On a sun-bleached afternoon in Clacton-on-Sea, a man in a silver cape dances on the sand with a full-sized dustbin over his head. He spins beneath a pier crowned with the rusting skeleton of a Ferris wheel, singing “England needs a new hope” in a voice that arrives from somewhere deep inside the plastic. The cape glints; the seagulls wheel; a small crowd films on phones. It is the sort of seaside eccentricity that might once have been ignored, but Clacton is no ordinary resort town this week. Home to roughly 92,000 people, at the centre of one of the poorest constituencies in eastern England, it has become the focus of international attention over what locals and observers alike have dubbed a political circus. The dancing bin man is Count Binface, one of Britain’s most high-profile and perennial political candidates, and he is part of an extremely online campaign that has somehow broken through the noise. In an ignoble first in British electoral history, he is one of thirty-four candidates on the parliamentary ballot. No constituency has ever seen a list this long; the ballot papers are reportedly three feet long, bigger than the trestle tables set up to count them, and too large for the standard envelopes used for postal votes. The election was triggered by the resignation of Nigel Farage, leader of the right-wing, anti-immigration Reform UK and a friend of Donald Trump. Farage resigned amid allegations that he and his party accepted and failed to declare financial support, including a £5 million gift from a Thailand-based cryptocurrency tycoon. Reform UK did not respond to requests for comment. Farage says he has done nothing wrong and wants to recontest the seat so voters can judge him. Labour and the Conservatives, by contrast, refused to field candidates, calling the contest a “gimmick” and a “circus.” When Rachel Reeves, then chancellor of the exchequer, accepted Farage’s resignation, she delivered the line that now hangs over the town: “If he wants to spend the summer arguing with a bin, I won’t stop him.”
Count Binface has been waiting for this moment. A fixture of British election nights, he has stood in six previous elections over the past decade, appearing on ballot papers from London mayoral races to parliamentary by-elections, always in costume, always with a manifesto that is somehow more honest than the real thing. Because British politicians do not have to live in a constituency to represent it, Binface can go anywhere; he has treated the electoral map as a comedy tour. Inside the bin is Jon Harvey, a comedian and writer who has worked on some of the sharpest satirical shows in the English-speaking world, including Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Have I Got News for You, and The Thick of It. His campaign is absurd by design: he pledges to nationalize the singer Adele, to cap the price of ice cream, and to hold a referendum on whether Pluto should be given back its status as a planet. But the absurdity has a point. In a political culture saturated by scandal, spin, and offshore tax havens, Binface offers clarity: you know exactly what you are voting for, even if what you are voting for is a man with a bin on his head. That is why national coverage has broken through. With Farage’s popularity collapsing across the country, Britons outside Clacton have found themselves rooting for Binface as a kind of corrective—a way of saying that the most self-important political machinery can be punctured by a joke. He has become the unlikely moral centre of a race the established parties boycotted, a candidate whose biggest scandal is that he might actually be the most competent person on the ballot. His social media team works furiously; his videos are designed to be memes; his speeches are written to be quoted. In a race with no Labour candidate and no Conservative candidate, the man in the bin has somehow become the grown-up in the room.
Underneath the jokes, the by-election is a serious story about the strange state of British politics. Farage is no fringe player. He has spent decades reshaping the country’s relationship with Europe and its own sense of identity, and Reform UK has become a genuine electoral force on the right. The allegations that led to his resignation were not whimsical. He and his party were accused of accepting and failing to declare financial support, including the £5 million gift from a cryptocurrency tycoon based in Thailand—the kind of opaque arrangement that Farage, in the past, might have built an entire speech around denouncing. Reform did not answer press questions. Farage, for his part, maintains that he has done nothing wrong and wants to recontest his seat so the voters can decide. That decision turned Clacton into a lightning rod. Labour and the Conservatives stayed away, not wanting to be dragged into a spectacle or to give Farage the legitimacy of a serious contest. But their absence left a vacuum, and into that vacuum poured all manner of causes, campaigns, and cranks. There are candidates promoting psychosexual theory, candidates promoting Bible messaging, candidates promoting white-nationalist conspiracy theories. There are novelty candidates by the dozen. The Monster Raving Loony Party alone has three representatives on the ballot: Nick the Incredible Flying Brick, Baron Von Thunderclap, and Howling Laud Hope, who has proposed shrinking hospital waiting lists by reducing the font size of the lists. It is a coalition of the committed, the confused, the furious, and the just plain funny, all sharing the same stretch of pavement, all trying to be heard above the seagulls. For residents, the result is both exhilarating and exhausting; every day brings a new stunt, a new slogan, a new candidate handing out leaflets with a smile and a manifesto that may or may not be a joke.
