Jessica and Simon are right about Farage: the public-school son of a stockbroker, on two million a year, telling a town he is about to drown that he speaks for it. They have also read the Count’s manifesto, which is more than most newspapers managed. And the Posadas joke is very good.

But Count Binface is not a socialist. He is not anti-neoliberal, and he is not a working-class alternative. Comic candidates look anti-establishment and say the right thing on some issues, but they have no class politics and nothing holding them to account, so what happens to them is decided by everything except the joke. Coluche polled into double figures for the French presidency in 1981 and then slid out of politics, and the anger he had gathered went nowhere. Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement filled the space left by the collapse of the Italian left, and ended up in government with Salvini’s hard right. Neither built anything for the working class.

Anticapitalists should not endorse him, because endorsing a candidate says we support his politics. I don’t.

Jessica and Simon say themselves that there is no credible socialist candidate in Clacton and no movement to mobilise against Farage, because the working class has been crushed for generations. That is the true and important part of their article. They treat it as the reason to back the Count. I think it is the thing the left has to answer for.

Ask what people in Clacton will have on 14 August that they didn’t have on the 12th. Whoever wins, nothing. No branch, no tenants’ union, no organiser in Jaywick, which the government’s own figures call the most deprived neighbourhood in England. A Binface win removes a man and builds nothing, and as the article says, Farage winning doesn’t stop the corruption inquiry anyway.

That isn’t telling anyone they are wrong to want Farage beaten. I understand why many will vote for the Count to do it. Reform is a hard-right party, Restore Britain is a far-right party, and there is a British Democratic Party candidate on this ballot whose politics draw on the BNP and the National Front. Beating them at the ballot box matters. But it is no substitute for beating them in the communities where they were built, and in the poorest seat in England that work has not been done.

A bin is the people’s champion in Clacton because anticapitalists weren’t there. That is a judgment on us, not a punchline. Bin day comes and goes. Jaywick is still there on Friday, and so is the work.