After 34 days of campaigning to regain the parliamentary seat of Clacton on England’s south coast, Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform UK party, declined to turn up to the town’s leisure centre to hear himself declared the winner and MP. The last high-profile winning candidate to fail to enjoy his moment of victory was Bobby Sands in 1981. The IRA man had his reasons: he was on hunger strike in a prison in Northern Ireland, and went on to die 26 days later.
Instead Farage attended a gathering of his supporters at an airfield on the outskirts of Clacton billed by his party as “Farage Fest”. He told fans he would be damned if he was going to stand on a stage “having won a resounding victory” and “be demeaned and humiliated by nobodies”. But he also said Essex police had advised him of an “organised campaign to disrupt and degrade the result”.
A Reform UK spokesperson went further: “Essex police advised Nigel not to attend the count tonight due to a credible threat against him.” Not true, suggested the police. No such advice had been given. One of the shoutiest members of Farage’s anti-immigration party, Lee Anderson, had a slightly refreshed explanation by 8.10am when interviewed by the BBC.
His leader had not wanted to disrespect those who had flocked to Farage Fest. He was, actually, if you will just listen just for a moment, a man of principle. All this left one intergalactic explorer, with his arms raised and a bin on his no doubt sweaty head, to take the starring role at Clacton leisure centre.
The candidate who went by the name of Count Binface made a declaration on social media: “I came first in the Clacton byelection! Of the candidates who bothered to turn up for the results.” Count Binface, for those who have not been following this latest fever dream of a moment in British politics, is the parody figure who declared himself the unity candidate when Farage triggered the byelection by resigning the seat back in July. Farage had explained his resignation at the time as a challenge to the establishment that would show them that the people did not want him scrutinised and investigated by the parliamentary authorities over an undeclared £5m gift from a crypto billionaire or any of the other financial scandals orbiting Reform UK.
The other major political parties called his bluff. It was a stunt, they said, and none of them stood, leaving Count Binface, a familiar and striking figure at elections, whose real name is Jon Harvey, to harvest the anti-Farage vote. And he could reasonably be said to have done rather well, given that he won just 95 votes at the recent byelection in Makerfield, in Greater Manchester, where Andy Burnham, now the prime minister, won his parliamentary seat.
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