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Why the joke is on Count Binface Our 'comedy' politicians are merely attention-loving exhibitionists

Look — he has a bin on his head! Brill! Credit: Count Binface, YouTube


May 5, 2021   7 mins

One indestructible English myth says this land is uniquely fit for eccentrics to live in. The white cliffs do not just keep invaders out, they contain the nutters too. They are the velvet rope before the padded cell of national life. Beyond this point — the weird, the barking, the barmy, and Noel Edmonds.

Whether the eccentric in question is Sir Isaac Newton, or that bloke in Port Talbot who dresses like a baked bean, they are said to represent this blessed — and peculiar — plot. American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson knew of no other country but England, he said, “where any personal eccentricity is so freely allowed.”

Eccentrics, we tell ourselves, are the oddballs on the outside who end up changing the mainstream for the better. Cracks who let the light in.

It’s a well-worn story, repeated by J.S. Mill, Edith Sitwell, and Christopher Hitchens. When Mill elaborated it in 1859, he was already warning “that so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of our time”. This, too, is part of the tradition. England’s eccentrics are felt to be an endangered species, dying out. Squashed by the forces of conformity: mass education, mass media, the ever-increasing uptake in psychiatric drug use.

This tale has something in it, but it’s probably closer to the truth to note that the eccentric was swallowed whole and digested by another type — the exhibitionist. Exhibitionists want to be loved. Their self-esteem is franchised out to other people, creating an air of desperation about them. There’s no endzone, no landing strip. It never stops. They say: “I am alive, I am alive, I am alive.” The exhibitionist courts disaster.

The eccentric, who is rarer, does not really consider himself eccentric at all. The world is eccentric, and they are normal. It’s an attitude that makes them freer than other people, because it does not depend on other people to exist. Unpretentious and unassuming, they nevertheless have a tendency towards taking one or two personal qualities to a heretical extreme. The eccentric courts embarrassment.

These types are easily confused. Count Binface, the needily satirical candidate for London Mayor, is a glittering example of this. Regularly hailed by the press, foreign and domestic, as a quintessential example of the ‘Great British eccentric’, the sad reality is that the Count would push his nan into a lake for a slice of recognition.

He has one joke. He makes a politician’s evening worse by hovering behind them on the night of a vote count dressed as a bin. This week it will be poor, hapless Shaun Bailey’s turn. When the Conservative candidate’s defeated face is flash-photographed, adorns newsprint, and loops on the 24 hour channels, there will be a man dressed as a bin behind him.

That, as far as I can tell, is the point of Count Binface. That’s it. Is it funny? Maybe the first time around it was, when he did it to Theresa May, in 2017. Then he did it once more, to Boris Johnson, in 2019. But again?

There’s nothing else there. A 20-minute interview between Binface and Owen Jones feels longer than a Scandinavian SlowTV epic about a train making a 50-hour journey between Brønnøysund and Stjørdalshalsen. With fewer laughs.

Binface, like Screaming Lord Sutch before him, is a garden gnome of English political history: garish, hollow, and bafflingly popular with a gormless minority. Both are exhibitionists, not eccentrics.

When Mill made his warning in the mid-nineteenth century, the high tide of the homegrown eccentric was already washing out, and the tide of the exhibitonist was washing in.

(Mill’s small contribution to eccentricity in his own time was a description, in his Autobiography, of his dreadful, narrow-minded wife Harriet, as a greater thinker than himself. He wrote that she was more poetic than Shelley too — for which he became an instant national laughingstock.)

The world-class English eccentrics were usually men, usually aristocrats, and usually born in the eighteenth century. There was nothing cuddly about them, no chance of them ever becoming national treasures (I suspect that this is what Count Binface wants — to win Strictly and co-author children’s books with David Walliams). Insulated by money and status, their oddities and manias grew wild.

Take the politicians alone. There was an eccentric in every rotten borough: the profligates (Charles James Fox), the rakes obsessed with orgies (Francis Dashwood), the proto-populist firebrands (John Wilkes). James ‘Wicked Jimmy’ Lowther, who sat in the Commons for twenty-seven years, had two overriding preoccupations: stinginess and having affairs. These combined when his favourite mistress died. He could not bear to bury her, or pay for a funeral. So he had her embalmed, thereafter using her glass-fronted coffin as a sideboard in his dining room.

