Is Count Binface 'England's Dreaming'?

Facing a bleak reality, the British establishment retreats into nostalgic fantasy

‘God save the Queen

She ain’t no human being

There is no future

in England’s dreaming’

Johnny Rotten sang these lyrics in the Sex Pistols’ 1977 single ‘God Save the Queen’. Released, in a gesture of extreme provocation, on 27th May, in anticipation of the celebrations for Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee — the song was banned from the BBC and independent radio stations, despite reaching number two on the official UK Singles Chart.

Today, of course, it is a thoroughly assimilated part of British cultural history, its excoriation of British patriotic complacency explicated in a hundred different books on the history of British music, punk rock, and so on, to the point it scarcely needs explaining. Indeed, its anti-establishment sensibilities have been so thoroughly integrated that its lyrics seem quaint. But there’s a line in the song that retains a certain potency, albeit in an entirely different, though still ‘British’ context (at least in aspiration). It’s that last line: ‘There is no future in England’s dreaming.’

I raise that line in the context of this essay on the pseudo-political entity known as Count Binface because it strikes me as highly relevant to the impulse of those still impressed by him. In ‘God Save the Queen’, ‘England’s dreaming’ was of an imaginary Britain, a nostalgic imperial fantasy that was, so the Sex Pistols felt at least, imposed upon a nation in a condition of severe decline by an establishment who were themselves largely insulated from its consequences in a futile effort to stave off the realisation of reality. Today, England’s dreaming can refer to Binface for much of the same reason, although the specific character of the nostalgia and the fantasy is very different.

I write this less than a full month since the shocking murder of ex-Tory MP and Reform immigration spokesperson Ann Widdecombe. It’s been two months since the release of the police bodycam footage showing Henry Nowak being bound in handcuffs by British police whilst vainly trying to alert them to the fact that he’d been stabbed and was actually in the process of dying. He was being cuffed because the police were arresting him for an imaginary incident of racist abuse, an accusation made by his murderer Vickram Singh Digwa. Nowak told the police ‘I’ve been stabbed’, and the police responded, ‘I don’t think you have, mate.’ Then he died. Meanwhile, the country is still in denial about the scale and the extent of the grooming gangs, a phenomenon which exists within the national consciousness in a curious sort of half-digested condition, as something ‘officially’ but not acceptably acknowledged. It is in this rot that ‘England dreams’ today, watching voters in Clacton who have a choice between Nigel Farage and ‘Count Binface’, a ‘joke’ candidate who wears a cape and a bin-shaped helmet.

The Binface character exists in an older British tradition of running joke candidates in important seats during general and by-elections. Its current form dates back over 40 years, with the Monster Raving Loony Party first officially standing against Peter Tatchell in what became his infamous loss of the 1983 Bermondsey by-election. Binface himself is the leader of the imaginatively titled ‘Count Binface Party’. His manifesto pledges include ‘nationalising Adele’ and ‘making 99 flakes cost 99p’. Previous policies include ‘rename London Bridge “Phoebe-Waller Bridge”’ and ‘banish Katie Hopkins to the Phantom Zone’. He is often photographed, in his bin, with his arms raised in the air like a sci-fi fantasy villain. His mission, as he somewhat awkwardly puts it, is to ‘demonstrate that British democracy is wonderful and unique in the entire cosmos.’

After Nigel Farage resigned as MP for Clacton, triggering a by-election, and Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and Restore all refused to contest, Binface emerged as Farage’s most notable opposition. Everyone in Britain is absolutely thrilled by this. New Prime Minister Andy Burnham was photographed shaking hands with Binface two weeks before his coronation. Old Prime Minister Keir Starmer suggested that voters ‘put their vote in the Bin.’

The presenter and commentator (and all-around establishment lackey) Matthew Stadlen tweeted on July 9th: ‘The attempt to portray a man with a bin on his head as the establishment is almost as hilarious as the claim that Nigel Farage is not the establishment.’ Alastair Campbell echoed this when introducing Binface in his recent appearance on The Rest is Politics: ‘When Nigel Farage resigned as member of parliament for Clacton, he grandly announced: “It would be a battle between me and the establishment.” Instead, it’s become him against a bin.’

