On a hot Thursday in Clacton, a man wearing a matte metal rubbish bin on his head, silver gators and shoulder pads took over a quarter of the vote in a British parliamentary by-election. Nigel Farage held his seat comfortably, 22,239 votes to 9,455, but nobody was talking about Farage’s arithmetic the next morning or indeed in the run up. They were talking about Count Binface, self-declared intergalactic space warrior, leader of the Recyclons, native of the planet Sigma IX, and now the owner of the best result of his six-election career.
Turnout was down.
The bin was up.
Make of that what you will.
It would be easy to leave the story there, filed under “delightfully British,” alongside Ceefax, Top Hats, Beefeaters and The-Stiff-Upper-Lip. But look a little closer and Clacton tells you something serious about how people think saving works, and it sets up a comparison that is instructive.
The Establishment Revealed
Start with why the by-election happened at all.
Farage did not lose his seat. Nigel resigned it, in July, to trigger a contest he hoped would solidify his standing in the national press and political consciousness. That gamble wagered because of a considerably less flattering story, a parliamentary standards investigation into whether he had failed to declare a £5 million gift from Christopher Harborne, a crypto billionaire with a stake in a major stable-coin issuer, along with further benefits linked to a second donor. Farage’s defence is that the money covered his personal security and was an unconditional gift, therefore exempting it from the usual disclosure rules. You would think a £5 million spend on personal security would enable Nigel to be present at the election result declaration but apparently it was not.
Despite the Reform UK MP’s protestations, others in Westminster are unconvinced, and the inquiry, paused for the vote, has now resumed. Bye bye by-election, hello parliamentary standards enquiry, again.
Here is the irony illustrated by these summer shenanigans. Farage has built an entire political identity on being the outsider who will finally clear out an establishment grown fat and self-dealing. Yet, Reform UK was the first British party to fling open its doors to crypto donations, a funding stream regulators have themselves flagged as an unacceptable risk to the whole system. So the anti-sleaze candidate is funded by exactly the kind of opaque money that makes sleaze possible, and is currently under investigation for exactly the kind of non-disclosure he built a career condemning in others. The man selling us the exit from the swamp, who vowed to drain the swamp turns out to be a swamp native, a now unmasked wetland species.
None of this makes him uniquely wicked. It makes him ordinary. It makes him human. Every insurgent, given enough time and enough donors, tends to discover that the establishment was never a place you could march out of. Assimilation far more likely than revolution.
Clacton Goes Bin
Nobody in Clacton seriously thought a Recyclon from Sigma IX was going to fix the NHS waiting list, solve unemployment or see this Essex constituencies schools rocket up the league tables. That was exactly the point. A vote for Binface was not a vote for a programme. It was a vote against every programme on offer, cast for the one candidate transparent enough to admit he was a joke, UK politics is impotent and unserious. When the choice is between an insider dressed as an outsider and someone who never pretended to be anything but a comedic candidate, over nine thousand people in one Essex town chose the intergalactic, voice modulated trash can. That is not apathy. That is quite a sharp piece of political theology, whether or not anyone in Clacton would put it that way. A protest vote highlighting ineptness and vacuousness.
The Old Old Story
Count Binface, who was formally Lord Buckethead until 2019 does not land on this planet from nowhere. A common mythic trope that resonates with humanity is of salvation from outside. Because here is the thing, the fantasy of rescue arriving from beyond the system is not new, and it was not conceived in Clacton. It is one of the oldest stories we tell. Superman is not from Earth, he is a refugee from a dying world, sent by his father to a planet that cannot save itself and needs strength it does not possess from within. Klaatu, in The Day the Earth Stood Still, arrives from the stars specifically because humanity’s own leaders cannot be trusted to stop it destroying itself. Doctor Who regenerates across centuries as the perpetual outsider who steps into human catastrophes that humans caused and cannot undo themselves. Even the Iron Giant, fallen from the sky into small-town America, ends up giving himself to save the very people who first came at him with guns. Different genres, different decades, same instinct, when a culture loses faith in its own resources, it reaches past the horizon for someone who owes the system nothing.
Even closer to home than intergalactic space travel that instinct is older than science fiction, and it is truer than science fiction. It sits behind every prophet Israel demanded, every emperor Rome deified, every revolution that promised to burn the old order down and start again with clean hands. And it fails for the same reason every time, the rescuer keeps turning out to be made of the same stuff as the people who need rescuing. Supermen from within our own system are, on inspection, just very well-funded men with less lycra but a similar sinful nature. Give any reformer long enough inside the house he was sent to clean, and he starts to sound like the previous owners, not because he is uniquely weak, but because the house was never the problem. We were. The pigs who bought down the farmer quickly come to resemble their human overlord.
The Saviour from Outside
This is where the joke stops being just a joke and becomes, without quite meaning to, an accurate diagnosis. Scripture has been saying for three thousand years that the straightening out of humanity cannot be an inside job. Not because politics does not matter (it matters enormously, even unnecessary by-elections in coastal Essex), but because sin is not a disclosure failure that better-audited donors could fix. It is a condition running through every human heart, insurgent and incumbent alike, and you cannot vote it out, regulate it away, or nationalise it into submission, however good a laugh manifesto pledge remains.
