Farage and the Binface by-election

He wanted to take on the establishment - and ended up with Count Binface

I normally credit Nigel Farage with courage, energy, judgment and entrepreneurial flair that made him one of the most consequential figures of the postwar era. He has spent years making fools out of his opponents. But sometimes, leaders go into meltdown and their judgement collapses.

Farage is now forcing a by-election - but not over an issue affecting his constituents, or the people he purports to champion. This is all about him and his money. He dislikes answering question about it, and is holding the by-election in protest. We’re told how angry he is - outraged, even - that anyone found out about the £5m “gift” wired to him from a Thai-based crypto king: a sum he did not disclose to others in Reform UK. He seems genuinely shocked that my newspaper, The Times, would run an investigation exposing the property portfolio that he failed to disclose to parliament. He has now been reprimanded 17 times for not abiding by Commons financial disclosure rules, bridling at the accountability that comes with public office. He seems appalled, at times enraged, by the scrutiny and transparency expected of MPs. It makes you wonder how on earth he’d cope with the pressure of bring PM.

Hissy-fit by-elections

I was on BBC Newsnight last night with Laila Cunningham, who I regard as one of the most effective Reform UK broadcast performers and one of their best signings. I feel for her having to defend this madness. When I said that Nigel Farage had called a “hissy-fit” by-election, she accused me of borrowing Kemi Badenoch’s words. It was an important point: am I part of a Farage-hating elite, beating up on him and showing my bias?

I replied that I had been using this phrase for years: always to attack Conservatives who called by-elections in an explosion of ego. I’ve always attacked this tactic, denounced it as an egregious abuse of public office, forcing them into a by-election at your own whim costing the taxpayer £350,000. “When the Tories started treating constituents as if they were props for their careers and whims (Nadine Dorries’ hissy-fit by-election over her non-peerage, Chris Skidmore’s pre-election job offer) it was a sign of the end,” I wrote. I’ve long seen such hauteur as indefensible abuse of public office. I accused Zac Goldsmith of a “hissy fit” in 2016 when he forced a by-election in protest over Heathrow’s third runway runway. A law needs to be passed, I argued, to stop MPs calling by-elections out of pique. Farage likes to say his critics are partisan. I’ve been attacking such egotistical explosion for years.

When MPs behave in this way with their constituents, it tends to mark the end. It shows either they have forgotten who serves whom, or they never understood in the first place. Why is Farage doing this to the people of Clacton? Are its voters really expected to become props in the great drama of Nigel and His Money? He seems to want to use his constituents as human shields to deflect questions about his financial links to convicted criminals and crypto kings. So he can say, when asked: ‘questions about my honesty were resolved in a by-election!’ This would not work for a second: but it’s the only card he seems to think he has left to play.

Enter Count Binface

It seems he didn’t properly consider the scenario where the other parties would not field a candidate. I’m not sure why not. This is what happened when the Tory MP David Davis pulled the same ridiculous stunt in 2008. S anyone sit Farage down and explain that his nemesis may arrive in the form of a human bin? And that there was a non-negligible chance of his losing to that bin?

Count Binface stood in Makerfield and captured the public imagination: a walking, comic, tin-hatted rebuke to the circus that out politics has become. William Hill has him at 7:2 - the only serious challenger to Farage. Cometh the hour, cometh the bin.

Count Binface stands in a long British tradition of using humour and satire as a check to egotism and pomposity. Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer. It’s an important democratic principle: a device, allowing voters to blow a raspberry. When the Blair government wanted Hartlepool to choose a mayor in 2002, its voters thought this an absurd proposition and returned a candidate in a monkey suit. He served for ten years. Binface himself is named after Boaty McBoatface, the winner of a 2016 poll when people were asked to name an underwater drone.

Readers of my vintage may remember droning, pompous Vienna by Ultravox in 1981: declared a masterpiece by the worst people; a shoo-in for No1. It was heroically kept off that slot by Joe Dolce’s Shaddapa You Face: vulgar, daft and magnificently unserious. All very British. I’ve always see that Dolce moment as one that defines an important part of our national character.

If Farage asks Clacton to rise up and vindicate his money-grabbing modus operandi, I’m not sure I’d bet against them choosing Count Binface to make a point. This, after all, is how Britain tends to deal with men who begin to confuse themselves with destiny: by ridicule. And after all, are Count Binface’s policies - £2 kebabs - any less ridiculous than Reform’s claims to save £234 billion (!) from cutting immigration?

Farage has always been at his best as the mocker, the jester, the licensed insurrectionist standing outside the castle walls. But in Clacton he risks becoming the thing he has always mocked: the grand, pompous man demanding a plebiscite on his own wounded dignity. He now looks like he’s busy assembling not an insurgency but a rival elite: global, moneyed, in many cases crooked (with criminal convictions) and outraged at any challenge. A YouGov poll shows 73pc of voters now regard him as “sleazy.” An image he hard dispels by picking a by-election over this scandal. Abouut his right to trouser huge sums from Bangkok sugar-daddies, spend nights in undeclared Westminster penthouses, take cash from convicted criminals and run what’s starting to look like a global funny-money operation.

When I made my Ch4 film on Reform UK I focused on its popular support, how it was giving hope to millions who loathed the Labour-Tory duumvirate. But Reform now starting to look like another, even more shameless piece of a self-serving establishment. A clique of people who loathe accountability so much, so viscerally, that they call by-elections in protest against it.

Against this, are we really so sure that Count Binface is the joke candidate? He gives better interviews than most politicians. He represents the voter’s right to rebel: to same that some propositions are too absurd to be dignified with normal politics. A by-election held because the local is irritated by scrutiny is exactly such a proposition.

When the British are told that it is their role to rise to a national occasion, to play the clapping extras in the coronation of a musical or political monarch, they often revolt. With a monkey; a boat. With Joe Dolce. Or perhaps with a man wearing a dustbin on his head.

Farage says Reform UK will cover the £350k cost, which itself reminds us of the problem. What kind of party has that cash to waste on a pointless by-election stunt? The answer: a party awash with funny money sent from the crypto kings it shamelessly serves. Only today the Bank of England governor confirmed that Farage has lobbied him against setting up å ‘Britcoin’ currency that would challenge the interests of Christopher “£5m gift” Harbone and Ben “£4m donation” Delo.

The Commons inquiry into that £5m - and, now, the George Cottrell money and the property empire - is a quasi-judicial process. It may lead to a proper by-election, a process that Farage seemed to wish to pre-empt by calling one now. “It’s a gamble,” he said yesterday. Quite so. Let’s see how it plays out.