Campbell and Stewart proceed to ask Binface if he’s seen Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, giving him the opportunity to demonstrate that ‘inside that bin’ is a smart guy (as they will later observe post-interview) with an impromptu recitation of Homeric Greek. They then subject him to a winking, faux-serious “critique” of his joke policies, as if they’re playing themselves on a parody TV show. And they take care, via the staging of a ‘serious interview’, to spell out the implicit joke, which is that just as Binface is ‘playing a character’, so is Nigel Farage, because Nigel Farage likes to drink beer, or appears to. In other words, whilst Farage may present himself as a populist candidate, Binface is the ‘real’ populist candidate, because he is ‘honestly’ playing a character.

Thus, we have two competing visions of populism, battling for supremacy over the cosmos, or at least Clacton. For the supporters of Binface, Farage represents ‘the establishment’ in an intuitive sense: he’s wealthy, privately educated, worked in the City, is a politician, all of which combine into a sort of vague archetype of someone that ordinary people ‘ought to be against’ for reasons that are social, aesthetic and moral more than political. They believe he is a bad person. Farage’s supporters, on the other hand, believe that he represents their political interests and don’t particularly care about his wealth or background or the supposed irony that he ‘is a politician’, which is clearly not an irony at all. Whether or not he is a bad person is irrelevant.

The type of populism represented by Binface was laid out in manifesto-like form by Sofie Jenkinson in an essay published in Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy in October of last year, titled ‘Mr. Blobby Patriotism’. In it, she attempts to describe a vision of British culture that will unify us in our times of trouble, alternately referred to by the title of the piece and by the term ‘Silly Sausage Britain.’

Pitched in opposition to various troubling signs and portents, riots outside asylum hotels, the Tommy Robinson march, a ‘rising political temperature’ and ‘then last week the awful attack on a synagogue in Manchester’ (this latter event now universally forgotten by everyone), that have simply appeared out of nowhere for reasons no reasonable person could understand, Jenkinson sits down to write a list of all the things she ‘loves’ about Britain.

What she loves about Britain, it turns out, is not anything substantive, like a tradition of liberal democracy or a functioning police force that protects children and doesn’t arrest murder victims. What she loves is an interminable list of crass psychic totems that, for her, conduct and transmit a non-threatening vision of British culture:

’Yorkshire Tea adverts with Sarah Lancashire and Sean Bean, Greggs, Pete Postlethwaite’s speech in Brassed Off, 2p machines, hun culture, the relentless sarcasm, Sam Fender hungover on breakfast TV, Big John, Bob Mortimer… Supermarket Sweep, Monster Munch… Irn Bru adverts, Tango adverts (apple and orange), Mr Bean, really bad service stations, Chicken Shop Date… the Lionesses going into the final, taking the piss out of our mates, meal deals…’

‘These fragments have I shored against my ruins.’ What any one of these objects, adverts, public figures, television programs, events, and beverages is exactly supposed to do, aside from being invoked and chanted for the simple, reassuring sensory pleasure and familiarity of the names and words and mouth-sounds, is unclear. Monster Munch is not going to explain an attack on a synagogue. Mr Bean doesn’t speak to the country’s frustrations over immigration that have persisted over twenty years through various successive governments’ attempts to ignore them.

In a nation that now forgoes politics itself as, on the one hand, a great big joke that right-thinking people have learned not to take seriously, and on the other, whenever it erupts in the wake of a national scandal like Henry Nowak, a frightening, incomprehensible intrusion that has to be immediately stamped down, this metaphorical trash-heap of images and moments is all anyone is permitted. Everyone watches TV. Everyone drinks Yorkshire Tea. Everyone has ‘mates’ and loves to ‘take the piss’ out of them. ‘In our friendship group we have someone called Cheese.’ Build your national identity, your patriotic pride, around ‘nicknames for your mates’.

The thinking goes like this: in a country as ravaged by those twin dragons of Hate and Division as ours, it behooves us to join together around the things we can all agree on and find some common ground. The things that we all agree on and find common ground over can’t actually have any weight or identity because that’s how disagreements arise, which leads us back to Hate and Division. Ideally, we will look for something that opposes itself to even the possibility of weight, the possibility of identity, but that nevertheless retains some vestigial yet highly recognisable flavour of Britishness.

Jenkinson ponders: ‘Is not taking yourself too seriously a grounding and common force? Perhaps. What I do know is that even in London if something weird happens on a tube, the eye contact and tiny smirks between Londoners is off the charts.’

