Nigel Farage’s Clacton by-election fight will cost taxpayers an estimated quarter of a million pounds, an official has suggested(Image: Getty Images)
Reform chief Nigel Farage is facing comedy candidates including Count Binfance in next week’s Clacton by-election after major political rivals boycotted the contest
Nigel Farage’s Clacton by-election fight will cost taxpayers an estimated quarter of a million pounds, an official has suggested.
The Reform chief is facing comedy candidates including Count Binfance in next week’s vote after major political rivals boycotted the contest. They accused him last month of a political stunt last month for triggering the vote amid a Commons probe over a £5million gift received from a Thai-based crypto billionaire.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today, chief executive of Tendering district council, Ian Davidson, said the ballot paper with 34 candidates was just under a metre long.
He said: “We’ve got 34 candidates, which is the most number of candidates any parliamentary election has ever had. And the ballot paper is just under a metre a long. The cost of actually printing, running, and posting things like that is about four times the cost of the General Election where we had five candidates.”
Nigel Farage is scathing at the £250,000 cost to the taxpayer of his unnecessary and ridiculous Clacton-on-Sea election campaign that he caused to avoid scrutiny and acccountability for the £5MILLION ‘gift’ that he didn’t declare.Nigel Farage explains that he’s called another byelection in Clacton-on-Sea because he should be able to secretly enrich himself without scrutiny and accountabilty and that the rules shouldn’t apply to him.Nigel Farage reminds you that he’s the man that brought you Brexit and asks what could possibly go wrong.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage’s decision to resign his Clacton seat and force a by-election, amid scrutiny over his personal finances, has produced one of the odder spectacles in recent British politics. With every other major party declining to stand and despite a record 34 candidates running, his most prominent challenger is Count Binface, the silver-caped “intergalactic space warrior” with a bin for a helmet.
Danny Kruger, the Reform UK MP for East Wiltshire, told the House of Commons that politics is not a joke, criticising rivals for lining up behind a comedian in a dustbin costume. His reaction suggests that Reform UK is a party that senses its own vulnerability to ridicule, rather than one confident enough to shrug it off. But Kruger’s reaction also overlooks an important point: that “joke” candidates belong to a long and consequential tradition in Britain.
The template was set by David Sutch, who stood as Screaming Lord Sutch. A previously aspiring rock singer, he entered politics in 1963. He campaigned to lower the voting age from 21 to 18, stood against Labour prime minister Harold Wilson in 1966, and founded the Monster Raving Loony Party in 1983. He contested elections 39 times in total.
‘Screaming Lord Sutch’, former leader and founder of the Monster Raving Loony Party. Justin Williams/EPA
His slogan, “vote for insanity, you know it makes sense,” concealed real disenchantment. Sutch saw himself as speaking for people too alienated by politics to vote at all. Ironically, several of his “joke” policies – commercial radio, a lower voting age, all-day pub opening – were enacted later by various governments. In 1990, his party outpolled the collapsing Social Democrats in the Bootle by-election.
Sutch established the trope of comedy candidates standing alongside the country’s most powerful politicians. Count Binface – who challenged Theresa May in 2017 in his previous guise as Lord Buckethead – follows this well-beaten path.
Count Binface (as Lord Buckethead) demonstrated reaching across the political divide by petting (wife of Boris Johnson) Carrie Symonds’ dog. Will Oliver/EPA
British election results are announced in a public hall, with the constituency’s candidates all lined up on one stage. This forces even a sitting prime minister to be pictured beside a rival in costume. The ritual of the count itself may help sustain this peculiar tradition by providing oddball candidates with a form of recognition, no matter how few votes they get.
In the Makerfield by-election, the fox took 18 votes against Burnham. What could be achieved in Clacton? Alamy
The line between joke and fringe candidates is more blurred than it seems. Sutch’s comedy hid serious protest; some overtly serious candidates, conversely, have been treated by the public as figures of fun. The road-safety campaigner William “Bill” Boaks, a naval veteran decorated at Dunkirk, spent decades sincerely contesting elections from a car painted as a zebra crossing. He eventually polled just five votes in Glasgow.
Similarly, the Natural Law Party (NLP) – whose candidates preached applying the principles of Transcendental Meditation to all levels of government and promoted “yogic flying” – never intended satire. It had serious policies such as an arms export ban. Its excruciating election broadcasts were nevertheless widely considered hilarious.
It should not be assumed that fringe candidacies are necessarily poorly resourced or powerless. Both the NLP and James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party, which fought the 1997 election on a single anti-European Union issue, drew on considerable private riches. The NLP was funded by ex-Beatle George Harrison; Goldsmith was a billionaire. The latter’s party used innovative but expensive messaging techniques such as the distribution of video cassettes to voters. Wealthy individuals could buy influence on the political process – something highlighted again recently by the donations received by Farage.
Members of the Natural Law Party demonstrate ‘yogic flying’ in 1997. David Cheskin/Alamy
The Referendum Party did shape the outcome of the 1997 general election. One statistical study found that, despite winning no seats and averaging under 3% of the vote, its intervention cut the Conservative vote by around 3.4 points – enough, is is estimated, to have cost the Conservatives 16 to 18 seats. A single-issue party built around one wealthy backer swung a significant number of individual contests even in total defeat.
The possibility of decisive impact without a single seat won is a useful corrective to the instinct to write off Binface’s Clacton campaign as empty theatre. His manifesto combines joke policies, such as nationalising Adele, with a few credible propositions, such as banning MPs who resign mid-parliament from standing in the resulting by-election. One survey already shows more voters nationwide would rather see him win than Farage, and local polling suggests that he might pick up a non-derisory 20% of the vote.
Some Clacton residents have demonstrated their support for Binface ahead of the by-election. Simon Dack News/Alamy
Whether or not Farage takes the Clacton seat, the number of voters who chose Binface instead may be used as ammunition by critics and comedians for the rest of his career. There is a further irony: what counts as “fringe” or “ridiculous” is constantly renegotiated. Farage himself spent years cast as a fringe obsessive before becoming one of the most consequential figures in current British politics. It’s a reminder that the boundary he polices against Binface is one he once crossed himself.
The history of British democracy is not only a history of winners. It is also the history of the losers, loners and long-shots whose campaigns reveal what voters find funny, what they find unacceptable, and what they are, in the end, prepared to take seriously. A man in a bin costume standing against the man who forced this election is a small but revealing window into the shifting boundaries of British politics.
Image of Elmo (left) and former Prime Minister Tory idiot Boris Johnson (right)Nigel Farage explains that he’s called another byelection in Clacton-on-Sea because he should be able to secretly enrich himself without scrutiny and accountabilty and that the rules shouldn’t apply to him.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Nigel Farage and ‘Posh George’ Cottrell (right) in January 2020. Credit: PA Images
Nigel Farage’s donors include Mayfair club owners, fox hunt masters, and the landed gentry.
On 7 June, Nigel Farage announced that he was resigning as the MP for Clacton amid the political furore caused by his £5 million undeclared gift from crypto billionaire and major Reform UK donor Christopher Harborne.
Farage said that he will stand for re-election in a contest he has described as “the people versus the establishment”.
However, judging by the makeup of Reform’s donors, the party is firmly embedded in the “establishment” that Farage has attempted to malign.
Not only has Reform accepted millions from crypto barons and fossil fuel interests, it has also been bankrolled by aristocrats, peers, and owners of swanky private members’ clubs.
“My family have known the Cottrell family and the broader Hesketh family for 50 years – a very successful aristocratic family,” said Reform deputy leader Richard Tice in an interview with Times Radio on 10 June.
Tice was being questioned about a £1 million transfer from Fiona Cottrell to his company, Britain Means Business, half of which was donated to Reform.
Fiona and her son George Cottrell have been in the news recently for their financial ties to Farage’s party – and they are far from Reform’s only old money backers.
Fiona Cottrell is the daughter of Rupert Watson, 3rd Baron Manton. Under her maiden name, Fiona Watson, she was a former glamour model and one-time girlfriend of King Charles III when he was the Prince of Wales. On top of the £1 million she gave to Britain Means Business, Cottrell has donated £750,000 directly to Reform – although a large portion, £500,000, is currently being investigated by the Metropolitan Police.
