The votes were being counted and the media had gathered for the moment that Andy Burnham, his sights on Downing Street, would be elected as the MP for Makerfield in greater Manchester. But Nick the Flying Brick, a candidate on numerous occasions for the Monster Raving Loony party, could not help but be distracted. How could it be that the candidate across the Edge Conference Centre with a silver bin on his head had managed to secure the 10 local nominations necessary to stand?
The Flying Brick, real name Nick Delves, 60, who is also treasurer for the Loony party, had knocked doors-a-plenty to get the nominations for his veteran candidate, Howling Laud Hope. Yet, the Flying Brick hadn’t seen any chaps on the streets with bins on their heads. Certainly not in recent days. Not a single one.
What was the story? Along with his fellow Loony party activist, the Ravin Rodent (a care worker by day), the Flying Brick approached the mysterious silvery figure by the trestle tables.
“He is very much a one-man band and he goes a bit funny if you use his real name,” said the Flying Brick of Count Binface. “He told me he found someone in Makerfield to sort it. We spoke for about 10 minutes. No one has ever seen him without the bin on his head and the conference centre’s air con was broken so he must have been so hot. Then I asked if I could take a photo with him.”
What happened next perturbed the Flying Brick. “He asked what we were going to do with it,” he recalled. “We said we would probably put it on our website, and he said: ‘No no.’ He said he would sue if we took a picture.
“I think he was maybe half joking? He was half in, half out of character. He was looking at the cameras, so we took a picture anyway – it wasn’t great, to be honest. But he runs a very tight operation. We have to take our hats off: he is totally out-shadowing us.”
Many may have concluded some time ago that British politics could not get any sillier, but this week Nigel Farage resigned as the MP in Clacton in order to stand for … the seat of Clacton. His reasoning was that it was not for the parliamentary commissioner for standards but the constituency to decide whether he had done anything wrong in deciding not to declare a £5m gift from the cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne and funds from the convicted fraudster George Cottrell for his staffing, security and housing.
“This will be a people versus the establishment byelection,” the Reform UK leader said, before a further unexpected twist. After the other main parties said they would not stand in a “stunt” election, Count Binface issued a statement: “I will be a unity candidate and pledge to build at least one affordable house. Nigel Farage says he wants ‘the people versus the establishment’. So be it. Leave him to me.”
Is Binface the new Martin Bell – the man in the white suit who stood in 1997 for all-things sane and good in the constituency of Tatton against the sleaze-engulfed Tory MP Neil Hamilton? Is the man in the mask the hero the country needs, if not deserves?
Probably not. Binface did not want to talk to the Guardian unless it was in character. The Monster Raving Loony party are among those who intend to stand an array of oddly named candidates as well. “Because we can,” said their leader, Howling Laud Hope.
But Binface, real name, Jon Harvey, has certainly become a media favourite since Tuesday, enjoying a moment in the limelight to talk of his policies of nationalising the singer Adele and capping the price of croissants at £1.
It is Harvey’s stated aim to have policies that get a giggle but maybe make the voter think. Even the Daily Mail, sympathetic to Farage’s anti-immigration party, could not avoid poking a little fun. “Farage: Binface byelection is deadly serious,” was its splash headline on Thursday. An inside comment piece carried the headline: “Farage is learning that when voters are shouting at you, it’s bad. When they’re laughing at you, it’s over.”
There is international interest too. In France, he has been styled Comte Tête-de-poubelle, while in Spain he is El Conde Cubo de Basura.
It was most probably not how Farage expected it to pan out. Raheem Kassam, a former adviser to Farage, who describes himself as a journalist, turned detective on the novelty candidate.
“All this Count Binface talk got me looking into who this guy really is,” he wrote in a tantalising tee-up of his big reveal. “Jonathan David Harvey – who earns his living making comedy shows for the BBC – is an Oxbridge liberal elitist who has screeds of anti-Brexit, anti-Trump and anti-British rants on his Twitter going back over a decade.”
Not that Kassam doesn’t enjoy a laugh as much as the next man. “Don’t get me wrong, I think Binface is a hilarious character, and Harvey is clearly a talented satirist,” he went on. “But pretending he’s just some random bloke in a suit having a laugh is nonsense.”
