BS Summary: This article contains 34 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, False Dilemma, and Biased Writer Voice, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 30.5% saturation with 300 hits. Analysis detected 1,970 faulty-reasoning hits from 984 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 59.8% and a BS Rank of 66% (7,540 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 65.60% of the article peer group.
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As the next by-election to disfigure Britain’s recent political history gears up in Clacton, it looks likely to be contested between a man whom some still regard as the Rebel Alliance and others as the Empire in business dress, and another who actively promotes the idea that he is from outer space.
There really is a neck-and-neck race in prospect – but it isn’t the one in Clacton, triggered by the recent resignation of Nigel Farage, where, thanks to the refusal of the other parties to stand, the ‘satirical’ candidate Count Binface will be his only major opponent.
I refer, instead, to the race between the overall collapse of the country – perhaps via a fiscal emergency, a sovereign debt crisis, power outages or civil war – and the collapse of the legitimacy of any political process.
A race during which we might find someone equal to the task of steering us away from these rocks.
All of which is only part of the reason why Count Binface is not funny.
I am not against politics being ridiculed, of course, by any means possible.
If the Count were, as the New Statesman claims, in ‘ a proud British tradition’ of mocking power and all its pretensions, and especially the illusion of meaningful choice at the ballot box, then fine.
If voting for him was just an opportunity to cock an active snook at the whole shooting match, a snook that simply refusing to attend the polling station would fail to register, I would applaud him or at least endure him in grim, mute acquiescence.
But Count Binface clearly isn’t mocking power and all its pretensions.
I know, because I remember the beginnings of the Official Monster Raving Looney Party, which did.
The OMRLP was inaugurated by ‘Screaming’ Lord Sutch way back in 1982, when dull men in grey suits really did dominate both sides of the chamber (despite the prime minister being ostensibly a woman).
The party was named in an attempt to go beyond the merely ‘Silly’ party that featured in Monty Python’s immortal Election Special , in 1970, which also cocked snooks at a rate of about three per minute.
As with Python, Sutch’s intent was to satirise the boring conformity of the main parties.
To ridicule the stale, sweat-infused atmosphere of Westminster and the whole drab, dismal Larkinesque air of inevitable failure that surrounded the rituals.
As it happens, Sutch also introduced manifesto pledges that did in due course enter statute, such as lowering the voting age from 21 to 18.
But this was by the bye.
And even if the joke, like all jokes, wore thin over ensuing years, Sutch remained a fondly regarded part of Britain’s slightly shabby electoral machinery brought out every cycle – machinery that always looked as if it had been kept in a not quite weatherproof shed since the last democratic pantomime.
The subtext to Count Binface on the other hand – and whether the honorific is a pun on the electoral process or just an attempt to lure me into making the single most obvious typographical joke in the lexicon, I don’t know – is quite different.
It seems to be not to mock the charade, the traditional legacy parties, the uniparty fiasco, the political elite that has relentlessly ignored the most clearly articulated wishes of the electorate since at least 1997 and brought us to this sorry pass.
Rather, Count Binface is designed to mock those who presume to do something about that.
To mock, not the weak, but rather those who are just beginning to sense their own strength.
To speak, as the estimable @bovrilG on X put it, Power to Truth.
This is far from new, of course.
The breed has even been given an epithet – ‘regime humour’.
I have to work with these people – or at least quaff apéritifs at swanky receptions with them – so would prefer not to name too many names.
But my attack on Ian Hislop and Have I Got News for You in these digital pages a few weeks ago identifies the tendency.
Hislop’s infamous ribbing of Rupert Lowe, for instance, for haplessly mistaking a British rowing crew for a boatful of illegal, undocumented migrants, is a classic of the genre.
A joke which purported to undermine the entire proposition that such boats exist and are a concern.
Silly old bear!
By dressing up as both a bin and an intergalactic traveller in time and space, Binface might seem to outflank Farage as an ‘outsider’ – I mean, what could be more ‘outside’ than a dustbin.
But his actual policy proposals, far from being the ‘centrist dada-ism’ that one amusing X user thought he’d seen, are distinguishable from those of Starmer’s front bench only by the slightly muffled delivery occasioned by his stupid prosthetic head.
Don’t get me wrong.
I too wish that Britain’s best hope for real change wasn’t led by a man who surrounded himself with billionaires and dodgy aristocrats .
But Reform UK is what we’ve currently got.
Don’t be fooled by the Rag Week get-up.
The establishment candidate in Clacton is Binface.
Oh yes.
And he’s also a cunt.
Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian.
Tickets for his tour, Staring at the Sun , are on sale here .
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1speaker1.3%attributed speech971writer words
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100%flagged-word coverage@bovrilG
13 attributed words100% of attributed speech92% writer coverage
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