Photo: Twitter
Quite likely, it doesn’t get any more embarrassing than this. Britain First’s attempts to legitimise themselves as a political force took a battering on Saturday, after they were outperformed in the London Mayoral Elections by Count Binface.
The parody candidate finished 11th out of 13 individuals competing for control of the capital. He fetched 24,260 votes in total, polling at a fraction over 1%. That’s right. One in 100 politically active Londoners gave their support to Mr. Binface this year.
In all fairness, the comical figure does have some pretty agreeable policies in his manifesto. He wants to tie the pay of government ministers to that of nurses for the next 100 years, while banning Christmas music in shops before December.
Alas, if you’re failing to gain more support than a bloke with a bin on his head, you must be doing something wrong. Ten candidates managed to avoid this humiliation. But Nick Scanlon of Britain First wasn’t so lucky…
The far-right mayoral hopeful earned just 20,512 votes – or 0.8% of public support in total. Scanlon also embarrassed himself further by shouting “Khan killed London”, when Sadiq Khan began his victory speech yesterday afternoon.
Party leader Paul Golding has tried to soften the blow, by claiming that many Britain First voters actually backed Susan Hall, in the hope that the Conservative candidate was best placed to defeat the Labour incumbent.
However, Khan ended up 11 percentage points clear of Hall – increasing his vote share from the previous elections. Whatever strategy Britain First were going for, it didn’t work. They even had to delete a furious Twitter post at one point.
The official Twitter count outright denied losing to Count Binface by just under 4,000 votes. However, one swift dose of reality and a Community Note later, and the rant was removed. Oh well, there’s always next time, guys…
