It was already shaping up to be one of the more remarkable nights in British political history. Andy Burnham had just won Makerfield with 54% of the vote, paving the way for a Labour leadership challenge that would end Keir Starmer’s premiership within days. Reform had their worst byelection night since the general election. Thangam Debbonaire had gone viral on Sky News. And somewhere in the Life convention centre in Wigan, a man in a bin helmet was preparing to give the second-best interview of the evening.
Count Binface had already made his mark. His encounter with Sky News, during which the reporter failed to identify him and was gently informed that he had indeed gone to journalism school, had already spread rapidly online. Then GB News sent someone over. The Count had a different but equally consistent theme prepared.
The interview
When asked how he was feeling as the count got underway, Binface set his stall out immediately: “I’m excited to talk to the news corporation that seems to flout Ofcom at every turn, congratulations.”
The interviewer pressed on. What were his policies for Makerfield? “Firstly, all news operations should obey Ofcom rules. Secondly, all news operations should obey Ofcom rules. And I could go on.”
At one point, a man dressed as a fox standing nearby made an unrepeatable comment. Binface apologised on his behalf before adding: “Hey, who’s the one breaking Ofcom rules around here? Now we both know how it feels.”
Why GB News specifically
Binface’s repeated references were not entirely without substance. GB News has been fined by Ofcom multiple times for breaching broadcasting standards, including failures to maintain due impartiality on political matters – one of the most fundamental requirements of British broadcast regulation. The channel has not been shy about its political leanings, and the regulator has periodically had to remind it of the rules that apply to licensed broadcasters in a way that does not apply to newspapers or online outlets.
The joke works because it is also a real point. GB News markets itself as a counter-establishment broadcaster pushing back against mainstream media bias. Ofcom exists precisely to ensure that broadcasters – whatever their editorial direction – play by rules designed to protect audiences from one-sided political output. The tension between those two things is genuine, and Binface deploying it in every single answer was, at minimum, more substantive political commentary than most byelection night studio discussion.
The broader context
It is worth noting that GB News was not the only broadcaster having a complicated Makerfield night. Sky News and GMB have both had Ofcom complaints filed against them in recent months. Broadcasting standards complaints have become a fixture of the political landscape in a way they were not a decade ago, with parties, politicians and pressure groups increasingly willing to reach for the regulator whenever coverage displeases them.
Binface’s approach – making Ofcom compliance a central campaign policy, then hammering it home in every answer regardless of what was actually asked – was, in its way, a pointed piece of satire about the entire ecosystem. The serious point being that when a broadcaster with a known political direction is given a licence to operate under rules designed to prevent one-sided political output, and then repeatedly breaks those rules, the fines and findings should probably be more widely discussed than they are.
The result
Binface finished seventh in Makerfield with 95 votes, behind the Monster Raving Loony Party candidate and – we can only assume – the man dressed as a fox. He did not save his deposit. He did not, as previously established, actually live in the constituency on the night in question.
But in a contest that produced two of the most-shared political clips of the year so far, he contributed both of them. The Sky News encounter was the funnier of the two. The GB News one was arguably the more pointed. Between them, they demonstrated something that British politics occasionally needs reminding of: that the novelty candidates standing in front of serious politicians at count nights are sometimes saying things the serious politicians would rather not.
In this case, one of those things was: all news operations should obey Ofcom rules. He could go on. And he did.
You can watch his interview with GB News below:
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