So the bin has been put out. Count Binface – the Oxbridge-educated cracker of shite jokes who gets a weird kick from standing in elections – has lost to Nigel Farage in the Clacton by-election. As every sane person knew he would. Commiserations to the not-so-sane who swell the ranks of the tosserati, like the windbags over at academic mag The Conversation, who got craft-beer Britain jizzing with eager glee with their headline: ‘Could Count Binface actually win?’ When did the educated become so dumb? Come get your trash, Remoaners, he’s cooked.

The result is exactly as those of us whose brains weren’t melted by Brexit expected. Farage, leader of Reform UK, retook the seat with 63 per cent of the vote. He secured the ballots of 22,239 people, a thousand more than he got in the General Election in 2024. Binface won 9,455 votes, which has caused excitement in that section of society that donates to Wikipedia and tweets ‘DYING’ about every Marina Hyde column. ‘What a slap in the face for Farage!’, they’re probably saying on Bluesky. Dream on. What the Clacton spat really revealed is the staggering lameness of the flagging anti-populist crusade.

That Count Binface got fewer than 10,000 votes is hilariously underwhelming when you consider the entire cultural establishment waved pom poms for him. The by-election was triggered by Farage himself. In response to media stories about his allegedly shady finances, he stood down in Clacton in order that he could stand again, his point being that it should be voters, not SW1 dirt-diggers, who decide his fate. In a shameful snub to the people of Clacton, the other parties refused to stand. Instead they threw their weight behind a man with a bin on his head. He became the running dog of the elite, and still he couldn’t break 10k.

Binface was the ideal mouthpiece for Britain’s death-rattling political class. His real name is Jonathan David Harvey. He’s 46 (maaate). He went to Oxford. He’s a longstanding regime comedian, penning safe gags for knackered shows like Have I Got News For You. He poses for selfies with Ian Hislop for heaven’s sake. And – you won’t believe this – he hates Brexit. One of his policy proposals is to have a referendum on whether we should have another referendum. My splitting sides. Little wonder this state-sanctioned edgelord, this lapdog in a leather cape, was embraced by the elite as the ideal shit-stirrer to send down to Clacton.

The chattering-class swooning over Binface was insane. ‘I am supporting Count Binface’, said Lib Dem leader Ed Davey. The then PM, Keir Starmer, backed him too. Then there was all the maniacal cackling in the ‘liberal’ media. Every bald podcast dad frothed over the prospect that Farage might ‘lose to a bin’. Is Binface ‘the hero the country needs?’, wondered a nutter at the Guardian. Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart – the kings of turbo-smug centrism – gushingly interviewed him, which I guess is a step up from gushingly interviewing former psycho jihadists whose armies butchered ‘infidels’. Better a man in a bin talking shit than a man in a mask slaughtering Christians.

Binfacemania went global. The New York Times ran piece after piece on the ‘trashcan’ threatening to unravel Mr Brexit. Time did a fawning interview. What united the Binface fanatics, from Westminster to Manhattan, was the dream of giving British populism a black eye. They hoped the trashcan piss-taker would dent Reform and rap the knuckles of the knuckle-draggers who vote for it. Some said Binface was the ‘anti-establishment candidate’. LOL, he was the precise opposite. He was the tinman mercenary of an establishment that dreads nothing more than the anger of working-class voters.

There was something breathtakingly classist in the Binface spectacle. Sending an Oxbridge comic and loather of Brexit to a working-class seaside town where close to 70 per cent of people voted Leave – it wasn’t even subtle, was it? (During his Rest is Politics interview, Binface quoted The Iliad in its original Homeric Greek, and quick as a flash the hosts said: ‘I don’t think you should go round the streets of Clacton spouting [Greek], ha ha.’) To turn Clacton into a stage for bourgeois snark, and its inhabitants into NPCs in an Oxford graduate’s elaborate and unfunny joke, was pretty sick-making actually. It was snobbery in the rags of satire. The working classes are more than the fleshy punchline to woeful middle-class humour.

The bin metaphor was perfect, because that’s what these people would like to do with working-class votes for populism – bin them. Indeed, Starmer openly said to the people of Clacton: ‘Put your vote in the bin.’ He meant ‘Vote Binface’; he really meant ‘Stop casting your ballots for things that I disapprove of, you morons’. It was anti-populism summed up: swarms of sarcastic grads telling working-class people to flush their stupid views down the toilet. But it didn’t work. Count Binface might have honked the moral horn of the transatlantic haters of populism but he ran aground against the common sense of the good people of Clacton. Who’s laughing now?