Loonies and bins: Britain's long love affair with novelty politics

[music] >> He's an intergalactic space warrior from the planet Sigma 9 and a part-time politician on Earth. >> I'm going to price cap Wigan kebabs, 99 flakes and Quavers. >> He wants to nationalize the singer Adele, abolish the auto-renew function for online subscriptions, cap the price of ice creams, and he has a giant garbage bin for a head. >> [music] [singing] >> You've probably seen the pictures by now. I'm talking about Count Bin Face. And right now in the UK, votes are being counted for him in the by-election for the parliamentary seat of Clacton. [music] He's the lead challenger for Nigel Farage, the controversial leader of Reform UK, who's held the seat since 2024. >> I'm the only fresh thing on the menu. >> [music] >> You're all sick of these politicians, as good as they're trying to be, but you know, you need you need something different, a little bit of secret sauce. >> Count Bin Face is a novelty act, the creation of a British comedian. But satirical political candidates have a long history, from Elmo to a man in a fish finger suit, to an AI candidate named AI Steve. This is The Conversation Weekly, [music] and I'm Justin Bergman, the international affairs editor for The Conversation in Australia. How did we end up with joke candidates [music] as part of our political culture? And importantly, what does it say about our [music] views on democracy? Richard Toy, welcome. You're a political historian at the University of Exeter in the UK, and you have studied candidates like Count Bin Face before. Let's start off by describing Count Binface. Who is he exactly? >> Well, he came to be a galactic space warrior and to be 590 years old. In reality, he is a comedian called Jonathan Harvey who's 46 years old who has previously worked as a scriptwriter on comedy shows such as The Thick of It, which was very well known in the UK, a political satire. And Count Binface presents as a man with a bin on his head and a black cape and a slightly silly voice and does a lot of interviews and creates campaign songs. And he's somebody who's been standing in elections under different guises since 2017. >> And actually ran for the London mayor election in 2024 and managed to get quite sizable number of votes. >> Yeah, it were 20,000 and he outdid so Tommy Robinson who's a sort of far-right leader of the English Defence League. So, that was his claim to fame. So, I guess that one thing which brought him some prominence is that in the UK system when the votes are announced, the candidates generally stand on a stage behind the returning officer and can be photographed or if it's live on national TV, you'll see this slightly surreal specter of of all the kind of normal candidates and then Count Binface or whatever other comedy candidate is he's standing in some kind of costume, maybe next to, you know, the prime minister or you know, party leader or something like that. So, just a few weeks ago, Count Binface stood against Andy Burnham when he was running to be MP in the by-election which ended up making prime minister. >> And what if Andy Burnham wins and he puts in a bid for the leadership? What do you think about that? Do you think you'll get it? [clears throat] >> Uh as I said to the gentleman from Sky News, I believe that elected mayors should carry out their full term before they're eligible for Parliament. >> It's interesting to see how people standing next to them react, you know, do they take it in good part as I think Andy Burnham did or do they look a bit sour and uncomfortable? And you know, Count Binface has been doing this for quite a long time and probably just anticipated carrying on doing this. However, when Nigel Farage resigned as an MP, then said he would stand in the by-election which was going to follow to be re-elected to kind of making the case of sort of the people versus the establishment. Other people said that this was really an attempt to disguise or cover up wrongdoing about the large donations which he had received. Then the other major parties said, well, this is a stunt by Farage and therefore we're not going to participate and essentially leave him a free run. Now, that left essentially Count Binface as kind of the only real challenger. Now, there are over 30 people standing. This is a kind of a record, but they are not from the big parties and because I suppose he was the most prominent of these kind of range of independents, eccentrics and kind of other comedy candidates, he actually became like the real challenger, which is obviously a rather surreal situation. >> Yeah. >> And so I think that has led to people around the world wanting to talk about this. Some people saying, well, why don't we have a Count Binface like one in our country? Why did the Brits you get to do this? >> To have all the fun. >> Yeah, exactly. So in in a sense, obviously when there's not a real political campaign going on in the conventional sense, then Count Binface is filling the vacuum. >> And has the media been treating him like a conventional candidate? Is he doing interviews? >> He's done quite a lot of