Anthony Henley was the MP for Southampton in the 1720s. Once he received a request from his constituents that he should vote against some tax changes proposed in the budget. He replied in a letter that he was “surprised at your insolence in troubling me at all…. May God’s curse light upon you, and may it make your women as open and as free to the excise officers as your wives and daughters have always been to me while I have represented your scoundrel corporation.”

Henley did not stand for the borough again.

His political career was longer than John ‘Mad Jack’ Mytton’s. A high-spirited colonel who took his seat in Parliament on a warm day in June, Mytton, who regularly surprised dinner guests by riding a bear around his dining room, found the debate boring.

He lost his patience, left and never returned. He had only been elected after a hard campaign in Shrewsbury, where he walked among his future constituents with ten-pound notes fixed to his hat. These were replaced as soon as they were taken, so Mytton ended up spending £10,000 in a few days, or £899,186.77 in today’s money.

After drinking five bottles of port every morning for most of his adult life, Mytton eventually died in the 1830s — in a debtor’s prison.

Eccentricity was vindictively competitive back then, full of spontaneous boys-club one-upmanship, and an escalating, balls-out weirdness that was both joyous and grotesque. To call it a golden age of eccentricity, which sounds gooey and nostalgic, is too far. They must have been awful up close.

But they do illustrate the difference between eccentrics and exhibitionists. Unlike Count Binface, none of them wanted to be liked. It’s impossible to imagine them being heckled at a stand-up comedy night, bothering the Edinburgh Fringe, or entering Britain’s Got Talent.

The eccentric took his last dinosaur steps long before the forces that are usually blamed for their demise arrived. It was part of the great Victorian make-over: discipline, self-control, fig leaves. Coffee after dinner, not port. As Mill’s writing shows, the Victorians became sentimental about eccentrics. The only Regency wild man to survive fully-formed into the reign of the little Queen was Colonel Charles De Laet Waldo Sibthorp, a long-serving, long-suffering, long-fulminating MP for Lincoln.

Sibthorp set a standard for reaction unequalled in parliamentary history. He was against Catholic Emancipation, against the Reform Act, against the Maynooth Grant, against patented water closets, against sanitary inspectors, and against the Great Exhibition — because Prince Albert was a foreigner.

The only business an Englishman had going abroad, Sibthorp reckoned, was to wage war. Innovation was a “dangerous thing”; reform, he told the house, was what he “detested, as I detest the Devil.” As soon as it was invented, he began a fruitless war against the railway, complaining that they “encourage the working class to move about.”

If Sibthorp were alive now he would milkshaked every time he crossed Parliament Square. If he appeared on Question Time #SibthorpScum would trend for twelve hours. But Victorian liberals — more robustly confident than their contemporaries today — dispatched him with generous laughter, not hatred. Charles Dickens described Sibthorp as a “‘a militia man, with a brain slightly damaged and, quite unintentionally, the most amusing man in the house.” He appeared in Punch over 345 times, always at the fag end of a joke.

The roaring 18th century English eccentric was made safe, an object for sweet reminiscences, like a holiday postcard stuck on a fridge. Biographies and bestiaries of them proliferated — In the Days of the Dandies (1890), The Book of Wonderful Characters (1869), English Eccentricities and Eccentrics (1866), The Life of John Mytton (1870). There would still be eccentrics after this point, but eccentricity was also a guise, slung on the rack of panto costumes that the exhibitionist could wear. It became a choice, even a strategy. The spontaneity was gone.

You can glimpse these changes in the career of the Tory statesman Robert Cecil. He was an immensely wealthy Marquess, and Prime Minister three times. He appeared to disdain ambition. During his maiden Commons speech he paused, yawned, and sat down — he found it all too tedious to carry on with. He turned down the premiership the first two times he was offered it.

Cecil was scruffy too — once arrested on the grounds of his estate on suspicion of being a poacher, once refused entry to the casino at Monte Carlo because he looked like a tramp. The impression is of an accidental Prime Minister, a lovable eccentric somehow forced into No.10 under duress.

