'Count Binface is the best replacement for Boris Johnson in Uxbridge'
A British by-election, in times of beleaguered governments and national decay, tends to flush out the eccentrics.
So it is only right that those competing for the former Parliamentary seat of disgraced Boris Johnson on July 20 include two people who have changed their name to ULEZ, a self-proclaimed lunatic, and a Ukipper who hates being ruled from afar yet has a home address 243 miles away in the Ribble Valley.
Thank goodness, then, for Count Binface. Yes, he's an anonymous alien overlord with the dress sense of Gary Glitter and a 1970s dustbin on his head; but his manifesto makes more sense than any of the others.
Binface is worried about the cost of croissants, which are being used in daylight robberies of unsuspecting munchers (Getty)1. He wants dentistry to be carried out by dentists. Rishi Sunak is happy for therapists to do it.
2. He wants to abolish the House of Lords. Keir Starmer says hmm, maybe, in a bit, after I've made some Lords first.
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3. He wants to end homelessness by moving homeless people into Royal palaces. Prince William agrees, although King Charles has yet to issue a ruling.
Princess Charlotte agrees too, but that's because she knows she'll inherit Gloucestershire (PA)The long and noble history of satirical by-election candidates have often thrown up inadvertently-good ideas that end up being adopted by the main parties. Pet passports, 24-drinking laws, and abolition of the 11-plus were all from the Monster Raving Loonies. We are still waiting for the mainstream to adopt their ideas of replacing government whips with a slipper for first offences, and to only use the Trident weapons system at weekends to keep the costs down.
But those are cases where the mad candidate suggested something the mainstream later adopted. In Binface's case, he's ahead of the curve - 100% of dental patients already believe a dentist should carry out dental work, 100% of non-peers can't see the point of peerages, and 50% of all palace owners think palaces should house the homeless, so long as it's not the one they're living in.
Binface also wants to tie nurses' pay to that of government ministers for the next century, and I can't think of a more elegant solution to fix all that is wrong in the NHS in double-quick time.
Unlike most fringe candidates, Binface is a proven vote-winner. He polled 92,986 in the race to be London Mayor, putting him in 9th place out of 20 candidates. Meanwhile Rishi Sunak had precisely 0 votes to become Prime Minister, and polled a mere 36,693 to become MP for Richmond in North Yorkshire.
For a PM, that's a thumping good win. For Binface, it means he's officially 2.53 times more popular than the man with the helicopter and the insincere grin.
Rishi Sunak pretending to be friendly with Count Binface at an election event (not really, but let's pretend)All right, Binface isn't the ideal candidate. He appears to have no policy on a third runway at Heathrow, but at least it means he'd never break a promise to lie down in front of the bulldozers. He's quiet on the ULEZ expansion, but there are other candidates making noise about that. And while the previous MP for Uxbridge spaffed a lot of things up the wall, we all know that bins keep the most noxious, juiciest bits in their bottom.
But what matters most is what Binface is not. He is not Piers Corbyn, climate denier, and lifelong record-holder for the title of Most Bonkers Corbyn on the Planet And That's Saying Something. He's not Laurence Fox of the Reclaim Party, who wants to reclaim manhood, womanhood, Brexit, whiteness, all rights ever given to anybody else, and to cut waiting lists by giving people a voucher so they can go and be ill more expensively, somewhere else.
He's not the Labour candidate, who hasn't been allowed to have any policies yet, nor the Tory candidate, who voted against a poverty strategy and for a rise in council tax. He's not the Lib Dem candidate, whose name of Blaise Baquiche makes her sound like an Ed Davy photo stunt, and he's not the Green Party candidate whose name is also Green, just in case you get confused.
The other possibilities include a devout Christian, someone whose name is a number, and the Official Monster Raving Loony whose moment has, I'm afraid, passed.
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The Standing At The Back Dressed Stupidly and Looking Stupid Party is not what it once was. UKIP nicked their colours, for one (Cambridge News WS)Binface is also, manifestly, not Boris Johnson. He is not a liar, a cheat, an underminer of Parliament, or a lockdown sceptic in charge of when to lockdown. He's not an obese cheese fiend who refused to crackdown on people eating junk. He's not lied to win any votes, he's not bungled his own party management, and I suspect if he met a man called Chris Pincher he'd know what sort of chap he was straight off.
If you want to put Boris Johnson's era in the bin, if you want someone to take out the trash of a government that's 13 years past its use-by date, if you want to reduce, reuse and recycle politics so that it does what the people need it to, rather than tell the people what to do, then Binface is the most able, on that list of no-hope notable exceptions to the rules of everyday life, to do it.
But perhaps the most important reason to vote for him is that, for once, it matters a huge amount and at the same time doesn't matter at all. "There will be a general election within 18 months," says Binface. "This is a free hit. Show the world what you really think."
In short, you can do a lot worse than vote for the man with a bin on his head. And if that's the state British politics has come to then, my friends, the man with a bin on his head is officially your best hope. If you're in Uxbridge, and if you can find the polling station, then on July 20, vote to Make Bins Great Again.
* A full list of the candidates standing, because we have to:
The candidates for the Uxbridge by-election
More candidates
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