Count Binface vs. Nigel Farage

At the time of writing there is still hope Count Binface can pull off a surprise byelection win and dethrone Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, who has led the opinion polls in Britain for the past two years. The danger is that the Monster Raving Loony Party may also run, splitting the vote and letting Farage win.

The story so far:

Nigel Farage is what was known in wartime British slang as a ‘spiv’: a flashy, fast-talking petty criminal who always has something shoddy and borderline illegal to sell. Farage is not actually a criminal, my lawyers have instructed me to say, but he has led three political parties — UK Independence Party, Brexit Party, Reform UK — and they all smelled a bit off.

They were all anti-immigrant, ultra-nationalist and shyly racist, and they all used ‘populist’ tactics well before that style went global. Think of him as a Donald Trump who didn’t inherit great wealth but is a lot more coherent. In due course the rest of the world has caught up and, in Great Britain, Farage’s current political vehicle, Reform UK, has led opinion polls for two years straight.

By last April it looked like the four biggest countries of Western Europe were all going to get hard-right, maybe even fascist-adjacent governments. Giorgia Meloni is already in power in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France and Alice Weidel in Germany are on track for election victories next year and Farage in the U.K. seemed a likely winner in 2028-29.

Farage’s future victory is less certain, of course, because the governing Labour Party has just got a new leader — and prime minister-in-waiting — Andy Burnham. However, Burnham will be the seventh prime minister in 10 years and if the high turnover continues, then surely it will be Farage’s turn soon. Or so he imagined. So did many other people, some of them with great foreboding.

Suddenly, just a couple of weeks ago, the wheels fell off Farage’s chariot. A team of investigative journalists from the Guardian newspaper discovered that Farage had accepted a personal gift of £5 million (about US$6.7 million) from Christopher Harborne, an expat British crypto billionaire who lives in Thailand.

It’s not illegal to accept a huge gift if you are a politician, but it raises questions about what the giver expects in return — especially if the politician doesn’t mention it. And if you are a British member of Parliament (as Farage is), you are obliged to report all such gifts even from the year before you were elected. He didn’t.

It’s not the first dodgy mega-donor Farage has had, and the Parliamentary Standards Committee began an investigation of his failure to report the gift. If it finds against him, he could be suspended from parliament — and if the suspension is for more than 10 days, he might have to win a byelection to hold onto his seat.

As often happens, that first revelation shook others loose, and Farage now faces four separate investigations of various financial failings. He was drowning in allegations, so he came up with a clever scheme. He would resign from his own seat, run for re-election, and use that ‘vote of confidence’ to distract people from all the accusations against him.

In the best populist tradition, he was using ‘the people’ (or at least the people of his seat in Clacton) to destroy ‘the elite’.

“It’s a chance to stick two fingers to the entire establishment to tell them where to go,” said the Man of the People.

It might have worked, except that all five other British parties instantly said they would boycott Farage’s glorified opinion poll.

And then Count Binface spoke up, promising to make matters even more interesting. He’s a comedian who frequently runs in a parliamentary election or byelection somewhere, not expecting to win, and shows up at the count wearing a hi-tech bucket on his head.

At this point I must mention that the English are weird. When the government said people should not put their religion down as ‘Jedi’ on census forms, 390,000 reported they were Jedi in the next census.

When a government research agency asked the public to suggest a name for a new polar research ship, the overwhelming majority said it should be called Boaty McBoatface.

So when Count Binface is running unopposed against Nigel Farage, there is a genuine chance that Count Binface can win. So long as Howling Laud Hope of the Monster Raving Loony Party doesn’t run too and split the anti-Farage vote. Farage got slightly less than half the votes last time, so it could happen.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers.