On one of the hottest English days on record, a food critic found themselves at an ice cream party in a tiny flat overlooking the canal by Camden. The gathering involved a bottle of Crémant and an ice bucket full of ice cream containers – caramel, strawberry, apple cider vinegar and cherry – alongside small paper cups and tiny plastic spoons, Roman gelateria style. The critic had skipped breakfast and lunch, concerned about the calorie implications.
But as this scene of Dairy Eden unfolded, a different kind of British summer ritual was taking shape in Clacton. Count Binface – the nom de guerre of comedy writer Jonathan David Harvey – is likely to be Nigel Farage’s only opponent of consequence. Binface, a pseudo-aristocrat cosplaying as a receptacle for household waste, has stood against each incumbent prime minister and London mayor since 2017. His purpose was corrective rather than competitive, a licensed fool puncturing pretension. Yet in Clacton, the fool finds himself inheriting the responsibilities of a ruling class missing in action: Binface is the establishment.
“On a record hot day, an ice cream party in Camden contrasts with Count Binface’s rise as Farage’s main opponent in Clacton.”
Harvey’s trajectory is more serious than the costume suggests. He is a stand-up and writer with credits including the Westminster satire The Thick of It. At heart, he is a defender of democracy, having spent two decades anatomising political absurdity without surrendering to the conviction that politics itself is absurd. Comedy, by his own account, was first an escape from a difficult childhood with a bibulous, domineering father, then a way of surviving the sudden death of his diabetic, morbidly obese brother. His memoir, A Fan for All Seasons, chronicles a painful year spent wandering from sporting event to sporting event after discovering Dan’s body in his London flat, searching in the rituals of spectatorship for a way of making grief publicly bearable.
It was after this odyssey that Harvey emerged in the political arena, confronting Theresa May in Maidenhead in 2019 under the Lord Buckethead persona. He later recalled: “Thursday night I was in a sports hall in Maidenhead. Sunday morning, I was flown first class to New York to appear on John Oliver. It was the weirdest experience of my life.” He chose not to become a professional ironist but a more curious vocation.
The easiest posture in an age of institutional exhaustion is cynicism. But as David Foster Wallace observed, “irony is the song of a bird that has come to love its cage”. Harvey’s bin, filled with the detritus of a broken political system, may yet hold a mirror to a summer of both ice cream and insurgency.