Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election

Some of his planks:

  * Cut your taxes, and raise everyone else’s.
  * Nationalize Adele.  
  * Build at least one affordable house.
  * Hold a referendum on whether Pluto should regain its planet status.

> Binface received 26.9% of the vote

> That's why Count Binface has been able to stand in so many high-profile elections. He has, however, lost his £500 every time, after failing to meet the minimum 5% of votes cast in order for his deposit to be returned.

It would seem he didn't lose his £500 this time...

Vote difference: 22,239 (Farage) - 9,455 (Binface) = 12,784 votes. 12,784 / 2 = 6,392

If Count Binface took just 6,393 more votes from Farage he would have won!

Britain has a first-past-the-post election system so the candidate with the most votes wins in each constituency.

As Farage didn’t get an absolute majority last time, and as a majority of voters didn’t even vote last time, I was extrapolating that Count Binface had a real chance. Not just as a protest vote, but a magnet for everyone not supporting Farage as well as everyone wanting a laugh (in a British boaty-mcboatface way).

Perhaps a serious clean-up-politics neutral candidate would have done better, like Martin Bell - a very well known war correspondent - who stood on an anti corruption ticket against the scandal riddled Conservative Neil Hamilton in Tatton in 1997.

Never thought I’d see my home town being discussed here. I no longer live there but regularly go back.

It’s not a great town but it’s also not truly awful. It’s a reasonably deprived town that harks back to its former grand past with an older demographic constantly topped up by people retiring there from east London.

There’s a lot of very nice people who are mortified that Farage is the MP and that the town has become a political joke. I struggle to see how people can vote for Farage but if you walk around the town center (which is perfectly safe like all of the UK is regardless of what social media and US news outlets say) you can understand why people want some change.

In reality there’s no well paid jobs and, with the aging demographic and no reason for anything to be based there, no reason for there to ever be any sadly.

Also Farage is in the district a lot more than the media makes out, I hear enough second and third hand sightings of him that he must be there more than once a month.

Reminds me of the Black Mirror episode in which a blue animated bear named Waldo nearly wins a by-election:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waldo_Moment

Reality these days sometimes feels as strange as fiction.

Really appreciate the pictures showing the evolution of the costume over the years. He's put some real solid work into it.

Also, Monty Python's own take on the phenomenon, for those who haven't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVI5ZOT5QEM

Can someone in the UK explained how the country has fared with multiple PMs since Borris Johnson? My read as an outsider is it would take another brexit exit (a singular, definable political question that can cleanly classified in a binary label) to create a unifier but I also have no idea what that could be (ai, immigration, climate change, etc are too load bearing and multifaceted to see such a clean binary moment).

The contributed proposition by the 10 year old kid to make fossil fuel companies pay for solar panels is perhaps the best policy proposal I’ve ever seen.

The second one is to make water companies CEOs swim in the Thames.

That is a program.

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. "

Story about politics .. check

Story about local "celebrity" politician .. check

Covered by mainstream TV news .. check

Comment thread full of political bickering .. check

Hundreds of votes and to the top of the front page you go!

Bumper sticker with a picture of Count Binface: "Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy!"

I long for the days when voting for outsiders was a fun way to fill out a ballot, back when election outcomes didn’t matter very much because the probable winners were all qualified to hold office.

Be careful with joke parties. It may seem fun and may seem like they are obvious "good guys", but you really can't know. It's easy to hide behind irony. In Hungary, we had the Two-Tailed Dog party which essentially turned into the personal enrichment of the couple leading it, and political background deals and embezzlement of state funds. A lot of times, the regular old human affairs poison these joke parties too, as anywhere else, except they may have lots of naive people around them who are even easier to fool and exploit.

Amd the winner of the by-election didn't even attended the announcement of the results.

Really really hilarious. I commend and ask all centrist parties to continue sending failed comedians as their provincial vassals

This isn't as it seems.