It is hard to think of a better example of what Jenkinson takes to be an image of common ground: furtive eye contact, ‘tiny smirks’, withheld comments, and of course, the inciting event around which all these smug, imperceptible little social gestures are directed: something weird happening on the tube, which is most likely a person making an obnoxious nuisance of themselves.

Count Binface stands for this supposed virtue of ‘not taking oneself seriously’, and he also stands for the loathsome, proud timidity of furtive ‘eye contact and tiny smirks’. In a later dispatch, Jenkinson confirms that Binface ‘represents the Silly Sausage Britain I know and love’.

There’s a certain quality of frantic relief here. It’s the relief of old, reassuring dramas being ritualistically re-enacted to soothe a troubled nation. The drama and pageantry of the Silver Jubilee, which the Sex Pistols travestied, was an attempt at restoring a sense of patriotic continuity. An echo of that moment (both the dream and the travesty) can be found in Episode 3 of the early 90s satirical British news parody The Day Today, in which it is reported that John Major has gotten into a fistfight with the Queen. This leads to an emergency broadcast in which a montage mixing absurd royalist and 90s Britpop imagery (dancing policemen smoking joints) is set to Holst’s Jupiter while an authoritative British voice intones ‘This is Britain. And everything’s alright. Everything’s alright. It’s ok. It’s fine.’

The Day Today was created by Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci. Iannucci, of course, went on to make the British political satire series The Thick Of It, and the year after that, a spiritual successor to The Day Today (and Chris Morris’ Brass Eye), Time Trumpet, which was considerably less funny. Iannucci was part of a generation of British comic writers who, through their comedic talent and intuitive grasp of the British media ecology of their time, gained a reputation for incisive, intelligent satire, and, from this, an astonishing degree of influence in determining the canons of ‘sensible’ British opinion.

Jonathan David Harvey, the actual identity of Binface, a comedian, worked on both The Thick of It and Time Trumpet. I apologise for dragging in so many of these ancillary reference points, but they are necessary to sketch out the specific sense of British cultural continuity that Binface has come to represent. Because the continuity he represents, the identity he affirms, is that of the ‘sensible comedian’ (you could just as well say the ‘comedian sensible’). This was a British comic sensibility that addressed itself to an audience who were wise (or thought themselves so) to the manipulations and hysterias of television news, tabloid headlines, lowbrow entertainment, sensationalism. Binface addresses himself to this same audience, now older, rocked by the triple trauma of Brexit, Trump and Lockdown, confronted with new, bewildering social issues to do with race and gender, still clinging to a belief in their essential ‘reasonableness’ as if to a life-raft on stormy seas.

What was once a self-assured confidence has now curdled into a sort of mania, but it is a mania that speaks in a self-consciously wry, funny voice, when it doesn’t break down into the shrill, wounded tone in which Iannucci defended Britain’s shameful record on the grooming gangs to Elon Musk: ‘We’re more than capable of dealing with our difficulties ourselves.’ Binface, of course, is saved from this kind of embarrassment, because as a funny joke character, he is not expected by anyone to offer comments on the grooming gangs, or on Henry Nowak, or the murder of Ann Widdicombe, on any of these disturbing realities which suggest that Britain is not a reasonable place at all, hasn’t been for some time, and maybe never will be again.

This is his fundamental appeal. He does not exist in the same world as these things. As long as he is in the news, ‘standing up’ to Farage, those things do not exist. He is not capable of addressing them because, obviously, he is not actually a politician and not expected by anybody to take politics seriously. Ironically, this makes him, for his audience, into a strange messianic figure, and also a figure of paradoxical political legitimacy, a saviour come to restore a fundamentally apolitical faith in the power of a ‘reasonableness’ that is not quite the same thing as rationality, and make it, once again, the guiding principle of the country.

The Starmer Government attempted to contain the numerous tensions erupting across British society through an ineptly and inconsistently applied paternalism, in which political recognition was withdrawn from British citizens at precisely the worst moment possible to inflame those tensions further. The scandal of the Nowak case was not just that his murderer, a Sikh, could exploit his minority status in his favour to essentially temporarily recruit the police as his own hired thugs. It wasn’t just the fundamental obscenity of the crime. The scandal was also the ensuing depoliticisation of the incident, and the immediate canonising of this, within the British media, as a compulsory tenet of good manners. Nowak was murdered and then posthumously annihilated as a citizen through the transformation of his killing into a ‘random unfortunate event’, in the same way that thousands of British schoolgirls, despite being very much alive, were annihilated as citizens when every British institution, almost in concert, failed to ensure their safety from predatory Pakistani gangs.