interviews and they're not really treating him quite like a conventional candidate in so far as everybody knows it's a joke and behave like that. And so, you know, he obviously doesn't also behave like a conventional political interviewee. So, if they say, "What are your policies?" he will say, "Well, you should have done your research. My policies are on my website." >> Plus, I'll ensure that elected mayors are ineligible for Parliament until they've served their term of office. Cheeky. >> Yeah, it's a combination of silly policies such as saying he wants to nationalize the singer Adele because she's like a national treasure and ought to be in public hands, and a range of things like that, making sure that hand dryers in pub toilets are better placed, and he wants to have the price of 99 flake ice creams kept at 99p, he wants to take the driving licenses away of people who drive past Clacton station with too loud exhausts, and he wants to make arcade grabber machines fairer, which, you know, one could imagine a lot of people getting behind. >> Yeah, my children would love that. >> But, also, you know, in this election, he has a policy that candidates who, like Farage, resign from Parliament shouldn't then be able to stand in the subsequent by-election. Now, that's actually, whether you agree with it or not, it's certainly a credible policy which is worth discussing. And so, people who don't like Farage, who want to vote for some kind of alternative, to a certain extent have rallied around Count Binface, who I think is playing it very cleverly. I mean, I will say I'm pretty sure that he's not actually going to win, but he does manage to, in a comedic way, articulate criticisms of Farage. When interviewers say, for example, you know, "Have you ever been to Clacton?" the constituency he says, "Well, I didn't think this was a requirement for the job on the basis of Nigel Farage's behavior. He's not really known for turning up and being there very often." >> So, Count Binface is not the first satirical candidate to stand for election in the UK, right? >> No, and I mean the most famous was a man called David Sutch. >> The youngest contender of the five, the national teenage candidate, is a 22-year-old pop singer whose latest disc is called Jack the Ripper. >> He renamed himself Screaming Lord Sutch and stood from the 1960s, initially as a candidate for what he called the Teenage Party, and then in the early 1980s founded the Monster Raving Loony Party, which is still going. >> In their manifesto, the Raving Loonies say that butter mountains would be turned into ski slopes, Britain would be a tax haven, and hot air would be nationalized. >> [laughter] >> And there are actually three Monster Raving Loony candidates standing in Clacton. >> Holy moly. >> The leader of the official Monster Raving Loony Party. This is the 38th time I've stood for Parliament. I now hold the record for >> Sutch was a guy who actually had some serious point to make. He was disenchanted with politics and disenchanted with the establishment and to a certain extent wanted to stick up a finger to the establishment. >> Excuse me, is this a publicity stunt? Definitely not, sir. I've already >> But actually his initial policies, Teenage Party policy was votes for teenagers. Now, this was at a time when the voting age was 21, and it was only changed in the late 1960s when it was reduced to 18. So, actually something which he'd been saying was a kind of a spoof policy just a few years earlier actually became a real policy. Similarly, all-day opening for pubs took longer, but you know, sort of by the end of the 1980s that had happened too. And you know, the subsequent leader Alan Hope actually was elected as a a local counselor and as far as we know did a decent job of being a serious local counselor. So there's often a kind of a blurred line between the comedy candidates and actually try to make some serious point. And there are some people who do it purely for publicity, purely for entertainment, but behind the jokes there are often serious points to be made. >> Was David Such the pioneer of this movement? Was he the first satirical candidate of note or were there earlier examples? >> I suppose what I would say is that you who is regarded as being a joke candidate because some people who take themselves very seriously are regarded by other people as as jokes. And then of course there were the people who were written off as candidates who were sort of thought not to have a credible chance. And I would highlight a guy called Edwin Scrymgeour who first fought for the Prohibition Party you know, against alcohol in Dundee in 1908. Nobody thought he had a chance. In 1922, he actually wins the seat. And who was the candidate who he defeated? Winston Churchill. >> Oh, really? Wow, that's amazing. >> And back in 1992, for example, there was a party called the Natural Law Party and they were funded by ex-Beatle George Harrison and they were completely sincere about trying to bring politics in line with the principles of transcendental meditation. >> Natural law is the intelligence that guides the evolution of the whole