None of the other major parties stood for election in Clacton, which meant that all those tens of thousands of votes cast for the other parties at the 2024 election should have gone to Binface in protest to make Farage fail. And the volunteers who would normally be canvassing for those parties should have strategically been out on the street trying to get votes for BinFace or another.

But instead the voter turnout remained similar to 2024 levels (around 40% at both elections), which means the voters who turned out were either new voters for Farage, or the voters of the other parties voted strategically for Farage.

My guess is that the other parties decided Farage is so fatally damaged with the ongoing scandals, that keeping him as Reform Leader is their best bet at maintaining the usual 2-party state (and more so as there is an paused parliamentary investigation into Farage that would resume only if elected).

It is of note that Reform's popularity and Farage's popularity nationally is on an ongoing decline and if Farage had been voted out, Reform could have either imploded (thereby allowing another right/far right party to replace them by the time of the next election i.e. the Elon Musk backed Restore Britain) or had a change of leadership at Reform UK with Farage stepping down

There is also the question of whether Farage is controlled opposition acting his part to give artificial hope to the people of change.

The truth is the 2-party state has existed for years and given the deep-state in the UK predictable control. If that system was broken, then it's a risk of major change to the establishment/british aristocracy.

In a 1:1, Count Binface would absolutely demolish Nigel Farage. By the way, have his voters never wondered why Nigel got so much money? Technically Nigel should be forced to give up all his money to the UK taxpayers for having helped yield the BREXIT disaster - which factually did cost the UK taxpayers a LOT of money. Nigel should not have any money for himself, other than a miniscule amount.

idk this seems like a very rose-tinted title considering the results

So Binface lost? What happened to all the Internet energy, likes, shares, and blog and social media posts?

Maybe Farage was always destined to win.

He has nerves of steel and an iron will.

Seems like he was a writer for The Thick of It. Fitting.

I just say this guy is funny!

While being a sketch-action, there is for sure a lot of preassure in playing this role for month?

I can't believe people chose the joke candidate over Count Binface!

I imagine that money can buy elections in some districts in the world like this:

- Have money

- Use money to saturate the political attention, making most people eventually wonder are any other candidates even running?

- Attack ads for competing candidates with actual attention already

(1) Seeing this situation, and (2) knowing that everything you have been told about the candidates that you have heard of might be flowery bullshit but you don’t quite know, (3) and not trusting them, you might just as well decide to tell the “eager volunteers” for the millions-funded candidate: I am not impressed and you are unwilling to give me anything that I want. But I vaguely know about this other candidate dressed as a hamster, and he is saying some damn fine and good things for me, the ordinary pedestrian (populist in the literature). Want my vote? Come and try and get it with more than your flowery bullshittery.

This is known as uninformed and irrational in the literature, I vaguely recall (it’s been what, 15 years?), pedestrians not simply taking the flowery bullshit, I mean information they have been graciously given for free by their betters, and then making an altruistic least-harm calculation based on that. (Concessions and bargaining based on personal interest is for tHe eLite; pedestrians are supposed to lie on their backsides and think of Xland.)

I, for one, welcome our new metallic receptacle nearly-elected overlord.

(better than the elected one, that's for sure.)

How long before an AI runs for election?

What's stopping it?

Can a human be the "frontend" to skirt around age and citizenship requirements?

the pre vote discusions centered on " The Count Binface" getting more than 5% of the votes as bieng a sign of great discontent, 25% + suggests that politics as it is, wont be for long.

So they took the existing clown show called "elections" and cranked it to 11.

would have been awesome if he won

It’s interesting they would let an alien from outer space run in these elections.

Especially against count binface.

if a quarter of votes is what Count Binface got as a candidate backed by every other party against Nigel Farage this is not the "success" people hope it looks like. On the contrary Farage got his highest percentage ever.

Actually a bad result for Binface: you'd have expected the whole opposition to converge on him (they would have had nothing to lose), but many non-reform didn't vote at all, giving Farage the absolute majority.

BBC spin on a Reform win.