No laughing matter

Jim Davidson and Nigel Farage represent an England that will not go quietly

Tom McTague

Good morning. Our Ideas Editor Nicholas Harris has written a feature on why Nigel Farage’s Clacton by-election is no laughing matter. Count Binface has stolen the headlines, but the Nigel Farage and the comedian Jim Davidson, whom Nicholas watched perform in Clacton, represent an England that will not go quietly. You can read the piece here. If you’re not subscribed, you can have two months for £2 here.

I went because he dared me. “What the f*ck do you want to come and see me fo? [sic] Just write I am sexist and racist not funny and a fossil and save the train fare. Hope you are ok. Jim Davidson OBE.” Those were the exact words of Davidson’s email, a reply to my request for press tickets to one of his gigs. And what the fuck did I want to come and see him for? While Jim Davidson is still a touring comedian, in polite quarters “Jim Davidson” is a punchline, a catch-all for a dying breed, one exiled from Saturday night primetime to provincial theatres, hotels and drive-thrus. Perhaps I wanted to see the pathos of that journey: the ocean of fame, lifting people high upon its crests, before sending them crashing to the depths. But the truth is I had more calculated and politicised reasons for watching Davidson perform.

In the past two years, Davidson has effectively become the house comedian of Reform UK. At the party’s 2024 conference, I saw him lounging in the VIP area – an open-top Reform battle bus – and heralded as “the greatest cultural hero of our time” by Lee Anderson. Reform’s unofficial “chief whip” is now a regular at Davidson’s gigs, and a dinner companion. Davidson has also been photographed with the Reform deputy leader Richard Tice, and is occasionally in touch with Nigel Farage. On his YouTube channel he broadcasts political commentary: “Andy Burnham Is a W*NKER”, 200k views. And his fiancée, Tash, his sixth, is a Reform party member.

Davidson himself is a lifelong Conservative, and was a friend of the late Margaret Thatcher. He will not join Reform, as doing so would involve giving up his Carlton Club membership. But he is undeniably part of the party’s soul. Anderson’s speeches – with their nicknames, pantomime and yollering – are amateurish Davidson efforts. At Reform’s 2025 Conference, Anderson was introduced to the stage as a “famous international comedian”. And this is all part of the attempt to turn Reform into a culture as much as a party, an all-inclusive resort of right-wing politics, with unlimited drinks. They have a TV channel (GB News), a broadsheet (the Daily Telegraph), a tabloid (the Daily Express), a telly don (David Starkey), an Emmanuel Goldstein (Rupert Lowe) and a suite of minor celebrities (GB News presenters, Laila Cunningham; the convicted racist Lucy Connolly). I wanted to see this culture for myself, in its naked form, outside Reform’s institutional bounds. And so, after some email negotiation, I arranged tickets for Jim Davidson’s gig of 5 July, at the West Cliff Theatre in Clacton-on-Sea.

Ididn’t know, when I went, that Clacton was going to become the biggest joke of the political summer. Two days after the gig, Nigel Farage resigned, triggering the 2026 Clacton by-election. And SW1 hasn’t stopped laughing since it became clear that Farage would have one main opponent: Jonathan Harvey, who once helped write Victoria Coren Mitchell’s bum-clenchingly bad autocue on Only Connect and now haunts high-profile constituency results as a giant space alien called “Count Binface”. Since then, it’s been one skit after another: Binface on the Today programme, Binface on Newsnight, and an unravelling tapestry of Binface lore (he says he is a 5,900-year-old alien called a Recyclon, and his home planet is Sigma IX). There has been noble talk of Britain’s satirical traditions, and praise for this representative of “Silly Sausage Britain”.

Harvey himself is only giving interviews in character, so it’s impossible to know what he really thinks of the show, or of becoming its biggest clown. But Binface’s appearance as a comedy candidate has come to feel oddly charged. Comedy is something like a surrogate nationalism in Britain, a source of pride and identity. It does a disproportionate amount of political load-bearing via “satirical” television and “radical” comedians. Like some ancient theology, it is riven with schisms and excommunications. And so, while there will be no political struggle in Clacton, this by-election is far from uncontested. If Reform is a culture as much as a party, there is a culture behind Binface and Jonathan Harvey too, one he laboured in the margins of for much of his TV career. It is the culture of Have I Got News for You (which Harvey worked on, and wrote for), Private Eye magazine and BBC 6 Music, Waterstones dads and Amandaland mums. It is arch, metropolitan, wry and retains a battered optimism about British liberalism, one that very easily looks like smugness when it catches the light. It backed Al Murray’s “Pub Landlord” character when he stood as a comedy candidate against Farage in South Thanet in 2015. It backed Eddie Izzard against Farage on Question Time before the Brexit vote. It thinks, all told, that what Farage needs is a good milkshake to the face – if not, as Jo Brand once joked on BBC Radio 4, “some battery acid”.

This culture has been embarrassed before. Ironically, it was via light entertainment that Boris Johnson became liberal England’s favourite Tory. But apparently no defeat can dampen its cheer, or self-confidence. When Binface spoke to Alastair Campbell last summer, they agreed that the true political divide in Britain is between the “sane and mad”. Which raises two questions. Is it “sane” to go looking for political hope in the bottom of a bin? And what, in a society divided in such Swiftian terms, would you do about the “mad”? Because, unfortunately for the sane, mad people don’t know that they’re mad.

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