But who becomes Prime Minister three times by accident? Cecil undermined all his privileges with a look of ragged incompetence. It made them stronger. His tramp act, and his understatement, made the vanity of his rivals look ridiculous.

Though Cecil is never compared with Boris Johnson, they are very much alike — pretend luxury slobs, and sly exhibitionists, who squeezed this old Regency idea of eccentricity out of a bottle and smeared it on their faces. The difference between them and Count Binface comes down to having a much better education, and a much better act.

For a long time, we have preferred exhibitionists to eccentrics. We talk a good game about fairness and decency, and let foreign despots buy up our football clubs, and look away when Philip Green is garlanded with every prize. We say we celebrate kooks, and the last one we produced was Chris Eubank over 30 years ago.

Boris Johnson’s thumping victory over Jeremy Corbyn was a clear case in point. Exhibitionists beat eccentrics in England, often by pretending to be them. Zoologists call this aggressive mimicry, and your grandmother called it a wolf in sheep’s clothing. In England how often is faked eccentricity a disguise for predators?

At a much lower level, the sympathetic, chummy, punch-in-the-arm coverage Count Binface receives from the press, compared with the staggering nastiness directed from all sides at the utterly eccentric — if not quite harmless — Piers Corbyn, also running for Mayor, demonstrates this. The Victorians would have laughed at Piers, we will end up chucking him in prison.

Compare us with our nearest neighbours. The French gave the world the Marquis du Sade, À rebours and Surrealism. We have the Marquess of Bath, David Copperfield and Russell Brand. Perhaps, ultimately, we are not as strange as we like to think we are.


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Dustin Needle
Dustin Needle
3 years ago

To know that Owen Jones is reduced to interviewing a man with a dustbin on his head to make ends meet, is actually quite uplifting.

Steve Wesley
Steve Wesley
3 years ago
Reply to  Dustin Needle

Uplifting indeed. Imagine how the poor lad felt upon finding Count Binface was his intellectual superior. I suspect Jones has gone to ground to lick his wounds. ( obviously this involves lamenting his treatment on Twi##er. )
We can confidently expect a Guardian exposè revealing that Count Binface is not only a fraud, with no identifiable policies on traffic, knife crime or the many issues facing London, but worse still, is guilty of cultural appropriation from the Tin Man, who is ( should we be so foolish as to forget ) a true friend of Dorothy like the Jones boy.

Mike Boosh
Mike Boosh
3 years ago
Reply to  Steve Wesley

Not heard the phrase “friend of Dorothy” for a while, so thanks for that.

Drahcir Nevarc
Drahcir Nevarc
3 years ago
Reply to  Mike Boosh

I’ve always been partial to “poor thrower”.

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
3 years ago
Reply to  Drahcir Nevarc

I see Andy Marsh has got the chop.

Drahcir Nevarc
Drahcir Nevarc
3 years ago

Not before time.

kathleen carr
kathleen carr
3 years ago
Reply to  Dustin Needle

Ned Kelly ‘disguised ‘ himself by wearing a metal bucket on his head-which is both stupid and eccentric.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
Reply to  Dustin Needle

Apparently Owen Jones had his phone stolen last week. On the plus side, it was a mostly peaceful theft.

kathleen carr
kathleen carr
3 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

Surely his phone was liberated-all property being theft?

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago
Reply to  Dustin Needle

Despite the sneery tone of the article, Count Binface did rather well. Amusingly and fittingly, he defeated the Women’s Equality Party. This party, which of course opposes equality for women, managed only 21,182 votes to the Count’s 24,775.
The majority of the candidates were exhibitionists, only a lot less likeable than Binface.

J Bryant
J Bryant
3 years ago

Well written and amusing article. Thanks for that.
Perhaps the Great British Eccentric isn’t quite extinct yet. Last week, in Unherd’s first Edgelands video, Aris Roussinos interviewed John Mappin who I think can fairly be characterized as a wealthy English eccentric.
For me, Mappin represents the best of what an eccentric can achieve: highlight inconsistencies and flaws in the narrative promulgated by mainstream politicians and their enablers. And also provide a fair bit of free entertainment.
I don’t know if we have eccentrics here in the States. So many mainstream figures seem quite eccentric to me. It’s almost normal in our public life.

