Monday, July 13, 2026
Binface: the back story
The paper says that the likelihood is that when the residents of Clacton come to cast their votes in the newly announced by-election later this summer, they will have a choice between two main candidates: a man with a habit of spouting (what is, to some) total rubbish and… a sentient bin.
This is because, in a rare show of unity, the major parties have refused to put forward candidates to fight in Clacton. Labour and the Tories alike have disdained Farage’s decision, with Kemi Badenoch describing the by-election as “fake” and Keir Starmer calling it “a desperate political stunt”.
This means that Farage’s only challenger appears to be Count Binface, the intergalactic rubbish basket-wearing alter ego of comedian Jon Harvey, who, over the course of the past decade, has become a strange fixture of British politics, sneaking into the frame of almost every big election. But who is this enigmatic alien?
The paper says that Harvey studied Classics at Oxford before embarking on a writing career, which has seen him work on TV shows such as Have I Got News for You, The Revolution Will Be Televised and Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It, which surely allowed him to hone his appreciation for the topsy-turvy weirdness of Westminster:
His interest in comedy and politics, he has previously revealed, was fostered by his older brother Dan during a childhood that was often turbulent, Harvey explained in a powerful piece for The Times in 2024. Their dad was an alcoholic, and he wrote, “we suffered it as a secret shame and it burnt us”; the brothers got through it by “wrap[ping] ourselves in a comfort blanket of shared passions”, laughing at old episodes of Blackadder.
In 2015, Dan died unexpectedly at the age of 43 and was posthumously diagnosed with diabetes. Since then, Harvey has admitted, he has struggled with the sense of guilt that so often plagues the suddenly bereaved. “In low moments, my heart thumps with failure. The thought that I could have done something else,” he told The Times. “That I should have tried harder.”
His strange side hustle as a joke candidate, he reckons, emerged as an “admittedly eccentric” means to keep Dan’s spirit alive and “to help his joy continue to radiate”. His first foray into politics was under the guise of Lord Buckethead, a creation inspired by a character from the sci-fi parody Gremloids, a 1984 movie that aimed to spoof Star Wars; Buckethead was their low-budget version of Darth Vader.
Donning a tall black bucket on, erm, his head, Harvey contested the 2017 general election against then-PM Theresa May in her Maidenhead constituency; he earned 249 votes by promising “strong, not entirely stable leadership”.
When Buckethead’s political travails were covered in the media, however, Harvey became embroiled in a copyright row with the writer of Gremloids, and so decided to take on a new cosmic persona, giving himself a slight title bump-up in the process. Count Binface was born.
He went on to stand against Johnson (in 2019) and Sunak (in 2024), as well as taking part in the London mayoral elections twice, with his biggest success coming in 2021, when he earned more votes than far-right group Britain First’s candidate Nick Scanlon. His campaigns tend to be crowdfunded online, with any surplus going to the homelessness charity Shelter.
When he’s not dressing up as a trash can, Harvey lives in Sussex with his wife Sarah, an actor and voice artist, and their two children; in a recent feature for The Times, he revealed how he has been camping out in the living room since their youngest was born, to allow Sarah to peacefully co-sleep with the baby.
And even space aristocracy, it seems, are feeling the pinch of the cost of living crisis. “My wife and I are both freelancers, so our incomes can vary wildly and I’m the primary breadwinner, which brings pressures of its own, especially now I’m a father of two,” he wrote in the same paper earlier this week.
After Farage has spent so long attempting to turn political discourse into theatre, there’s a certain logic to the fact that he now seems about to be joined on that stage by a jester – especially one who might appeal to those who think that politics is, well, rubbish.
It's going to difficult for Farage to argue he is being victimised by the establishment when his chief opponent is an alien with a bin on his head.