Perhaps no one better embodies the strange marriage of politics and performance than Rosie Morrell of the Everyone Is God party. Her platform includes creating a “stable world economy” and mapping and fully comprehending the complete spectrum of human psychology and sexuality. She wears a Union Jack dress and a matching bikini, with pink feathers dangling from her ears, and she is more than happy to take off the dress for a photograph if it earns a second of attention. That, she explains, is what the other press have been asking for. Her partner is the one formally contesting the by-election, but in a race this crowded the line between candidate and supporter has dissolved entirely. Everyone is a messenger. Everyone is a stage. This is what democracy looks like when the traditional gatekeepers step away: a chaotic, embarrassing, often glorious public square where the only currency is notice. It would be easy to laugh at all of it—and many people are. But there is something genuinely human about the frenzy. In a town that has known more than its share of neglect, the sudden arrival of national attention is both flattering and unsettling. Locals have watched their high street shrink, their fortunes rise and fall with the seasons, and their political representation become a punchline. Now they are the centre of the world’s attention for reasons that have nothing to do with them. The national media have turned Clacton into a zoo, and the candidates have obliged by doing tricks. Yet the people who live here are not props. They are the ones who will queue at the polling station, unfold the enormous ballot, and try to make sense of a list that includes a man in a bin, a flying brick, a baron, and the leader of a party that believes everyone is God. The absurdity is real, but so is the act of voting.
Yet the practical reality of thirty-four candidates is not just a joke; it is an administrative nightmare. The ballot papers have become the stuff of legend: three feet long, bigger than the tables used to count them, too big for postal envelopes, impossible to scan at a glance. Election organizers have had to improvise. Postal voters have had to fold their ballots with care; counting staff have had to spread them out like banners across the trestle tables. The sheer length of the ballot has become a symbol of how unwieldy and absurd democracy can be. For voters, the task is genuinely difficult: no one can be expected to know all the candidates, let alone judge their policies. Some respond with bemusement, others with grim determination, and a few with the quiet pride of people who know they are participating in something that will be remembered for a long time. The parties, meanwhile, have responded by fighting frenziedly for attention, launching gimmicks and stunts and photo opportunities in a desperate attempt to stand out. In a way, the circus label is exactly right. But the circus has a backdrop, and the backdrop is real. Clacton is one of the poorest constituencies in eastern England, a place where the closure of a pub or the arrival of a new discount store can feel like major news. The people who live here have been promised solutions many times, by many politicians, and most of the promises have washed away with the tide. They know better than most that elections do not always change things. Yet they also know that not voting guarantees the result they do not want. This by-election, with its bizarre candidates and towering ballot papers, is not what they asked for. But it is what they have been given, and many intend to use it—to send a message, to make a point, to have a laugh, or simply to be seen. That is the strange, stubborn dignity of democracy: even in a circus, every voter still gets to choose.
What will happen on polling day is anyone’s guess. A by-election with thirty-four candidates does not have a stable gravitational centre; it could break in almost any direction. Nigel Farage is still the most recognisable name on the ballot, and he is betting that the voters of Clacton will see him not as a man mired in scandal but as a fighter willing to face them directly, however strange the company. Count Binface is betting on the opposite: that a public exhausted by scandal and spectacle will choose the spectacle that tells the truth about itself. The national mood seems to lean his way. For every person who dismisses him as a joke, there is another who sees him as the only honest candidate in the race, a man whose manifesto is no more fantastical than the promises of the real political class. And perhaps that is the point. In a democracy, satire has always been a form of accountability, and Count Binface is satire wearing a bin. He promises to nationalize Adele, to cap ice cream prices, to give Pluto a fair hearing—pledges that are absurd and yet somehow less insulting than the false certainties of conventional politicians. Clacton has become a stage for the British political id, a place where the country’s anxieties and absurdities have been poured into one oversized ballot paper. But the people doing the voting are not props. They are residents of a real town with real problems, and when they file into the polling station, unfold their enormous ballots, and make their marks, they will be doing something very human: taking a chaotic, broken, ridiculous system and trying to make it mean something. The man in the bin will sing his song; the baron will thunder; the flying brick will not fly. But England needs a new hope, Count Binface sang on the beach. In Clacton this week, hope comes in many shapes—some silver, some plastic, all of them human.
