Let's recap the strangest fortnight in British politics.
Nigel Farage resigned as MP for Clacton. On purpose. To trigger a by-election. Which he is standing in. To win back the job he just resigned from. If you're confused, don't worry, so is everyone, including, we suspect, Nigel.
The response from Westminster was swift and decisive: absolutely nobody turned up. Labour called it a circus and stayed home. The Conservatives called it fake and stayed home. The Lib Dems and Greens looked at their diaries and discovered they were washing their hair on 13 August.
Which left exactly one challenger standing between Farage and re-coronation: Count Binface. A space warrior. With a bin on his head. Currently second favourite at the bookies to become the Member of Parliament for Clacton.
We watched all this unfold and thought: hang on. If the bar for entry is "a man wearing a bin," we know a guy.
Enter Riot Man
Clacton, meet your third candidate.* Riot Man: defender of flavour, enemy of boring, the only political figure in Britain with a manifesto you'll actually want to read.
While the other candidates are running on "give me my job back" and "intergalactic bin justice," Riot Man is running on the issues that genuinely keep this country up at night. Slow walkers. Seagulls with no respect for the law. Self-checkouts that accuse you of crimes you did not commit.
And one issue we're deadly serious about. More on that in a minute.
The Riot Man Manifesto
Smoke-free by Friday. Saturday, latest. Other parties want a smoke-free Britain by 2030. Riot Man respects the ambition but questions the urgency. Why wait five years to do the best thing you'll ever do?
Scrap the tax on quitting. This October, the Government introduces a tax on vaping, the thing millions of British smokers used to quit cigarettes. A tax. On quitting smoking. Riot Man has reviewed this policy carefully and concluded: you cannot be serious.
Plain packaging? Plain banned. The Government wants every vape in a standardised white pack, every device in matt white, black or grey, hidden behind shutters like cigarettes. Riot Man's counter-proposal: put the shutters on boring instead to keep quitters, quitting.
Flavours keep their names. Under the new proposals, flavour descriptions get standardised down to a single approved name. Riot Man believes a flavour has the right to its own identity. Mint is not a crime.
Make every smoking area a dance floor. Self-explanatory. Long overdue.
Chip-stealing seagulls to be tried as adults. Clacton, you know. You know.
Wasps banned from beer gardens. Enforcement TBC.
The Bit Where We're Actually Serious
Here's the thing about jokes: the best ones have a point.
Riot exists for one reason, to get adult smokers off cigarettes for good. So while Westminster spends its summer on a by-election nobody can fully explain, the policy that actually affects the UK's vapers, and the six million smokers who haven't switched yet is moving quietly in the background.
On 10 July, the Government opened a consultation proposing that vapes be sold in standardised white packs, that devices come in one matt shade of white, black or grey, that flavours be stripped back to a single approved name on the pack, and that displays be hidden away in shops, potentially behind the same shutters as cigarettes.
Read that again. The same shutters. As cigarettes.
That's the problem, not the colour of the box. More than half of UK adults already wrongly believe vaping is as harmful as smoking, or worse. The Government's own consultation says it's significantly less harmful. But if you wrap vapes like cigarettes, name them like cigarettes and hide them behind the shutters with the cigarettes, you're telling every smoker in Britain they're the same thing. Some will shrug and stick with the cigarettes. Others will buy whatever's under the counter with no rules at all. Either way, the thing that's helped 2.5 million British adults quit smoking gets dressed up as the thing it's replacing.
THEY'RE DRESSING THE CURE LIKE THE DISEASE. SPEAK NOW.
To be clear: we back tougher rules on youth access and where vapes are sold, we've said so publicly, and we've proposed going further than the Government in some areas. What we won't cheer for is confusing the cure with the disease.
We'll be responding to the consultation properly, with evidence, not a cape. (You can respond too here; it's open until 2 October, and it matters.) But we'd gently suggest that if British politics has room for a man resigning from his own job to reapply for it, and a second man in a bin polling at 4/1, then it has room for one loud question in a red rosette:
Why are we about to tell six million smokers that quitting looks exactly like not quitting?
That's Riot Man's real platform. The seagull stuff is just excellent bonus policy.
How to Vote Riot Man
You can't. He's not real.
But Riot Man's real campaign has a real ballot box, and it's open right now:
- Visit savevaping.co.uk to easily email your MP, respond to the Government's consultation with our guidance, and join the Relapse Register if you're worried these rules could send quitters back to cigarettes. This is the one that counts.
- Follow the campaign on our socials. Riot Man will be on the campaign trail, kissing babies' hands and shaking dogs.
- Share the manifesto. Every share is a vote. (It isn't. But it feels like one.)
- If you smoke, switch. It's the single most Riot Man thing you can do, and unlike his other policies, this one's genuinely available right now.
The consultation closes at 11:59pm on 2 October 2026. Farage gave himself five weeks to save his seat, you've got until October to save something better.
Clacton, the choice is clear. One candidate resigned for attention. One candidate has a bin on his head. And one candidate truly believes in a Britain where the seagulls face consequences.
Be more Riot. Vote Riot Man.
*Not actually a candidate. Obviously.