The tradition of novelty candidates in Britain arguably began with Lieutenant Commander Bill Boaks, a heavily decorated war hero, who from the 1951 election onwards stood in 28 votes on the single issue of road safety while riding around on a heavily modified bicycle plastered with large slogans.
It was, though, David Sutch, better known as Screaming Lord Sutch, who made the role his own. He first stood in the 1960s in a byelection forced by the resignation of John Profumo after the famous sex and spies scandal. He then formed the Monster Raving Loony party in the early 1980s, satirising the political class while floating bizarre and yet strangely attractive policies.
According to one friend, Harvey, whose father performed as a drummer in the same band as Sutch, believes he is the natural heir. There are parallels to be found. Sutch, who took his own life in 1999, did not read classics like Harvey at the University of Oxford, and he was a showman, not a comic. But there was tragedy in his past, as with Harvey.
Sutch was just 10 months old when his father, a war reserve police officer, was killed in an accident. Harvey, 46, from Croydon, has spoken of living in 11 houses in the first 11 years of his life amid the chaos that came with his dad’s alcoholism. He has described his father, an estate agent who died in 2005 at the age of 57, as “Jekyll and Hyde sponsored by Strongbow”.
In 2015, Harvey found the body of his older brother, Dan, 43, in his London flat. Obese and an undiagnosed diabetic, he had fallen into a hypoglycaemic coma. Harvey wrote a book about coping with his grief through sport – a passion he shared with his brother whose ashes are scattered outside the London Stadium at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
It was a couple of years later that Harvey, who is married to the comedic actor, Sarah Daykin, began his political career, not as Binface but perhaps the more storied character of Lord Buckethead.
It all began with Harvey watching a VHS with a friend at Oxford of a film called Gremloids which included a Darth Vader-inspired figure. They subsequently learned that a businessman called Mike Lee, who had bought the video rights to the movie, had stood in 1987 dressed as this Lord Buckethead against Margaret Thatcher in her Finchley constituency. Lee hoped to flog some videos.
Two decades later, as Theresa May triggered a general election in order to push her Brexit deal through, the farcical nature of British politics in 2017 reminded Harvey of Buckethead. He decided it would be amusing to bring him back and an opportunity to develop his standup.
“The election happened and it went viral around the world,” he recalled in a podcast three years ago. “So much so that, Thursday night, I was in a sports hall in Maidenhead, standing next to Theresa May as she self-detonated her majority and three days later, I was being flown first class to New York by John Oliver to be on his HBO show as the sort of star surprise guest.”
But with a media profile came problems. There was a copyright dispute with the licence owners of Gremloids. Harvey, who has since gone on to be a writer for shows such as The Thick of It and Have I Got News for You, dropped the character and took up the guise of Count Binface for the 2019 general election.
But the Hollywood director of Gremloids, Todd Durham, made contact with David Hughes, a former press officer to the original 1987 Buckethead. Durham persuaded Hughes to stand as Buckethead in Boris Johnson’s Uxbridge constituency.
The stage was set for an unseemly clash at the count. Binface drowned out Buckethead’s interviews by singing The Star-Spangled Banner, and Buckethead flipped the finger at Binface as the results were announced.
“I think I did get more votes than him,” said Hughes. “But we went for drinks and I thought, actually he’s cool. So then Buckethead posted on Twitter – I had control of the Twitter in those days – saying: ‘I’m an impostor. The true heir to the Buckethead throne is Count Binface, and I hereby endorse him.’”
How does Hughes feel now? “I’ve got lots of people who’ve been getting in touch with me the last couple of days, saying, ‘why don’t you run against Binface’ and ‘it will be the battle of the receptacles’. But no, I’ve done that now.”
Hughes admitted to finding the Binface routine a little tired and in need of some fresh material. Harvey has spoken disparagingly of GB News in the past and suggested that nothing has got better since 2010 – coincidentally when Labour last lost power.
What is Harvey’s motivation? “I do genuinely think that, more than the clicks and shits and giggles, he does actually genuinely believe that the absurdist element of British elections is kind of a cool one,” said Hughes.
“And there is that endless joke: there is one absurd, parody, completely inappropriate candidate – and he is standing against Count Binface. That one is kind of funny.”