Count Binface challenges U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak for Parliament seat

Count Binface, a recurring satirical character in British elections, is challenging the prime minister for the Parliament seat representing Richmond and Northallerton.

Most polls suggest that Sunak will retain his seat, as every prime minister has before him. But his national approval rating is so low that an Ipsos survey released Saturday found that Sunak was only four percentage points ahead of Binface on favorability. Binface, in turn, was viewed more favorably than former prime minister Liz Truss.

This is a candidate whose big policy ideas include banning loud snacks in theaters, building “at least one affordable house” and, in a kind of reverse Brexit, inviting other European nations to join the United Kingdom. He also wants to represent the U.K. at Eurovision.

The main party leaders in British elections, unsurprisingly, focus on the British press; getting one-on-one interviews with the leaders is a challenge for foreign correspondents. But Count Binface — played by 44-year-old comedian Jon Harvey — responded quickly to our interview request. And he had much to say about “Bindependence Day,” which is what he is calling the July 4 snap elections.

When pressed on his loud-snacks policy, Binface said, “What’s the point of going out and spending half your mortgage and you can’t hear anything because of the noisy snack brigade? It’s madness.”

Harvey’s first outing as a satirical candidate in a British election was in 2017. Candidates who meet age and citizenship requirements have to pay 500 pounds ($634) and submit 10 signatures from voters in the constituency they plan to contest. So Harvey declared himself a challenger to Prime Minister Theresa May, and he assumed the role of Lord Buckethead, a character inspired by a Star Wars spoof movie who has taken part in U.K. general elections going back to 1987.

But Harvey ran into “an issue on Planet Copyright” — American filmmaker and Buckethead creator Todd Durham threatened to sue him. “So I respawned into my true form, Count Binface.” In 2019, he ran against Prime Minister Boris Johnson, as well as someone else officially authorized to pose as Buckethead.

When we asked if we could speak to Harvey, straight-faced Binface countered with a warning: “Your belief in the character is starting to fall away. … If that happens, this humor will disintegrate faster than a laser blast.”

Who actually votes for a character like this? In the recent London mayoral election, Binface — running on a pledge to put a price cap on croissants — won more than 24,000 votes.

Perhaps that’s not surprising in a country that voted for “Boaty McBoatface” when asked to name a $288 million research ship, or where a census question on religious identity once got nearly 400,000 people answering that they were Jedi knights from Star Wars.

But in this particular moment, there is a genuine dissatisfaction with politics, as well as anger driven by government scandals, the fallout of Brexit, cost-of-living pressures, political turmoil and stretched public services. A recent British Social Attitudes survey found that public trust and confidence in politics is at an all-time low.

“If you don’t know what you’re going to do, and you go into the polling booth and you see ‘Lord Buckethead’ or ‘Count Binface,’ you might think, I’ll send a message by voting for him,” said Martin Baxter, founder of Electoral Calculus, a political consulting firm.

Baxter said satirical candidates have occasionally had political significance — as when the Monster Raving Loony Party, which encourages people to “vote for insanity,” outperformed what remained of the Social Democratic Party in a special election, underscoring that that party’s days were over.

(The Official Monster Raving Loony Party is fielding 22 candidates in this general election.)

Asked what he would consider a good result on July 4, Count Binface said, “I don’t want to get dewy-eyed, or dewy-visored. If I get any votes, that’s fine. If I get zero votes, that’s fine. Ultimately, it’s the being there that counts. This will be a capping moment for 14 Earth Years of some of the worst government leadership any major country has ever suffered.”

Binface said that standing in a village hall or leisure center at 3 a.m. with party leaders as the votes are announced is “a real leveler — and it’s something that makes British democracy particularly wonderful and unique in my visor.”

In 2019, when the vote result was announced for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Johnson — who had just led his party to a stunning victory — stepped to the lectern and said, “I thank my fellow candidates in all their glory, Lord Buckethead, Elmo … forgive me if I don’t identify them all.”

This year, Elmo is running in the district of Keir Starmer. So, if the polls are right, he may be on the stage when the Labour Party leader and possible next prime minister celebrates a good night.