The salvation of democracy is a joke. Why Binface was absurdly appealing next to Farage

August 14, 2026 — 3:00am

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By the time you get around to reading this, there’s a good chance Nigel Farage will have won or will be about to win the Clacton byelection. If so, he will have seen off the intergalactic threat of Count Binface, a serial candidate with a bin on his head, who claims to be an alien space warrior from Sigma IX. Thus closes a circus of a chapter in British politics whose meaning, for now, is strangely ambiguous. I’ve spent much of this campaign trying to figure out if Binface represents the salvation of democracy or its nadir. Now it has concluded, I wonder if my confusion stems from the fact that I was asking a question Binface had no interest in answering.

The whole byelection was born in farce. Farage manufactured it as soon as controversy began to bite after he failed to declare a £5 million ($9.6 million) payment from a crypto-billionaire. A parliamentary integrity watchdog is investigating, so Farage thought he’d subvert the process by resigning from parliament and letting the people decide. That’s meaningless without the investigation having been completed. It’s also a waste of time and money given its findings might force another byelection in any case. But victory would allow Farage to dismiss all this scrutiny as anti-democratic, elite nonsense. As a result, the major parties boycotted, leaving Binface as the principal challenger.

The satirical potential was enormous. Farage called this a contest between the people and the establishment, but what did this mean once he was going head-to-head with a bin? If........

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