Chris Milburn
Chris Milburn
3 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

I agree completely – Mappin was wonderfully, confusingly eccentric. As far as I can tell there were no ulterior motives – he was just wonderfully strange.

Peter LR
Peter LR
3 years ago

I see Count Binface had to pay £5000 deposit to stand in the election – so he’s obviously not a binman!

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago

David Icke is definitely a Great British Eccentric, or should be thought of one till eventually his theory that lizards masquerading as powerful people ruling the earth is proved true, and then he becomes a visionary. (there was a picture of Biden where you could just make out a bit of a tail, but it has since been purged from the internet.)

Orde Wingate is my favorite Eccentric living almost during my life, he is parodied wonderfully by George MacDonald Fraser in the best combat war diary written ‘Quartered Safe Out Here’ of the Burma Campaign, WWII, and gets covered more sedately by Sir Wilfred Thesiger on the Ethiopian Campaign. Just the very finest kind of soldiering eccentric. Thesiger is my second favorite.

Last edited 3 years ago by Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas
James Slade
James Slade
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

The oddest coincidence about Orde Wingate is that he played a major role in support Zionism in the 1930s, most of the first generation of Israeli army commanders were trained by him in the 30s. His cousin,T E Lawrence, played a major role in Arab nationalism.

James Slade
James Slade
3 years ago
Reply to  James Slade

Wavell, who was CinC Middle East at the time, said if had known Windgate was Lawrence’s cousin he would never put him in charge for training the self defence force.

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
3 years ago
Reply to  James Slade

Hard to fault a Wykehamist.

David Platzer
David Platzer
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

There is a biography about him by Christopher Sykes.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

David Icke is surely mentally ill, rather than eccentric. He destroyed his own life with potty ramblings based on films that had excited him.

David Boulding
David Boulding
3 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

I suspect Icke may be financially better off then ever..

Mike Boosh
Mike Boosh
3 years ago
Reply to  David Boulding

I don’t dispute that he’s as mad as a barrelfull of monkeys, but I suspect he’s earning a lot more than 200k a year now… And as an old stale and pale presenter he’d have been put out to pasture by the BBC years ago and been replaced by someone more “representative”. Its probably accidental, but I reckon seeing lizards under the bed is the best thing that could have happened to him, career-wise.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago
Reply to  Mike Boosh

He may well be making out like a bandit, Mike, but I reckon the first 20 of the last 30 years were probably pretty lean for him. He doesn’t strike me as having the foresight to have thought that far ahead.
A similar and more typical case is David Shayler, formerly of MI5, who also believes and originates conspiracy theories and is currently living as a transvestite called Dolores.

William Murphy
William Murphy
3 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

Decades ago Malcolm Muggeridge noted the questionable sanity of many people in British intelligence. Like irregular warfare, it attracts people who think outside the box (and should probably be locked up in one). My favourite was the British operative working with the French Resistance who drove around occupied France in a car with a Union Jack on the bonnet.

mike otter
mike otter
3 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

I agree with those below – he’s probably further toward ill than well on the mennal elf chart but many are….He is very shrewd IMO hence the family firm structure so his son can run it after he is taken to planet zog or whatever. Whether he believes his own credo i don’t know but how different is his mythology from Boris Johnson’s Churchill hagiography? Boris either believes in the historicist notion that individuals- generally white, male and armed make history or he doesn’t but knows others like the idea so is cashing in. Either way only one of them has the potential to be dangerous to civil society.

Robin Lambert
Robin Lambert
3 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

D.Icke He did work for the BBC ..nuff said..

Chris Milburn
Chris Milburn
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

I would class Icke as an exhibitionist. I don’t think he pushes odd theories because he believes them, I think he does because it’s made him incredibly wealthy. A true eccentric is not externally motivated – weirdness comes naturally.

Seb Dakin
Seb Dakin
3 years ago
Reply to  Chris Milburn

You should have seen the initial stuff, on Wogan as I recall. If a guy with a rock-solid job at the BBC figured donning a shellsuit and babbling about aliens was going to be a smart career choice then either way he was crazy. Gotta remember, this was pre-internet. It was not easy or obvious to see how you monetize a belief that the elites are lizards.
He may be an exhibitionist for all I know – then again he was live on TV to an audience of millions every week. He didn’t need act mad to get attention. I honestly don’t think you can question his genuine nuttiness. David Icke is truly a nutter. It’s just a matter of where you draw the line between eccentricity and mental illness.
Perhaps that’s the thing. Almost any deviation from ‘normal’ behaviour gets medicalised these days. Our would-be eccentrics are all on their meds.

Christopher Chantrill
Christopher Chantrill
3 years ago

I just did a bit of checking and it was the Duke of Wellington that said railways “encourage the poor to move about.” Sibthorp called railways “the Steam Humbug.” in Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know by Karl Shaw.
Today, of course the Iron Dukes are the lefty fans of trains and light rail. That’s because today it is cars that “encourage the poor to move about.”
Yep. The ruling class likes to keep the poor in their place. No moving about allowed.

Last edited 3 years ago by Christopher Chantrill
Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago

Well they have solved that problem by making today’s trains unaffordable for the poor.

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
3 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

Even in 1960 when a decent wage was about £12 per week a single from Paddington to Bristol cost 33/ or one pound and thirteen shillings. If you had a decent lunch onboard that would set you back another pound, more if you hit the ‘Old Monk’ Port.

Last edited 3 years ago by CHARLES STANHOPE
Sam McLean
Sam McLean
3 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

You’d support renationalistion then Fraser?

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
3 years ago
Reply to  Sam McLean

Yes, and bring back Beeching, all is forgiven.

Robin Lambert
Robin Lambert
3 years ago

Beeching was A Chemist at ICI ..The Main reason Concrete mess of motorways,gained Ground in 1960s Was Ernest Marples(Minister of transport) brother John Had a Road construction company 7won most of the Early Contracts..

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
3 years ago
Reply to  Robin Lambert

Yes. agreed.
However the infamous Modernisation Plan of 1955 should have been preceded by Dr Beeching or someone similar.

As it was 1955 saw millions squandered well before Dr Beeching arrived in 1962/3, when the situation was already desperate.

The whole transition from steam to diesel/electric was an expensive fiasco that bankrupted BR*, and also vilified the very name of BR.

(* British Railways).

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
Reply to  Sam McLean

Possibly. I don’t really know enough about it. We’re probably screwed with horrible, plasticky trains and expensive tickets either way. The might be fewer strikes under a privatised service, but I don’t remember British Rail being as bad as some claim it to have been, and in the 1980s and early 90s it seemed to be reasonably priced on the whole.

William Murphy
William Murphy
3 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

With the cost of electric and hydrogen cars, the poor won’t be moving around in those either.

nick harman
nick harman
3 years ago

Auberon Waugh also complained about people moving about on railways who really had no business to.

Tony Nunn
Tony Nunn
3 years ago

Thinking of eccentrics in politics reminds me of the late Bill Boakes who, I believe, still holds the record for the greatest number of lost deposits. He would typically stand for election in several constituencies and fail to retain his deposit (it was only £150 in those days) in any of them. The title of his “party” was long and prone to change but the central theme was road safety – as proclaimed by the billboards covering the extremely dangerous looking contraption on which he used to cycle around South London.

Matthew Steeples
Matthew Steeples
3 years ago

Your article has only encouraged me further to vote for Count Binface as you plainly have failed to grasp that not only Livingstone, Johnson and Khan have failed as Mayor of London, but Shaun Bailey (who you rightly observe will not win) would too. Instead of having a pop at brilliant Binface (formerly Buckethead) – who has been standing for yonks before Theresa May wrecked our political scene – maybe embrace the fact that the mainstream parties deserve an almighty kick in their sorry arses and support a protest candidate. Next!

Robin Lambert
Robin Lambert
3 years ago

Lord Buckethead,Was Unfairly beaten by Thereason May in Dec 2019 in Maidenhead..

Stephen Rose
Stephen Rose
3 years ago

Sentimental attachment to eccentrics, died out in the 1980’s.I remember the late great Dave Allen, having a soft spot for an English eccentric,non aristos too.
You need a bolt hole, to be a practicing eccentric,not a platform.
I gave a lift to someone I thought was a tramp, breton cap, two Co-op carrier bags, he was drenched to the skin, walking on the road outside Polegate, East Sussex.
My first car, a worn out Hillman Avenger, the man climbed in, I recognised him as Lord Longford. He didn’t introduce himself, the carrier bags were full of Home Office correspondence. He launched into a conversation on penal reform, after 20 minutes or so, he asked me to drop him off with an invitation to come to tea, I declined, off he went.
Can’t imagine a public figure behaving like that now.
I think your analysis is spot on, the public regard Keith Lemon as an eccentric. I will still take a sneaky pleasure in Count Binface, whispering in Sadiq Khan’s ear “You are only human”

jim payne
jim payne
3 years ago
Reply to  Stephen Rose

Keith Lemon! What a total pratt.

James Slade
James Slade
3 years ago

Here we have the genuine voice of the metropolitan middle class. The poor mistreated Corbyn brothers, just harmless eccentrics rather than a pair of vicious racists. Don’t mention the fact that Jeremy has repeatedly supported terrorists. As for Boris, he committed the cardinal sin of being successful by ignoring all those nice middle class people with degrees from Russell group universities. The most amusing thing of course is that fact their arrogance and disdain is a constant reminder for the rest of the electorate of why they voted for Boris. Yes Boris’s image is calculated but his greatest selling point is that he isn’t you.

Colin Colquhoun
Colin Colquhoun
3 years ago
Reply to  James Slade

Boris didn’t “become” successful, he was born successful. He may well ignore middle class people, because he’s in the ruling, upper class. At university he was in a special group of people who were born that way, and went around wearing formal dinner jackets and getting hammered all the time. I was there. I saw them. Loads of people did, there are photos.
He’s not very competent. He earned very little of his success, and what he did earn was by charm and guile, not by real work. He doesn’t care what happens to anyone else. How do you not see that?

James Slade
James Slade
3 years ago

How unlike the privately educated Crobyn borthers

Colin Colquhoun
Colin Colquhoun
3 years ago
Reply to  James Slade

Of course he’s unlike them. He’s very privileged indeed. All three of them seem atrocious to me, but not for the same reasons.

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
3 years ago

As Tacitus*might have said:

“Consensu omnium capax imperii nisi imperasset” =

‘Everyone agreed that he was capable of ruling until he actually got the job’.

(*Tacitus on Galba).

kathleen carr
kathleen carr
3 years ago

The awaiting approval is certainly eccentric. I said that we often mix real and fictional characters-comparing people to Mr Toad for example.

kathleen carr
kathleen carr
3 years ago

Apart from Screaming Lord Sutch didn’t the current craze for silly candidates come from Monty Python? There does seem a rather unfunny seam of middle-class humour where a person presents as consciously eccentric-wearing half a moustache for example-who are not usually very funny.

Nigel Clarke
Nigel Clarke
3 years ago
Reply to  James Slade

But, nevertheless, correct.

kathleen carr
kathleen carr
3 years ago
Reply to  James Slade

The author mentions David Copperfield and Aunt Betsey looks after Mr D–k , after rescuing him from an asylum. His work on his memoirs keeps being interrupted by thoughts of King Charles’ head. Dickens is full of eccentrics characters & I think we muddle up fact and fiction when thinking about British people-constantly comparing people to Mr Toad for example.

Grenville Smith
Grenville Smith
3 years ago
Reply to  James Slade

“Terrorist” is in the eye of the beholder? Thatcher and Reagan both accused Nelson Mandela of being one.

Niobe Hunter
Niobe Hunter
3 years ago

Well, he was quite prepared to commit acts of terrorism, and encouraged other people to do so.

Paul N
Paul N
3 years ago

Harumph! Eccentrics aren’t what they used to be. Everything is going to pot. Bah humbug.

mike otter
mike otter
3 years ago

How dare you conflate his Lordship with Binface? Lord Sutch was a shock rocker before Arthur Brown, Alice Cooper or Wednesday 13 had even seen a makeup box. He was the Silly Party made real from about mid 60s onward and though eccentric his point was: Politicians are ridiculous, those in it for ideological reasons are dangerous, those in it for the corruption are actually pretty harmless, and DON’T VOTE FOR THEM IT ONLY ENCOURAGES THEM. You can still get away with being eccentric in Britain but you do need to back it up these days, which is sad for all of us except cops, lawyers and weapons dealers.

Max Beran
Max Beran
3 years ago
Reply to  mike otter

Where are the ladies in all this? Is it because, in that deathless phrase, they know their place?

Arnold Grutt
Arnold Grutt
3 years ago
Reply to  Max Beran

One that was called eccentric was Margaret Rutherford, but I also heard her called ‘a typical English eccentric’ (an oxymoron surely) which is a clue to what she really was (no slight intended) a cliche upper-middle class battleaxe in tweeds, rushing around doing good, and bothering officialdom. There was another similar 1950s/60s character actress, whose first name was ‘June’ I think, often seen in tweeds on a bike, or ‘rambling’ in hillside gear with a knobbly stick, with a face like a thunderstorm.

Last edited 3 years ago by Arnold Grutt
Stephen Rose
Stephen Rose
3 years ago
Reply to  Arnold Grutt

Hmmm, could that be Beryl Reid, she certainly was fabulous, very funny and very much a character off screen. Theatricality certainly was a hiding place for eccentric characters, Sir Ralph Richardson, was a legend in the eccentricity stakes.
Joe Orton, Frank Zappa,Ken Russell, Joan Littlewood, today’s celebs are a sad bunch of suck ups, compared to those guys.

mike otter
mike otter
3 years ago
Reply to  Max Beran

Why do you think the band is called Wednesday 13 and the Frankenstein Drag Queens? I reckon there are as many women as men eccentrics but they tend not to congregate in shock rock bands or spoof political movements. Women are well represented in horror punk and goth styled bands and by the law of averages some at will be eccentrics. Susan Ballion is known to have a fair few pet cats which according to folk wisdom signifies eccentricity.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago
Reply to  mike otter

Actually, given that there are more male than female outliers in pretty well everything, whether it’s height, shoe size, IQ or anything else, there probably are more male eccentrics than female. Women are grouped more closely around the mean, so if being eccentric is exceptional, there won’t be as many of them that are.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago
Reply to  Max Beran

Barbara Woodhouse would have qualified, I’d think.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago

I would say that, for instance, Sir Desomond Swayne MP is a bit of an eccentric. Crap Man**** (sic)*, on the other hand, is definitely one of the exhibitionists.
*I refer to our obnoxious and supercilious Secretary of State for Health or whatever his title is.

eugene power
eugene power
3 years ago

Owen jones and dustbin.. when is collection day in Islington ?

ashtreeimages
ashtreeimages
3 years ago

If he warrants an article written about him, he must still be relevant.

Matthew Steeples
Matthew Steeples
3 years ago
Reply to  ashtreeimages

He’s got more in that bin than Bailey will ever have in his Bozo brain.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago

If you were talking about Andrew Bailey of he BoE I’d agree with you.

nick harman
nick harman
3 years ago

What exactly then is Fox?

Matthew Steeples
Matthew Steeples
3 years ago
Reply to  nick harman

A complete, utter cr**inius w**ker.

William Murphy
William Murphy
3 years ago

“….how often is faked eccentricity a disguise for predators?”. Shrewd comment Will. Think of that loveable eccentric Sir Jimmy Savile, OBE, KCSG. Or the loveable rogue Boris with his string of discarded mistresses and £400 billion of taxpayer money poured down the COVID toilet.

Karen Jemmett
Karen Jemmett
3 years ago

But I don’t wish to move around anymore!

Niobe Hunter
Niobe Hunter
3 years ago

‘I am alive, I am alive etc’. Pretty much covers everyone on Twitter.
by the way, bit unfair on JS Mill. I don’t think having an unreasonably high estimation for your wife really qualifies as being eccentric.