Looking back at loony characters from our political past

Screaming Lord Sutch and his election agent pictured at the count in February 1998

Quite what my mother would have thought of Brexit I don’t know, writes Monica Dyson. She was very pro Europe but that was only because as she got older she managed to get away somewhere nice and hot in Spain or Italy every year, with her equally ageing cronies. Politics didn’t come into it.

However, during the 1950s, my mother was an enthusiastic voter at all elections. I remember when it was the General Election in England in 1959 she voted for the Conservative candidate for Brightside, Sheffield, Hugo Holmes. It wasn’t that she actually had any real interest in politics, but as she said ‘Hugo was so handsome and spoke so nicely!’ He didn’t actually get anywhere as all through the 1950s Richard Winterbottom, the Labour candidate became the people’s choice with every election, but she was exercising her democratic right to vote, and if that was the criteria she used, then so be it.

I sometimes think that you might as well vote for people on the strength of their looks, as politics seems to be something that can attract people who are completely off their rockers. The British people have always loved their eccentrics, and there was no one who fitted that description more than the musician David ‘Screaming Lord’ Sutch (Third Lord of Harrow). My husband votes reluctantly in any election, having no faith in anyone from any political party. However he has said that, if Lord Sutch had been standing in Sheffield, he would have voted for him enthusiastically, as he was the only person who has ever brought a sense of fun to the political scene.

I remember a few years ago we went to see Lord Sutch and The Savages at The Boardwalk, the premier Sheffield music venue which sadly closed some years ago. They were very late arriving as they had lost their way.

The band walked through the concert venue carrying a coffin and once on the stage it opened to reveal Sutch. That would set the tone for an evening of utter madness. Despite a self-confessed lack of any vocal talent, Sutch carved out a prolific and varied career.

In the early 60s he started to stand in parliamentary elections, at first representing the National Teenage Party, and then by the 1980s The Monster Raving Loony Party -‘Vote for Insanity!’ In his career he contested over 40 elections, always losing his deposit but always commanding a respectable number of votes. After he polled several hundred votes in Margaret Thatcher’s constituency in 1983, the deposit was raised from £150 to £500. Undeterred, he increased the number of his concerts to pay the extra cost. He achieved his highest number of votes in Rotherham in 1994 with 1,114 votes.

David Sutch, whose idol was Winston Churchill, had many famous friends to include Mick Jagger and even visited the Playboy Mansion in America. However, although viewed as a harmless eccentric by many, he was also thought of as a complete nuisance by others.