An Alien, a Stockbroker, and Two Eclipses: The Astrology of Clacton
Imagine a by-election nobody quite knows how to satirise. A sitting MP resigns in the middle of a £5 million crypto donation row. Every major party declines to field a candidate against him. The effective challenger is a man in a silver cape and a dustbin-shaped helmet, who has never been to the constituency and who describes himself , entirely sincerely , as an intergalactic space warrior from the planet Sigma IX.
This is the 2026 Clacton by-election, and it is, astrologically speaking, about as dramatic as the headliners deserve.
The Two Candidates
Nigel Farage needs little introduction, but his biography does the heavy lifting in this piece. Born in 1964, schooled at Dulwich College from 1975 to 1982, he skipped university and walked straight into the City in 1982 as a commodities trader at the London Metal Exchange, spending roughly two decades working metals at firms including Drexel Burnham Lambert, Crédit Lyonnais Rouse, Refco and Natixis Metals, before setting up his own firm, Farage Futures. He failed to win a Westminster seat six times before Clacton delivered his seventh and successful attempt in 2024.
His opponent , and "opponent" is doing quite a lot of work in that sentence , is Count Binface, the alter ego of the comedian and writer Jon Harvey, who has written for Have I Got News for You and The Revolution Will Be Televised. Binface first stood as Lord Buckethead against Theresa May in Maidenhead in 2017, then rebranded (a naming dispute with Todd Durham, creator of the original Lord Buckethead character, forced the change) and stood as Count Binface against Boris Johnson in Uxbridge and South Ruislip in 2019 and again in the 2023 by-election, and against Rishi Sunak in Richmond and Northallerton in 2024. He contested the London mayoral elections of 2021 and 2024. His high-water mark was the 2021 mayoral race, where he polled 92,896 votes and finished ninth of twenty candidates. His most recent outing was the 2026 Makerfield by-election, where he polled 95 votes , 0.2% , and finished seventh.
A few of his standing policies, for the record: a 99p price cap on a 99 Flake, the abolition of auto-renew on digital subscriptions, and a pledge to build at least one affordable home in the constituency. On BBC Radio 4's Today programme he was asked whether he could win, replied "probably not," and added that his job was to "celebrate and defend British democracy." The Shadow Attorney General, separately, has suggested that a Binface win could cause a constitutional crisis, on the basis that parliamentary convention forbids MPs from addressing the House wearing a hat.
The Political Setup
What makes the contest so strange is the field. Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives, Restore Britain and the Greens have all declined to field a candidate against Farage, leaving Binface as the effective challenger, with only a scattering of minor and satirical candidates , Laurence Fox for Reclaim, the Monster Raving Loony Party, a Climate Party candidate, the British Democrats, the Forward Party , to dilute the ballot paper.
Farage's resignation is itself the story. On 7 July 2026 he announced he would vacate the Clacton seat and re-contest it, formally stepping down the next day via the procedural office of Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead. The reason: ongoing scrutiny over financial support he received but did not declare, including a £5 million pre-election gift from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne (already subject to a standards probe), and separate support from his associate George Cottrell covering staffing, security and the use of a London townhouse. He denies wrongdoing, frames the contest as "people vs the establishment," and gets one procedural perk out of the deal: re-election resets the rolling 12-month window of MP declarations.
One important caveat for the astrology below: the poll date is not yet fixed. Farage would prefer 6 August, with other possible dates in early-to-mid August. So "late August" , the original window , would in practice push the writ too far for the current political weather, and the reading below is written for whichever August date the poll actually lands on.
The Cosmic Weather for August 2026
If there is a month in 2026 designed to make a by-election feel cosmically overdetermined, it is August. The month sits inside a full eclipse season, the outer-planet backdrop is unusually active, and several of the slow-moving planets are clustered in fire and air signs , which is itself a talking point among mundane astrologers.
Two Eclipses, Back to Back
The headline astronomical event of the month is the total solar eclipse on 12 August 2026 at 20° Leo. It crosses Greenland, Iceland and Spain , and the UK sees a partial eclipse that evening , making it the first total solar eclipse to touch mainland Europe since 1999. Then, on the night of 27 to 28 August, comes the deep partial lunar eclipse at 4° Pisces, with about 96% of the Moon in Earth's shadow and the best views from the Americas. The August Full Moon , the Sturgeon Moon , is that same event.
Eclipses, in the astrological tradition, are cosmic punctuation marks: moments when fate accelerates, hidden things surface, and endings arrive more sharply than usual. A Leo solar eclipse opening the cycle, followed by a Pisces lunar eclipse closing it, is a fairly dramatic bookend for any contest, and any candidate whose chart has planets near 20° Leo or 4° Pisces is going to feel it.