universe. The Natural Law Party will establish a group of 7,000 experts in transcendental meditation and yogic flying. >> Now, to the outside they appeared a lot of people to [music] be extremely comical. What one of the things which they demonstrated in their party political broadcast was something called yogic flying, which is people crossing their legs and bouncing up and down forwards on mattresses. >> [music] >> And their party political broadcasts were very comical, if you like, or amateurish. And even if they picked up only a half percent of the vote, they were still persuading [music] a significant number of people to engage with them. They were going to public meetings where other candidates were addressing, they were putting their policies forward. [music] And I suppose I would say that again, this is the blurred line between [music] what is comedy, what is serious. They were utterly straight-faced about it all, and that was what made it so funny in a way. >> What's the broader perspective here? What's the point of all of this for these candidates? What are they trying to prove? >> Well, I think in the case of Count Binface, you know, he persistently says, "Well, what I'm trying to show is that there is something great about British democracy, which is that anybody can stand, and even a man with a bin on his head can do this and can be sort of up there with the other candidates. And that is what he wants to celebrate," as he says. But throughout democratic history of Britain, there have been all these people who have come forward as independents or as representatives of very obscure parties, and they really are part of the democratic process, too. And that also, they have got the potential to make a breakthrough. They're people who get written off and nobody takes seriously, and most of them, you know, 99.9% of them will never get anywhere. And then suddenly, it turns out that Count Binface is Nigel Farage's major challenger. And this actually makes a point about Farage himself, who has been in politics for 30 years, but somebody whose cause was ridiculed, was felt to be very marginal at the point where he started, and he has persisted, and he has obviously succeeded in changing the face of British politics. >> And these satirical candidates, it seems as if they're becoming a part of the general political culture now, right? This is going to continue to grow in terms of a moment. >> Well, I would always say that the idea that there's been a two-party system has been a big oversimplification, right? It's always been more complicated than that, but clearly in the last few years, there's been a progressive further breakdown [music] of that, so that we really genuinely have multi-party politics. Reform UK, Farage's party, are serious contenders. [music] The Greens now have a number of people in Parliament. The Scottish National Party for many years has had large numbers of MPs at Westminster. The Liberal Democrats [music] have got the biggest number of seats they've ever had, and so on and so forth. And so, in this situation where you've got a proliferation of different voices, [music] and you've got the age of social media as well, with a lot of play very quickly, I think that yes, these comedy candidates are not going to go away, and that the success of Count Binface is probably just going to encourage people to try similar things in the future. >> [music] >> Coming up, what happens when the joke is on us? Are satirical candidates bad for democracy? >> [music] >> Are you going to have no head two pieces of mullet, please? A piece of sea perch and eight boiled and peeled potatoes, please, Colin. [music] >> From a fish and chip shop in regional Queensland >> I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians. >> to the heart of Australian politics. This is the unlikely story of the country's most controversial minor party. Are you xenophobic? Please explain. For 30 years, One Nation and Pauline Hanson have been ridiculed, dismissed, and shut out. >> Gone. >> I don't like [music] it. No. No. No, I don't. Never did. >> Now, no one's laughing. >> One Nation continuing to surge in the polls. [music] >> Dramatic surge in support for One Nation. >> The fringe becomes the mainstream. >> This is the story of how a party built on fear and grievance thrived, died, and rose again to upend Australian politics. >> Well, I'm back. >> Hanson 2.0 is the serious, strategic, [music] experienced, battle-hardened political operator that we see in the news today. >> [music] >> I'm Ashlyn McGee. This is The Making of One Nation from The Conversation, and you can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts. [music] >> Welcome back. So, Richard, what happens if a satirical candidate wins? >> Uh well, this is the interesting question. I think that if Count Binface were to win, then he would try to do a serious job of representing the constituency. I mean, in terms of Westminster politics, it would be unprecedented, and I think that he would have to accept that he couldn't turn up in sort of full costume in the Chamber of the House of Commons, and he would be an MP, but also, it's