Officials in Clacton concede that the traditional method of identifying the joke candidate — looking for the one in the bin costume — has failed for the first time in British electoral history.
Officials in Clacton have convened an emergency Sincerity Tribunal after conceding they cannot legally determine whether Nigel Farage or Count Binface is the stunt candidate. The traditional test — identifying the man in the novelty costume — has collapsed under scrutiny. A ruling is expected after the election, which officials admit defeats the point.
CLACTON-ON-SEA — The Electoral Commission has convened an emergency Sincerity Tribunal after officials admitted they could no longer determine, with any legal confidence, which candidate in this week's by-election is the stunt. The contest, pitting Nigel Farage against Count Binface, has been denounced as theatre by roughly everyone, though nobody can agree on whose theatre it is.
Your correspondent has covered eleven British by-elections, four constitutional crises and one incident involving a lettuce, and can report that this is not a new film so much as a straight-to-streaming sequel: the same seaside town, the same rosettes, the same man promising that this time, unlike the previous seven times, he is deadly serious. The only fresh casting decision is a gentleman with a dustbin on his head, and even he has been here before.
The tribunal's difficulty, explained Electoral Commission spokesperson Margery Plinth, is procedural. "Historically, the stunt candidate self-identifies via headgear," she told reporters outside a leisure centre that smelled, as all British polling stations do, of chlorine and resignation. "But we now have one candidate in a novelty costume with a fully costed manifesto, and one candidate in a Barbour jacket whose entire platform is being photographed near things. The old tests no longer function."
"We asked ourselves: which of these men is performing? The tribunal sat for nine hours and then adjourned to lie down."
The tribunal's provisional criteria — does the candidate intend to do the job, has the candidate previously resigned from a comparable job, does the candidate own an intergalactic space fleet — have so far produced what one clerk described as "a dead heat, in every sense." A proposal to simply declare both men stunts and award the seat to the town itself was rejected as "dangerously sensible."
The verdict, pending
Locals, interviewed at length by the world's press in the manner of zoo animals being asked about the weather, remain serene. The BBC dispatched a camera crew; the residents dispatched them back. One is reminded, inevitably, of every seaside constituency ever anointed the Soul of the Nation for a fortnight, then abandoned to its arcades the moment the count finishes.
Ms Plinth confirmed the tribunal would deliver its ruling after the election, which she conceded "rather defeats the point, but so does everything else." Asked whether Britain might consider a permanent register distinguishing serious candidates from performers, she paused for a long time. "We looked into it," she said finally. "The register would be blank."
Polls close Thursday. The bin, at least, will still be a bin on Friday. Continuity of that sort is not nothing.