George Cottrell – nicknamed “Posh George” – is part of Farage’s inner cadre, having been UKIP’s head of fundraising, and later Farage’s chief of staff. George, who was previously convicted of wire fraud after being arrested by undercover U.S. agents while attending the 2016 National Republican Convention with Farage, has also provided direct financial support to the Reform premier.
Cottrell helped to fund Farage’s anti-immigration campaign videos in 2023 and 2024, supplied him with security, and allowed the Reform leader to use an office in his five-storey London townhouse, which overlooks Buckingham Palace. Farage didn’t declare these gifts, and recently falsely claimed that he hadn’t received any additional support from George since being elected to Parliament.
As his nickname suggests, George is known for his opulent tastes, lives in a penthouse in Tivat, Montenegro, and regularly claims to have a trust fund of £250 million, according to the Sunday Times.
And his aristocratic lineage is extensive. George is the nephew of Thomas ‘Alexander’ Fermor-Hesketh, 3rd Baron Hesketh, a former Conservative donor who defected to UKIP. One of Alexander’s three sons, Frederick Hatton Fermor-Hesketh, donated £11,500 to Reform last year.
Another member of high society to have donated £100,000 to Reform is Isabel Marcelle Christina Goldsmith, daughter of Sir James Goldsmith and Bolivian heiress Maria Isabel Patiño – the former a financier who left a £1.5 billion fortune to his family on his death in 1997.
Isabel Goldsmith is an avid art collector and half-sister of Conservative politician Zac Goldsmith, who served in ministerial positions under Conservative leaders Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak.
There is also a familial link between Zac Goldsmith’s mother, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, and another high-profile Reform donor – Robin Birley, who has donated £172,000 to the party.
Annabel is Robin’s mother, while his father, Mark Birley, was the founder of the famous ‘Annabel’s’ nightclub in Mayfair, London.
Robin is himself a Mayfair club owner whose portfolio includes 5 Hertford Street, and Oswald’s (named after Robin’s grandfather) at 25 Albemarle Street, both of which are regular haunts of Reform politicians and their allies.
Alexander Thévoz, who has documented the “secret life of London private members’ clubs”, writes that “to understand Robin Birley’s clubs is to understand Brexit”. In 2024, the high society magazine Tatler reported that Oswald’s had 2,000 members, “all at the apex of social power”.
Farage is a member of 5 Hertford Street, which earned the moniker of “the Brexit sex dungeon” around the time of the referendum due to the number of anti-EU figures who frequented the establishment. The club costs a rumoured £3,000 to join (including the £1,200 joining fee) and its members reportedly wander around “in smoking jackets, velvet slippers and signet rings”.
Farage appears to conduct a considerable amount of his political business from Birley’s clubs. It was reported in 2025 that the Reform leader held a fundraiser at Oswald’s – founded as a private wine club – to attract billionaire donors including former Tory patron Bassim Haidar, all while popping “jeroboams of white burgundy and double magnums of Tempo d’Angelus”. The event reportedly raised £1 million for the party.
Birley isn’t Reform’s only private members’ club donor. Another backer, Steven McTiernan, behind three donations worth a combined £15,000, appears to be the director of another exclusive private members’ club, the Oriental Club (or Oriental Club 1824 Limited), located in Stratford House, near Oxford Street in central London.
The club is described on its website as being “founded by returning officers and officials from India and the East for whom the Club was a valued haven in London”, and “a place where high ranking Members of the East India Company could meet and do business in pleasant, comfortable surroundings whilst home on leave”. The Duke of Wellington was, it says, “the Club’s first and only President in 1824”.
Reform’s donor base is also populated by several individuals with peerages.
Lord Anthony Bamford, who stood down from the Upper Chamber in 2024, is one of Reform’s more recent donors, having previously given vast sums to the Conservative Party.
With a combined wealth of £10.3 billion, the Bamford family gave Farage’s party £200,000 in November last year through its multinational construction conglomerate JCB, while Lord Bamford paid for a helicopter flight for Farage and one of his staff members to tour a JCB site in 2024, valued at £8,413.
Following JCB’s donation, Reform’s senior figures have publicly praised JCB’s Pothole Pro equipment, which is said to speed up the fixing of road damage – a key issue in local authorities, many of which Reform now controls.