not only Westminster where there have been comedy candidates. So, a few years ago now in Hartlepool when directly elected mayors were introduced, there was a man who stood as the sort of mascot of the local football team called H'Angus the Monkey. >> Stuart Drummond, the former elected mayor of Hartlepool, most people from outside the area will remember you as the football mascot, the independent H'Angus the Monkey, who confounded expectations back in 2002 when you got elected. >> You know, I only stood in the election for a bit of fun, a bit of a joke. The same as this year, the team were doing really well at the time. Um, and you know, I got a bit of publicity. And I thought, well, I might as well see it through. Never stood in an election before. >> And you know, he did it as a joke, but [music] to his surprise, he won the election. And actually served a couple of terms and by all accounts was a credible mayor that he dropped the monkey costume and was doing his best [music] for the town. >> It's easy to draw a bow and say Count Binface tells us a lot about the state of politics at the moment. But given satirical candidates have been around for so long, what does it say about us? >> Well, I think it says that politics is a spectacle and we enjoy it. And let's just come out and say Count Binface is fun. I mean, I think that of course people like to fantasize or speculate about alternative realities in which Count Binface or other comedy candidates might win. And obviously there is a situation where there is a kind of alienation from mainstream politics. Yet at the same time, people want to feel represented by politicians. And equally, remember that they serve a function for the media as well or for commentators. So, when the Monster Raving Loony Party was founded, for example, back in the early 1980s, this was a time when the Labour Party was swinging to the left and this gave right-wing commentators the excuse to say, "Well, look who are the real loonies here?" You know, it's kind of the Labour Party with their extreme policies of gay rights or whatever it was. And so, equally, of course, this is the immediate joke which occurs to everybody with Count Binface. So, you'd have Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, saying, "Well, you know, I'm not going to support a joke candidate with ridiculous policies in Clacton and therefore I'm supporting Count Binface." The joke candidates serve as a distraction, a lightning rod, something for the media to talk about when they need to get people interested in elections, really. Actually, elections are in some ways terrible news for the media because you've got 3 weeks or more of kind of the same story over and over again. So, how do you keep people's interest when most people, you know, have kind of limited engagement or kind of limited tolerance for detail? And so, things like public meetings have always been about spectacle and drama and comedy candidates are just another aspect of that. >> Yeah, but doesn't part of this mock the entire electoral system in a way? I mean, is this is this damaging for democracy in some respect? >> Well, I think it's probably good for it to be mocked. You know, I mean, in terms of actual mockery, you might remember the Monty Python by-election sketch where they have sort of the sensible party and the and the silly party. >> And the Silly Party have held Leicester. What do YOU MAKE OF THAT, NORMAN? >> WELL, THIS IS LARGELY AS I PREDICTED, EXCEPT THAT THE SILLY PARTY WON. I THINK this is mainly DUE TO THE NUMBER OF VOTES CAST, GERALD. >> And so, I think that kind of elections are ripe for sort of humorous exploitation. And [music] admittedly it is a pretty weird situation that we are are in in [music] Clacton at the moment where the most sort of serious challenger to Nigel Farage is coming from the man [music] in a ridiculous costume. One can well say actually should the major parties have stepped up and fought Farage in this situation. But in general, I don't think [music] that comedy characters are an issue because perhaps they [music] do increase the interest of politics when it is important that people engage. >> People are definitely paying attention to this election, that's for sure. Richard, thanks so much for your time. We really appreciate it. >> Thank [music] you. >> [music] >> That's it for this week's episode of The Conversation Weekly. You can read Richard's argument for why we need to take candidates [music] like Count Binface seriously on our website now, the conversation.com. We've also linked to it in our show notes. >> [music] >> Isabella Podwinski was the executive producer of this episode. Sound mixing and production is by Michelle Maclem, and our theme music is by Needa Soral. Jemma Ware is head of audio. Ashton McGee [music] is head of editorial innovation, and Misha Ketchell and Steven Cohn are our [music] editors in chief. The Conversation is a non-profit news outlet dedicated to sharing the work of academic experts [music] with a wider audience. If you like what we do, please support us at donate.theconversation.com. [music] Thanks for listening. >> [music]