneath his signature white Stetson.
One held a ventriloquist’s dummy with a dustbin head and pair of children’s booties dangling from little puppet legs. He called it “the Lovechild” and waggled it at me saying “hello” in an unsettling squeal as I watched from the media pen. No smile reached his eyes.
Seeing their costumes up close gave me a twinge of sadness. The fabric seemed musty, filmed with dust. The men wearing them looked tired, skin rumpling, mutton chops in retreat. Another election count, another leisure centre, another all-nighter. One wore a regnal robe with the name of the party’s founder, Screaming Lord Sutch, stitched into its back. Sutch still holds the record for most parliamentary elections ever contested. He took his own life in 1999.
The counters returned to their ballot papers. It was 11.30pm on the hottest day of the year; nothing had happened. “We could be waiting until six in the morning,” I was told by a council worker clutching a bag of Percy Pigs. He didn’t offer me one.
I set out to find some of the other 31 candidates contesting this by-election, triggered by Nigel Farage in the hope of proving his popularity amid questions over the £5m he had been given by a Thai-based crypto billionaire. As a gift but also not as a gift, for security costs but also not for security costs, nothing to do with politics but kind of because of Brexit. And anyway, it’s none of your business.
“I am a man of faith and I’m only running because God’s called me,” said Tony, a floral-shirted man whose manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount and whose policy focus is freeing Jaywick Sands from the scourge of non-indigenous sea buckthorn. How’s the campaign gone? “It’s been a whole feast of divine appointments.”
“I’m the Australian candidate; I brought the hot weather,” another told me, looking genuinely sorry. An eager libertarian was delighted to have coined the term “demockeracy” to describe this vote. I wrote it down in my notebook, as Tony raised his arms above my head to give me a blessing.
Suddenly, whispers rippled among the counters, and the camera guys around me began to do the camera-guy jostle: focusing lenses, frowning, subtle elbowing. Some pelted to the door. For a moment, I couldn’t tell what had happened. And then I looked up. High in the gallery – reserved usually for parents pretending to watch under-11s gymnastics after school – was an 8ft-tall shimmering tin can.
Count Binface was here. We stared up from below. He looked sort of magnificent against the municipal blah of laminate and pinboard. From this angle, the libertarian was trying to catch a glimpse of his shoes under the costume: “Maybe he’s wearing Loakes.” Howlin’ Laud Hope shuffled steadfastly, eyes front. “You’ve got to evolve with the times,” remarked the council worker, through a Percy Pig.
All the top broadcasters surrounded Count Binface, Sky News’s grump-in-chief Jon Craig – looking slightly less cross than usual – out front. The BBC’s whippet-like Harry Farley stared down the lens, cheekbones tensed, waiting to go live. Giving interview after interview, the novelty candidate in a spacesuit and silver cape with a bin on his head spoke of the “beauty” of an election with so many candidates, satirical or otherwise. “In Russia, China, North Korea, we couldn’t even have this conversation,” he said, “let alone stand for election.” An Agence France-Presse reporter begged him to speak English as he began to digress about manger-ing les croissants.
The alter ego of the comedy writer Jon Harvey and a regular at headline elections, Count Binface had become Reform’s main opponent in Clacton. Like Farage before him, he was the protest vote. All the mainstream parties had boycotted the race. “If they choose not to stand, somebody has to stand up and be the opposition,” he said in his British-Pathé-cum-Microsoft-Sam accent. “It is my humble duty.”
At last, he turned to the New Statesman and I felt a jump of nerves. It’s hard to read a man with a bin over his face. “I’m a fan!” he said – a claim that may not have helped either of our causes.
Out in Clacton, I had heard voters complain Binface was “taking the mickey” out of them. Other candidates had grumbled too. “Does he want to be the next MP or the next Mr Bean?”; he’s taken the “good British satirical tradition too far”; he was “getting all the attention from the press”; and, gravest of all, he was “an Oxford graduate”.
Had he inadvertently become the “establishment”? “I mean, look at me,” he said, his robot vowels squeaking ever so slightly. “Do you think I’m the face of the establishment, or might a New Statesman reader think that somebody who’s been an MP, an MEP, one of the chief architects of Brexit, a fixture in British politics over the last 20 years, worked in the City, and is reputedly a member of the East India Club – which to this day, to my knowledge, does not admit women – is?”
A crowd had gathered to listen, which didn’t help my nerves. I asked how he had surpassed the Loonies as Britain’s comedy candidate of choice. A roar from behind. “Interview all of us!” they heckled at the back. A staff member moved them on.
At 3.30am, the atmosphere plummeted from village jamboree to hospital ward. Farage had just announced that he wasn’t turning up. Essex Police had advised him not to attend for security reasons, he ventured. But I asked them, and no, they hadn’t. In a speech streamed on GB News from a Glastonbury-style festival for insiders and supporters in a nearby airfield, Farage was avoiding the “nobodies” and celebrating his “convincing and overwhelming win” – more than two hours before the results came in. Post-truth became pre-truth.
At 6am, the 20 remaining candidates lined up (Tony had left; his “only other ambition was to put my hands on Farage and pray for him”), and it was declared that Count Binface had won 27 per cent, beating the polls. Farage won 63 per cent, short of the predicted 73 per cent. The anti-Farage vote had mobilised, tactically, behind a bin, even in this Reform heartland.
No matter, though. Farage and his entourage didn’t have to bother themselves with the Tendring District Council staff, Essex Police officers, security guards, counting agents and local press working a night shift for an election he had insisted upon.
At least one senior Reform MP, I discovered, was put up for the evening far from the seafront in a countryside spa hotel. Le cod supreme with lemon leaf stew and sautéed salt marsh vegetables for £28, please; no cod and chips here. Blood and terroir nationalism, and all that. As Farage addressed the crowd cheering and boozing outside their luxury yurts at his party, he knew he never really had to face the “nobodies”.
[Further reading: The Green Party are tumbling, but Zack Polanski is still raving]
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This article appears in the 20 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special
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