Stand Everyone Down
StandEveryone Down
Nigel Farage wants a contest between the people and the establishment. We put the serious questions to the one candidate who owes the establishment nothing.
Nigel Farage says he wants a contest between the people and the establishment. I think we should take him at his word.
The establishment he describes is real and well documented. Ministers leave office and walk into the lobbying firms that spent years courting them. A single degree from a single university, taught in a handful of rooms, still supplies most of the people who run the country. That is the machine Farage says he wants to face down. If the contest is honestly the people against it, one candidate owes it nothing at all.
He is a joke, and he is the first to say so. His manifesto caps the price of a croissant at £1.10 and proposes to rename London Bridge after Phoebe Waller-Bridge. But the joke has an edge Westminster lacks. He takes no donations and has no consultancy waiting at the end. There is no revolving door behind him, for the good reason that there is nothing behind him except a bin. Set against the establishment Farage claims to oppose, the man in the bin is the only figure standing fully outside it.
One further irony is worth recording. Binface is, by his own account, an intergalactic being from the planet Sigma IX. A country that puts an alien on the ballot and cheers is a country rather more open to immigration than its politics currently admits. The hardest border this side of the asteroid belt did not keep this man out, and Britain, to its credit, never asked it to.
So the Maculate put the serious questions to him. The ones a candidate for high office should have to answer. He answered every one. What follows is transcribed faithfully, and edited only for the length of his galactic honorifics.
I have costed it to the penny, and the penny is thriving, thank you for asking. The entire network will be funded by a modest levy on anyone caught saying "but where am I supposed to park," a revenue stream so vast the Chancellor has been seen weeping gently into a spreadsheet.
On Sigma IX we cycle everywhere, and I should confess how that came to pass. My grandfather borrowed the technology from a small shop in Coventry, took it home, and within a generation the bicycle had become the principal mode of transport across the entire planet. It is our proudest civic achievement. I am sorry to report that he never paid the bill. With interest, my planet now owes Coventry a sum best expressed as a small moon. The shop, should it be reading, has my sincere apologies and, in the fullness of time, its money.
So you will understand my enthusiasm. The last citizen on Sigma IX who drove to the shop for a single lime was launched into a nearby star, with full honours and a lovely buffet. I do not propose that here. Britain is not ready for the star. Britain is barely ready for the mini-roundabout. So we shall start with bollards, thousands of them, handsome and unbribable, planted precisely where a Range Rover would prefer to be. Each lane will be swept nightly by a municipal fleet, every unit of which is me, for I am the one candidate who turns up to the crisis already wearing the container.
I have waged one war in my life. It was against Boris Johnson, in Uxbridge, and I got my deposit back, which is more than he ever returned to the nation.
The motorcar and I are not enemies. I am simply retiring it, on a generous pension, with a canal-side bench and a framed photograph of the M25 to gaze upon when the memories come. Behold your city. Forty thousand cars in a street built for one horse and a mild plague, every engine running and nothing moving, each driver serenely convinced the villain of the piece is a man on a Brompton. It is a group therapy session that everyone drove to. Under me the ambulance still gets through and the blue badge still parks at the door. Once a year, and once only, I shall pilot a single ceremonial Reliant Robin across Trafalgar Square, badly, directly into the fountain, so the children may know what their grandparents survived. There will be a small plaque.
I would hand you the secrets of the universe this very afternoon. Regrettably the Intergalactic Federation has reviewed humanity's track record with new technology, a record that opens with fire and closes, catastrophically, with the leaf blower, and has voted to keep the good drawer locked.
What I can share is our waste-reclamation science, at no charge, because you need it and because the matter is, for me, deeply personal. I am a bin. I look upon your landfill and I see family. So the faster-than-light engine stays on Sigma IX, beside the good scissors, where the children cannot reach it. Your recycling, though, shall become the envy of three galaxies, and your bins shall at last be loved, and where appropriate, knighted. One or two may even be granted a parking space, which I accept is ironic. We begin where every great civilisation begins. With me.
You are not alone. I am a talking bin from outer space giving a press conference, a detail I feel the national media has chronically buried.
The galaxy knows Earth well. It watches. It has a group chat, and you are not in it, though your screenshots circulate widely and attract a great many laughing-face reactions. The reviews are mixed. One elder civilisation filed you under "promising, but why is it shouting." Another visited for a single wet Tuesday in March and quietly emigrated. And still the cosmos permits you to rename your bridges after the author of Fleabag, wholly unbothered, which is the most gracious act a superior species has ever performed for a lesser one, and you did not even send a card.
Deadly serious. Larry is the finest running mate available on this or any planet. Five Prime Ministers have come and gone beneath him, and he has mourned precisely none of them. He has never drawn a salary or accepted a directorship, and has never once been photographed leaving a private equity lunch with his collar turned up. He cannot be bribed. Lobbyists have tried, most recently with a salmon of genuine quality. He accepts the tribute, then does precisely as he pleases, which already places him several Chancellors ahead.