The Big Aspects in Range
Several slow-moving aspects are live across the August window, and they pull in sharply different directions:
- Jupiter in Leo trine Saturn in Aries , exact on 31 August 2026, in range from roughly 31 July to 30 September. This is the headline aspect peaking inside the polling window: a rare, supportive aspect between the two old guard of the solar system, traditionally associated in mundane astrology with a consolidation of authority or a stabilising moment for established power.
- Jupiter in Leo opposition Pluto in Aquarius , exact around 20 July and in range through about 19 August. A heavier, more combative aspect: power struggles, exposure of hidden resources, populist versus institutional force.
- Jupiter in Leo trine Neptune in Aries , in the same window. Less dramatic, but the kind of aspect that can lift a candidate's mystique or muddy their message, depending on how well it lands on their chart.
- Uranus in Gemini trine Pluto in Aquarius , a rare supportive aspect that favours unconventional candidates and rapid shifts in public mood.
The Sun, meanwhile, moves into Virgo on 23 August, and Mercury joins the Sun in Virgo on 25 August. That last week of the month is, astrologically, quite a Virgo-heavy stretch , which suits a fussy, detail-obsessed, scrutineering tone, and may not be the kind of energy a former metals trader wants in the room when financial scrutiny is the backdrop of the campaign.
Reading the Two Charts
Now to the part the title all but promises: does an intergalactic space warrior from planet Sigma IX actually stand a chance against a former Dulwich commodities trader?
Astrologically, the answer is: more than you'd think, if you take the symbolism at face value.
The Cosmic Case for Binface
Eclipse seasons favour outsiders, disruptors and anyone whose story doesn't fit the usual template. Binface is, by his own description, not just an outsider but a literal off-worlder , about as "out of the ordinary" as a chart can get. The Uranus-in-Gemini-trine-Pluto-in-Aquarius backdrop is exactly the kind of aspect astrologers associate with unconventional candidates catching a public mood, and his stated policies (the 99p Flake, the auto-renew ban, the one affordable home) are perfectly tuned to that disruptor wavelength: small, concrete, slightly absurd, easy to repeat on a doorstep.
The Pisces lunar eclipse on 28 August, if the poll lands late, falls in a sign traditionally associated with compassion, symbolism and the kind of public mood in which voters may briefly forgive a candidate for being silly if the gesture feels sincere. Binface's stated reason for standing , "celebrating and defending British democracy" , sits comfortably inside that register.
The Cosmic Case for Farage
Against all that: Jupiter trine Saturn is, astrologically, the most establishment-friendly aspect of the month. It is the aspect of consolidation, institutional weight and the kind of slow, grinding momentum that rewards incumbency, infrastructure and people who have been in the room a long time. Farage has been in the public room for a quarter of a century. The 2024 Clacton result was decisive: he took the seat with a substantial majority, and the demographics of the constituency , older, working-class, coastal, right-leaning , match his coalition closely.
A Leo solar eclipse with Jupiter also in Leo is, in the older astrological texts, "the moment of the king" , a literal or symbolic figure of authority having his moment. Farage, whatever else you say about him, has spent thirty years positioning himself as exactly that. He is also the candidate with the most to gain from the Jupiter-Pluto opposition fading out of range after 19 August , a heavy aspect whose energy, if he absorbs it well, transfers cleanly into the supportive Jupiter-Saturn trine by 31 August.
And there is one procedural bonus he gets regardless of the stars: the rolling window of MP declarations resets on his re-election, and the existing investigation into his financial declarations restarts its clock. The by-election, in other words, is a feature of his political strategy, not a bug.
The Verdict from the Stars
The astrology of August 2026 does not predict a Binface victory. It does, however, predict a contest in which the symbolic disruption (an alien, a dustbin helmet, an unvisited constituency) sits at one end of the room, and the consolidating weight of Jupiter trine Saturn and the Leo eclipse sits at the other , and which side gets the loudest headline depends almost entirely on whether any of the slow-moving aspects land on Farage's natal chart at a sensitive point.
A Binface win, on this evidence, would not be impossible, but it would be, in the language of astrology, a genuinely Uranian event: sudden, unexpected, and almost certainly the kind of thing a sensible bookmaker would price at roughly the same odds as Binface's 95 votes at Makerfield in early 2026.
For astrologers, though, the value of the contest is less the result than the spectacle: a Leo eclipse, a Pisces eclipse, Jupiter trine Saturn exact on 31 August, the Sun moving into Virgo on the 23rd , and the only candidate billed as a Recyclon from Sigma IX taking on the most conventional commodities-trader-turned-politician in Westminster, in a constituency no other party even bothered to contest. That is not a by-election. That is an episode of a soap opera the universe has been writing for months.
If a contest like this makes you look twice at your own chart , at which Leo or Pisces eclipses are landing on which planets, and which slow-moving aspects are live in your own life this autumn , you are not alone. The team at Wilfred Hazelwood Astrology and Psychology Clinic see plenty of clients in exactly that moment, and the reading, more often than not, is far less silly than the one Clacton is currently offering.