So when Christians say humanity needs a saviour from outside itself, they are not being quaint. They are describing the one rescue that is not another round of Nige-versus-Binny. Jesus is not from Basildon, and he is not from Sigma IX either. Jesus’s ‘outsideness’ is not costume. He is, in John’s blunt phrase, the Word who was with God and was God. Entering a world he owed nothing to and needed nothing from, and becoming flesh to dwell among us. He required no undeclared gift, because, as the psalmist puts it, the cattle on a thousand hills are already his. And where every human rescuer’s story runs to a sequel, because Superman is needed again next summer and Reform will need another manifesto in five years, Christ’s rescue was finished on a Friday afternoon outside Jerusalem. No relaunch pending. No rebrand needed. No investigation to resume. Just Jesus’ own last word from the cross, ‘it is finished.’
Mission accomplished.
Even better than Binface
Binface’s actual Clacton manifesto is, like all his manifestos, genuinely funny. Jon Harvey the alter-ego of Count Binface is a comic genius. But set beside the gospel, each pledge turns out to be a small, comic sketch of something Christ has already done immeasurably better.
“I promise to spend more time in Clacton-on-Sea than in Washington DC, and to champion the area.” Jesus did not schedule a visit and champion the place from a distance. He moved in. John says the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us. Not a campaign visit, but an incarnation.
“MPs who resign mid-parliament to be barred from the resulting by-election.” A sensible enough tweak to a flawed system, and democracy remains the least worst way of restraining sinners who govern other sinners. But it is still a patch on a fallen arrangement. In glory, Christ will not need re-electing, because he will reign absolutely, benevolently, and to universal applause, with no resignations and no by-elections ever again. A servant leader getting approval ratings exceeding even the most entrenched autocrat.
“I pledge to build at least one affordable house.” Jesus’s Father’s house has many rooms, and Jesus himself has gone ahead to prepare a place for each one of his people. Not a single affordable unit on a waiting list, but a ‘mansion’ reserved, already paid for, with names on the door.
“Arcade grabber games to be made fairer so players actually have a chance to win.” Jesus took the opposite route. Philippians says he did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself and became nothing. He gave up grabbing entirely, so that we, who never had a chance, could win everything.
“Regeneration of Walton Pier so it is just as great as Clacton Pier.” A worthy local ambition. Christ is not in the business of levelling up one pier to match its neighbour. Revelation promises a new heaven and a new earth, not a refurbishment down the coast with anti-seagull netting, but the remaking of everything.
“A windfall tax on cosy crime novels written, or ‘written’, by celebrities.” Isaiah says the coming King will divide the spoils with the strong. Rather than taxing what others have won, Jesus shares out the plunder of his own victory, freely, with people who contributed nothing to the winning of it.
“People who drive past Clacton station with annoyingly loud exhausts to lose their licence.” A reasonable enough irritation to legislate against. But the King foreshadowed in Isaiah is pictured as the anti-thesis of a boy racer with a chunky exhaust. He will not cry out or raise his voice in the street, and he will not break a bruised reed. Where Binface promises enforcement, Jesus promises gentleness towards the very people making all the noise.
“I will not accept £5 million gifts from crypto billionaires (on Earth).” A pointed line, and an easy promise to keep when nobody is offering. Jesus went further than merely declining gifts, he emptied himself of everything, had nowhere to lay his head, and at the end even his own clothes were taken from him as he died. The candidate who refuses gifts is admirable. The King who owns everything and yet arrived with nothing and left with less is something else entirely.
“A referendum on whether Pluto should regain its planet status.” No referendum required. Colossians says all things, presumably including Pluto, were made by him, through him, and for him. His verdict on Pluto’s status was settled before Pluto was ever flung into orbit.
“The hand-dryer in the gents’ toilet at the Great Himalayas restaurant, Southport, to be moved to a more sensible position.” Wonderfully specific, and wonderfully minor. Hebrews promises a cleansing offered once for all, never to be repeated. Every human system of washing, whether ritual or literal, convenient or boxed in next to a urinal keeps needing to be run again. Christ’s does not. Spiritually speaking, the hand-dryer and its position becomes obsolete.
Finally for the Bin
None of this is to mock Binface, who is, by every account, in on the joke more knowingly than most of the people he is standing against. It is to notice what the joke reveals. Farage held Clacton. But over nine thousand people, 26.2 % of voters, said they would rather vote for a costume than trust their politics to anyone still standing inside the room, still working the same donor networks, still filling in the same registers of interest late or not at all. They are closer to a very old truth than they realise.
Only one rescuer in history has ever actually come from outside, uncorrupted by the system he entered, ‘unbought’ by anybody’s crypto wallet, and unlike every name on that Clacton ballot, he is not up for re-election. He already reigns, and he is not wearing a bin on his head. Though, he was once made to wear a different kind of headgear made of something excruciatingly sharper.
This reminds me of Alice Roberts’ claim on RHLSTP that “We will save us from ourselves.”
A very engaging, thought-provoking and well-written read. Thank you, Jon.