When even the police assist your murderer in your own murder, when they assist your rapists, you are no longer a political subject. Time and time again, Labour under Starmer hammered the message of The Day Today emergency broadcast, but they spoke in a different language (and I imagine they will continue under Burnham): they didn’t say ‘everything’s ok’ or ‘it’s fine’, but they suggested that ‘everything’ would be these things, if the British public stopped allowing various inconvenient and unfortunate, but nevertheless apparently ‘random’ tragedies, to cause ‘Division’. More pertinently, the British public ought to stop allowing various semi-mythical entities or shadowy forces (Russian bots, trolls, ‘Musk’s algorithms’) from exploiting these tragedies to ‘sow Division’ and ‘stir up hate’.

The joke of Binface is that he is not a joke at all. Not a joke because for his audience, he is the last bastion of what for them counts as political seriousness. What counts for them as political seriousness is something that has been whittled down over the years and across various crises into a numb, feeble intuition that a certain British decency and good humour will carry us through despite all evidence to the contrary, and despite the severely compromised, limping condition of these national virtues. That Binface is not a joke is not forgotten by the ordinary voters in Clacton either; friends who have campaigned in the constituency inform me that if it were The Bin turning up on the doorstep, he could well be subject to physical assault.

Nevertheless, there he is on various morning shows, reassuring them that he is as committed as ever to ‘nationalising Adele’, the joke being, for everyone who is in on it, that ‘ironically’ this is actually ‘quite a good idea’. It’s a good idea because, like 99 flakes that cost 99p, like banishing Katie Hopkins to the Negative Zone, it’s something that everyone can agree on. And if everyone agrees on it, then Britain can be said, in some sense, to be in good health. Binface is a candidate of ‘unity’.

Part of the unity, too, is his affirmation of a generalised and, obviously, highly ‘sensible’ political cynicism that expresses itself in dismissive chatter about ‘politicians’, ‘politicians’ as figures of non-specific and self-congratulatory contempt. This was also the sensibility, buried under a few layers of superficial harshness, of The Thick of It, in its presentation of politics as a basically non-ideological arena of spin, cut-throat but also characterised by bumbling incompetent ministers who just want a decent night’s sleep. The characters in The Thick of It were slimy, scheming, pathetic, unlikeable… but they were predictable.

The murder of Ann Widdecombe was predicted by nobody because the idea of a leftist creep murdering an elderly lady does not have a home in British consciousness. So, the whole concept of Binface, as a heavily degraded (in the sense that, unlike The Thick of It, he’s not actually funny), vehicle of the same cynicism, is that he is a guarantee, a re-invoking of that same comforting, familiar landscape, in which politicians are non-ideological incompetent losers, but where those same politicians aren’t bludgeoned to death with a hammer by a malevolent actor whom nobody wants to acknowledge.

Looking out over that landscape, you might plausibly say ‘fuck it’ and turn to a man with a bin on his head who really does say the things that ‘everyone is thinking’ as long as those things really were as anodyne as ‘99 flakes should be 99p’, which is the wish that people are expressing through their support for him. That is what Binface invokes. It’s not the imperial nostalgia of the Silver Jubilee or what Sofie Jenkinson describes with characteristic clunkiness as ‘Reform’s top-down Rule, Britannia! patriotism’, but a nostalgia for a time and place in which the satirical function of a character like Binface would be effective, where he wouldn’t be a figure of denial.

The curious, redundant way in which Stadlen and Campbell ‘tell the story’ of Binface, as if to remind themselves of why it’s funny or convince you that it is, the way they insist on his irreverence, speaks both to an uncertainty that they must feel, and to a faith that this can be overcome if the story can play itself out. It’s a faith in ‘the inherent absurdity of the situation’, the faith that its absurdity will rescue us from it. The death of Henry Nowak was absurd, but this didn’t rescue him from it. The state of Britain is absurd, and this will not rescue us from it.

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This article was written by Yeerk, a cultural critic and host of the Bistro Californium podcast. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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