Brexiteer peer Daniel Hannan is not a man you’d want delivering a ribald best man’s speech, or a 20-minute set at a weekend comedy club – but it seems his humourlessness goes way deeper.
Hannan, now director general of the right wing Institute for Economic Affairs, has written a gobsmacking critique of Count Binface’s candidacy for the Clacton by-election in the Daily Telegraph. It appears the po-faced former MEP has no idea whatsoever that Binface is a joke candidate.
For fully 1,400 words Hannan lays into Binface’s policies. “There is a line in Count Binface’s manifesto that encapsulates why Britain is in such a mess. ‘I’ll cut your taxes,’ pledges the Clacton by-election candidate, ‘and raise everyone else’s’,” writes the hapless Hannan.
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“So says every party, if not quite so baldly. Politicians baulk at hiking the taxes that people feel directly. Instead, they raise the taxes at one remove – the taxes that voters imagine fall on others.
“A business no more pays corporation tax than your TV set pays the licence fee, but politicians pander to the section of the electorate which mulishly refuses to understand that all taxes are paid by human beings.”
He alerts Telegraph readers of Binface’s “promises to cap the price of kebabs, and to ‘restore the price of a 99 Flake to 99p’”. “That is pretty much what Zack Polanski says about food prices,” says Hannan, shaking his head. “Indeed, when it comes to energy bills, it is what all the parties say, which helps explain why Britain is getting poorer.
“Capping the price of a kebab is not a brave take on a glaring policy failure. It is what every half-wit who refuses to understand economics would do. If we did somehow fix the price of kebabs, the result would be a massive kebab shortage, because it would no longer be worth producers’ effort to bring them to market.
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“But unscrupulous politicians pretend that price rises are caused by ‘corporate greed’ rather than by excessive regulation, taxation and money-printing.”
Alas, space constraints mean we are denied Hannan’s sober assessment of some of Binface’s other policies, including bringing back Ceefax, forcing rule-breaking cyclists onto unicycles, making corners in football “refereed properly” and renaming London Bridge the Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
But perhaps, if Hannan, looked carefully, there may be some clue as to the fact that Nigel Farage’s opponent isn’t hoping to be taken seriously. That’s it: he’s got a bin on his head.
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