Reform also has financial ties to the owner of the Daily Mail, Viscount Rothermere, the great-grandson of Harold Harmsworth, who founded the newspaper in the late 19th century and was handed hereditary titles in the 1910s.
Viscount Rothermere’s spouse, Viscountess Rothermere (Claudia Harmsworth), gave £50,000 to Reform in September 2025. The family is worth £2 billion, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, and owns the Daily Mail’s parent company through complex offshore structures. The pair also own Ferne House, a country manor set in 225 acres of parkland in Wiltshire, which they revamped in the early 2000s at a reported cost of £40 million.
Not all of Reform’s donors are aristocrats, but even those lacking old money or a peerage have a habit of engaging in aristocratic hobbies.
Reform donor Johan Christofferson, who gave the party £100,000 in June 2025, has a keen interest in fox hunting. A hedge fund manager and former Tory donor, Christofferson was the joint-master of a Scottish fox hunt that was prosecuted in 2017 for illegal hunting. Farage, for his part, is a vocal supporter of the blood sport, and has opposed the ban on the practice.
As documented by DeSmog, senior Reform politician Zia Yusuf – also a party donor – made his money by providing luxury experiences to the super-rich.
Commenting on the importance of transparency around political donations, Cary Mitchell, executive director of strategy at Best for Britain, which campaigns to strengthen the UK’s democracy, said: “Nigel Farage likes to present himself as a man of the people, but with a parliamentary investigation by the standards watchdog into undeclared gifts, there are clearly questions for him to answer when it comes to transparency.
“Scrutiny of political donations is a critically important part of the electoral process, allowing voters to assess who is seeking to represent them, and evading it demonstrates a fundamental contempt for voters and the UK’s values as a parliamentary democracy.”
Nigel Farage explains that he’s called another byelection in Clacton-on-Sea because he should be able to secretly enrich himself without scrutiny and accountabilty and that the rules shouldn’t apply to him.Nigel Farage admits to being a whore willing to do anything for someone with a big fat wallet and asks whether drinking pints and smoking fags is not enough for the stupid plebs.Nigel Farage blames the Muzzies.
A firefighter gestures next to burning trees as a wildfire rages near Marcheprime, outside, Bordeaux, France, July 26, 2026
FRANCE holds emergency meetings on the evacuation of Bordeaux, a city of a million, as wildfires sweep ever closer. In Spain families are fleeing the capital, Madrid.
The reality of the climate emergency has come to Europe. There were plenty of warning signs — more severe heatwaves by the year, droughts and floods devastating harvests — including in Britain, where three of the five worst harvests on record have been since 2020 — and worsening wildfires.
In Britain this summer fires have burnt swathes of the Cairngorms and Eryri (Snowdonia), as well as Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh for the second year running. As summer heatwaves grow longer and drier, we should not imagine our towns and cities are safe. As Fire Brigades Union leader Steve Wright told the Morning Star in May, “In London a suburban street burnt to the ground last year” (in Rainham) “and we had wildfires in Dorset and Wiltshire.”
Computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, argues that addressing the climate crisis requires “World War II-scale mobilisation.”
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Addressing the climate crisis involves radical restructuring — one reason climate activists were, even before Palestine solidarity campaigners, the victims of repressive new anti-protest laws.
That, in turn, means getting real about the class power of the forces blocking change. Proposed mechanisms for delivering action like citizens’ assemblies are a response to the sluggishness of existing institutions, but do not address its cause — the power of the capitalist class.
Agreeing what we ought to do doesn’t guarantee that it will happen: the climate movement needs to be one with the labour and peace movements, and recognise that this is fundamentally a class struggle and a battle against capitalism itself.
That dividing line becomes ever clearer, domestically and internationally.
The far right are the climate deniers at home; globally the denier-in-chief is the main imperialist power, the United States, whose agenda is to stop the rise of China, the world leader in renewables and green tech. The only existential threat as grave as climate change is world war — and the push towards that is also the biggest obstacle to climate action.
The cry on climate demos — “system change, not climate change” — rings true. We need to follow through on the implications.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
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Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Power-mad orange gasbag Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
A firefighter gestures next to burning trees as a wildfire rages near Marcheprime, outside, Bordeaux, France, July 26, 2026
