for the non-british, i gotta tell you about this because it's a beautiful reality
nigel farage is, if you're blissfully unfamiliar, a pissbaby who wants to ride on the trump playbook into power. his party, filling the power vacuum of the dying conservative party, has gained a worrying degree of popularity in a very short time, despite spending most of his time getting 'milkshaked'.
it'd be funny if it wasn't scary. the conservative party, which has been the shitty right-wing party of the uk since the beginnings of its weird as shit democracy, is on the precipice of collapse, and into that gap has come farage with the 'reform' party. it's far-right and it's currently very popular and it's very very fragile. nigel farage is its sole face. it requires him to function and without him the movement has no establishment figurehead.
so. farage is a member of parliament (you basically need to be one to be a prime minister) who's eyeing the PM job in a couple years. he's got a non-zero chance of making that happen. but his party has to survive to the finish line, and he needs to be an MP to make it happen.
this situation became tenuous for him when it turned out he'd been taking millions of pounds of mysterious backhanders juuust before he was elected from, primarily, a crypto billionaire and a man named 'posh george'. all in all he pocketed £5 million for fully unclear purposes. you're supposed to declare anything above £300 received in the last 12 months when you get elected to parliament. you see the issue.
so there's a parliamentary investigation going on, and how is farage to stop such a thing? well...
at a time where his position is tenuous, he can stop the clock, make every news cycle about him, and reinvigorate his base and mandate by resigning, triggering a local election, and then standing in that election. in his area no party stands a chance of being the One True Opposition against him; they'd just split all the votes amongst each other and farage comes out on top having tamped down the whole 'millions of dollars of ??? money' thing. genius, thinks farage.
seeing that it's a fool's errand, though, no party has taken the bait. everyone has allowed him to run unopposed.
this is count binface. his entire career is being The Guy Who Stands In Elections. if the prime minister's local election is getting contested, he's there.
nigel farage is in a one-on-one battle for his political future, and the future of his party, against someone he never thought he'd be directly pitted against, and who now, if he remains the sole other candidate, controls the narrative for the next few weeks of his life. it's Farage v Binface.
what does binface stand for, though? is he just a guy with a bin on his head? well, he's got strong opinions on stuff. here's his manifesto from when he ran for mayor of london:
the only thing that really remains consistent between his manifestos is the hand dryer thing. it's fair enough.
all this to say. it's a non-zero chance that, with a single unity candidate against farage, people just say 'fuck it' and tick count binface on the ballot.
and now nigel farage and his team have to stay up at night sweating about it.
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