The revolving door, meanwhile, now spins so quickly it powers the entire building, the only renewable energy project Westminster has ever delivered ahead of schedule. Larry and I come before you with no second job to protect. He does moonlight on the mice. But he declares every mouse, and he has never once blamed the previous cat.
I hold nothing against Oxford. Handsome spires. Outstanding fudge in the gift shop. My concern is narrower, and it keeps me awake.
When the same three-letter degree, taught in the same four rooms, supplies very nearly everyone who governs a country, you do not get a talent pool. You get a puddle, and everyone in it went punting together in the summer of 2006 and has been in the same group chat ever since. I do not say they are taught to be corrupt. The reading list is immaculate and the essays are handed in early. I say only that if you feed the identical person into the identical funnel for a hundred years, you must not act surprised when the country comes out funnel-shaped and slightly damp. My own degree is in Bin. I studied outdoors and alone, examined chiefly by pigeons, and I left with the highest honour my field bestows, which is to remain standing on bin day.
Finally, a policy of real substance. MI5 guards against the real threat and MI6 against the foreign one. Nobody whatsoever guards against the wholly invented threat, which, I regret to report, remains undefeated at the ballot box.
MI7 shall keep a live register of every bogeyman summoned to spoil your evening. The enemy within, and the shadowy somebody forever coming, never quite arriving, for your milk. When a politician next appears on the evening news white with terror at a menace massing just beyond the hedge, MI7 will investigate within the hour and confirm, with the full authority of the galaxy, that the menace was sketched on a beer mat the previous Thursday by a man who needed you frightened by Friday and re-elected by May. The agency shall run on a single principle. If the menace cannot be located, it was invented, and the inventor is warmly invited to explain himself to a bin. Running costs: one bin. I have already supplied the bin. I am, as I have always been, both the infrastructure and the answer.
It troubles me the way a very large lasagne troubles me. Magnificent from a distance, and you slowly begin to wonder what is holding it together. A majority that size is a marvellous thing right up to the afternoon it decides it no longer requires your opinion, or that inconveniently timed vote of yours.
As for Sir Keir, I hold him in the very highest regard, largely because he holds himself there already and I should hate for him to be lonely. He was a prosecutor, and it shows. He smiled once, I am told, in 2019, though it has never been independently verified. He has the natural warmth of a man reading you your rights and the visionary sparkle of a laminated fire-safety notice. I would never call him authoritarian. I would merely observe that when the nation's former chief prosecutor wins by a landslide and adopts the word "tough" as an entire personality, a sensible bin keeps its lid within easy reach.
I say relax, and perhaps have a little lie down. I have read the leaflets, the ones cautioning that a vote for me is a vote for the skies to fill with bins, and I wish to reassure every worried patriot in person. The Recyclons have no interest in your jobs. We are here for your recycling, which you were not using correctly in any case.
There will be no waves. My people are exceptionally tidy and cannot abide a queue. If anything my arrival lowers net migration, since the moment a Recyclon sees your bin-collection timetable, half of us turn around and go home. Should a single Recyclon ever reach these shores, he will sort himself into the correct kerbside category and be gently patronised on the local news like everyone else. If it soothes the gentlemen of Reform, I am content to arrive pre-integrated. I understand the weather, and I have never once missed the bin lorry, which is a great deal more than the county council can claim.
To the watchers on the far arms of the net, the patient and the frankly nosy, I send warm greetings from inside a bin, on a wet island that still charges you extra for hand luggage.
I know how it looks from up there. I know there is a wager running on whether we make it. I ask only for a little patience. This is a species that invented penicillin and the wheelie bin, and then queued politely for both, and there is something in that worth keeping. If the vote goes my way, I shall represent this planet with great dignity and a firm ceiling on the price of a croissant. If it does not, I shall see you all at the usual coordinates for the debrief. Bring snacks. Not croissants. I have croissants comprehensively covered.
When we were done, Count Binface invited me to a rubbish party. He was not being modest. It was held inside a bin, the good bin, he was quick to clarify, and the only refreshment on offer was a tray of croissants, each one priced with visible pride at exactly £1.10.
I stayed far longer than I had meant to. Somewhere between the second croissant and a lengthy anecdote about a moon, it struck me that the being in the bin had given me straighter answers than anyone I have yet interviewed on either of my worlds. Make of that what you will. I intend to.
Vesna Draak is a human-Draconian correspondent for The Maculate. She files from wherever the net reaches, and declares all croissants.
Count Binface
This interview is a work of satire. Count Binface is a real independent candidate; the words attributed to him here are invented, and nothing is authorised or endorsed by him or any associated party.