Terry Prone: Amid the weirdness of world leaders, Count Binface is starting to make sense
Wondering about losing your marbles is a punishing exercise, in my experience, largely because whenever I suggest it’s happening to me, some member of my family tends to opine that I may have had a marble deficit to start with — adding, offensively, that they see no concrete evidence that the overall number has reduced that much.
On the other hand, virtually every day at the moment, some world leader does something or says something that is so barking, I find myself wondering (a) if it’s just me who hears the woof, and (b) if everybody else hears it too, how are we moving right along as if things were normal and just complaining about the weather?
For example, just as I had acclimatised to Donald Trump’s daily capacity to astonish, along comes Turkey’s president, Recep Erdogan, with his souvenir gifts to help world leaders remember this year’s Ankara summit.
Most of us start small, as souvenir recipients. Peppermint-flavoured sticks of rock threaded through with the name of the resort wherein you stayed did have their place in many a childhood, while carrying the health threat of rampant mouth ulcers. I also have a scarf the former Romanian ambassador gave me for some reason, plus a smirking head of Buddha’s mother given to me by an NGO in Cambodia. That’s about the height of it.
But Erdogan wouldn’t lower himself to souvenir rock or a scarf, operating, as he does, at a much higher level. Instead, each visiting head of state, at the end of the summit, was given a wooden display box bearing the Nato logo and a rendering of the Turkish flag.
You could put your granny’s ashes in the display box, it was so cute, as long as you first removed its current occupant — a Gumusay .357 Magnum revolver.
In case you are less than knowledgable about small arms, this is a vintage firearm. Ah, you may say, so nothing more than a historic ornament, then?
No, actually. The guns were perfectly functional and each had a bullet kindly inserted, so you wouldn’t have to bother getting yours ready for action.
The great thing is that Emmanuel Macron couldn’t mix up his gun with someone else’s because the Turkish leader had thoughtfully ensured that each gun was personalised. Just as you might custom-engrave an expensive pen with the recipient’s name, so each world leader got a gun with their name permanently on it, together with a cleaning kit and 500 live bullets, presumably so they wouldn’t be short-taken if they shot someone at the airport with the first bullet that had been lovingly inserted in their personal gun.
If the personal engraving guaranteed an absence of ownership confusion, it didn’t prevent all problems.
Canada’s leader and the UK’s soon-to-be ex-leader had to have their guns decommissioned before they could bring them into their respective countries, which, in terms of trouble, beats having to go to Arnotts to swap a shirt someone gave you in too small a size.
Although some will say the guns were a marketing coup, since they drew world attention to Turkey’s arms-manufacturing capacity, they also added to the wider current picture of political craziness, dominated, this summer, by Nigel Farage, who — when accused of ill-gotten gifts worth millions — stamped his little foot at British media and said he wasn’t having any of this. A bit like Prince Harry, and that didn’t end well.
Nigel announced a new kind of resignation. The revolving door resignation. He was tossing his job as MP, thereby causing a by-election. Said by-election would permit the voters to make a judgement on his putative corruption by re-electing him, which would be almost guaranteed, given the loopiness of politics to which we have already referred. The big parties said he could do the other thing.
They weren’t going to spend time and money competing in a stunt contest.
Lest readers fear that this would return Farage to the Houses of Parliament unopposed, the good news is that opposition will be provided by Count Binface, who might better be called Count Binhead, since he wears a vast version of a rubbish bin on his head when campaigning.
His real name is Jon Harvey, and he earns a respectable living from TV shows such as .
Maybe Harvey alleviates any boredom he may experience from scripting satire in the day job by this side hustle of campaigning for election to Britain’s parliament as an intergalactic space warrior almost 6,000 years old.
Now, at this point, a number of serious issues have to be addressed, the first of which is that Ireland is desperately lacking in figures like Count Binface. What’s wrong with us?
The ostensibly serious UK is unexpectedly rich in precisely these oddities.
Starting with David Edward Sutch, a musician who ran for parliament almost 40 times, starting in the 1960s, as the leader of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, under the title of Screaming Lord Sutch.
He had some good ideas, not least the erection of a statue to pop star Tommy Steele, who Lord Sutch claimed, with some justification, was “the only decent thing to come out of Bermondsey”. (He didn’t succeed, although, oddly, Tommy Steele, who is still with us, became a sculptor and donated to Liverpool a statue, not of himself, but depicting Eleanor Rigby of the Beatles’ song.)
Count Binface is of the Screaming Lord Sutch lineage, although some of his ideas have more genuine appeal — not least his desire to permanently cap the price of a 99 ice cream cone at 99p and link the salaries of UK government ministers to those of NHS nurses for 100 years.
(That latter might make more sense than RTÉ’s linking of presenter salaries to that of the director general.)
Now, the other parties’ absence might help Binface. Coverage of candidates must be balanced, so the Count will have to appear on every major radio and TV show broadcast during the campaign.
This, in turn, may allow him to shift Farage in a way that does the latter no favours. Farage is always grinning. But the comedy part of this by-election might just be owned by a contender whose day job involves getting laughs.
Losing out on the fun element of the campaign would be a disadvantage to Farage, as would be the loss of one of his favourite summer props. He can no longer own the 99. In fact, his regular consumption of 99s might have to stop, since every photograph of our Nigel licking the confection would inevitably play into Binface’s argument.
If Binface were to be elected, he would have separate problems, because the parliamentary dress code precludes face coverings. So the Count would have to remove his bin when the time came for him to make his maiden speech.
You win some, you lose some.
But wouldn’t it be fun if the Count won this one?
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