Count Binface, Clacton's Only Serious Candidate.

Political manifestos have become rather exhausting. They promise to rebuild the nation, restore trust, secure borders, rescue the economy and generally usher in a brighter tomorrow.

Count Binface would simply like your croissant to cost £1.10. His platform also includes restoring Ceefax, making trains run properly, and conscripting anyone who uses a speakerphone on public transport. Somewhere in there is a proposal for former prime ministers to undertake national service, which may have wider appeal than intended. This is the difficulty with Count Binface. The more ridiculous the manifesto appears, the more awkward it becomes for everyone else's.

Britain has always found room on the ballot paper for the eccentric candidate. There seems to be an unspoken understanding that democracy is sturdy enough to survive a man wearing a wheelie bin on his head. It may even benefit from it. This time, though, the eccentric candidate isn't padding out the ballot. He's most of it.

Nigel Farage resigned his Clacton seat this month, ostensibly to let voters have their say again, less ostensibly while a parliamentary inquiry into an undeclared personal gift closes in on him. He then announced he'd be recontesting the seat he'd just vacated, which is either supreme confidence or a very expensive way of buying time. Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and Restore Britain took one look at the by-election and decided, unanimously, that it wasn't worth turning up for.

Which leaves Count Binface as the opposition. Not a novelty entrant polling in the low single digits for a laugh. The opposition. Bookmakers have shortened his odds. A green energy tycoon has offered to fund his campaign. Andy Burnham has posed for photos with him, and the Leader of the Opposition has floated him, apparently in earnest, as the authentic "people versus the establishment" candidate, a title Farage spent thirty years cultivating for himself, now being handed without irony to a man in a bin. Binface, asked whether he'd even been to Clacton before announcing his candidacy, admitted he hadn't, adding that he'd rather got the impression from Farage that staying away was simply part of how you did the job.

Farage has built his entire career presenting himself as the outsider taking on the establishment. It has been a remarkably successful career for someone permanently introducing himself as the new arrival. Three decades in politics, two decades in the European Parliament, Brexit, Westminster and now a resignation of his own making have done little to disturb the image.

Political success, however, has a habit of changing the scenery. The anti-establishment campaign gradually acquires wealthy donors, media advisers, fundraising dinners and, every so often, a helicopter. The rebellion becomes better organised. The outsider becomes a familiar face. One day the establishment is no longer something over there. It is giving the keynote address, and mildly annoyed that the inquiry keeps getting adjourned.

Australian readers will recognise the pattern. Pauline Hanson still speaks the language of insurgency despite becoming one of the country's longest-serving political figures. That is less a criticism than an occupational hazard. Populism depends on remaining the outsider, even after the furniture has your name on it. What's happened in Clacton is the logical endpoint of that arrangement. Every party built to actually run the country looked at the choice between legitimising a scandal and contesting the seat, and chose neither. They didn't lose the argument. They didn't show up for it. The vacancy was filled, entirely by default, by a man wearing a rubbish bin asking why housing is unaffordable and trains don't work.

The remarkable thing is that these are not especially silly questions. Satire has always worked best when it says something perfectly sensible in an entirely inappropriate costume. British politics, this month, has managed something rarer still: it has made the inappropriate costume the most credible thing on the ballot.

Whether Count Binface wins is almost beside the point, though it is no longer quite as beside the point as it used to be. His real achievement isn't the manifesto. It's exposing, with some precision, exactly how many serious people are prepared to be serious about this.

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The views expressed are those of the correspondent. Factual claims draw on publicly available sources.