Ramblings

Photo: Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons

Prompt: The Third Age Trust Essay Competition 2025:

“Submit an essay (max 1,000 words) making the case for a person, policy, invention or idea that has positively shaped society”. This essay was one of twenty shortlisted out of ninety entrants.

Anyone paying even the slightest attention to British politics from the 1960s through to the 1990s will remember Screaming Lord Sutch. At almost every by-election he was to be seen banging the drum for his party – at first the National Teenage Party (when he was 22) and later the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. 

At election counts, he would stand behind the sober-suited, po-faced candidates in his ridiculous attire – always sporting his trademark top hat and a preposterous rosette. When the Returning Officer, inevitably, would announce his defeat by a huge margin, Sutch would immediately shake hands vigorously with the winner, in a generous, no-hard-feelings, best-man-won sort of way – hilarious because everyone knew that he never stood a chance.

He had started as a second rate English rock’n’roller. In the early 1960s he changed his stage name from David Sutch to Screaming Lord Sutch, 3rd Earl of Harrow, in homage to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, the American pioneer of shock rock. He had a talent for attracting top class musicians, but this never translated to top class recordings or chart hits. This tendency peaked with the 1970 release of Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends, which, despite the performances and songwriting contributions of heavyweights like Jimmy Page, John Bonham, Jeff Beck, Noel Redding and Nicky Hopkins, was named in a 1998 BBC poll as the worst album of all time.

His live shows could be fun, though, and I attended one fine gig at Warwick where students were recruited from the bar to bear him in a coffin through the crowd to the stage, where, in Jay Hawkins style, he rose screaming from the coffin to begin his set. The band then played a set of rock’n’roll classics which, though hardly original, were very energetic and danceable.

But he is rightly remembered for his political career. His time with the Official Monster Raving Loony Party produced excellent policy ideas like a 99p coin (to avoid the need for a penny change), selling socks in packs of three in case you lost one, and renaming South Hams in Devon as South Hams, Egg and Chips. Margaret Thatcher was unimpressed by such frivolity, and the deposit required to stand for the House of Commons was hiked from £150 to £500 in 1985. Sutch, of course was undeterred, and by the end of his career in politics he had contested and lost a record 39 elections, never once saving his deposit – although he did poll 4.2% at the 1994 Rotherham by-election, not far off the 5% threshold required.

But it was the voting age issue which brought Sutch into politics. He saw the unfairness and hypocrisy of people under 21 – many of whom were working, paying taxes and raising families – being denied the vote, while the “grown-ups” were behaving as they did in the Profumo affair. So he campaigned in the 1963 Stratford-upon-Avon by-election (caused by Profumo’s resignation) to lower the voting age to 18. In 1970 this became law. Many more of his policies have since been enacted:

– after running a pirate radio station, “Radio Sutch”, from an abandoned WW2 fort in the Thames estuary, he campaigned for the legalisation of commercial pop music radio. Pirate radio was replaced by the monopoly of BBC Radio 1. Finally, Commercial radio was introduced in 1973.

– he campaigned for the abolition of dog licences – which came to pass in 1988.

– also for the introduction of dog passports – pet passports did indeed become a thing in 2001, to ease quarantine constraints.

– he championed all-day pub opening, long before the Licensing Act 1988 allowed pubs to serve alcohol from 11 am to 11 pm. After this victory, he successfully pushed for 24-hour licences.

– alongside friend and fellow perennial losing candidate Bill Boaks – who campaigned on road safety – he advocated the pedestrianisation of Carnaby Street, which happened in 1973.

In keeping with his anarchic and free spirit, he generally campaigned for the removal of what he deemed pointless or unnecessary restrictions imposed by killjoy governments.

One of his greatest impacts was the decisive end to the self-important David Owen’s career in politics. After Owen had rejected a merger with the Liberal party, Sutch outpolled the Social Democratic Party “rump” in the 1990 Bootle by-election. Magnanimous in relative victory, Sutch offered to merge his party with Owen’s, but the SDP was wound up within days.

But sadly his clowning masked chronic depression, and he was especially hard hit by his mother’s death in 1997. He took his own life in 1999.

His career cannot be counted successful in musical or electoral terms. But he gave us many laughs, always in short supply when watching the television news. And how many politicians can get close to his record of getting such enlightened and progressive policies enacted? 

For now, though, South Hams remains South Hams.