November 10th: Screaming Lord Sutch

Screaming Lord Sutch, founder of the Monster Raving Loony Party was born on this date in 1940.

1. Screaming Lord Sutch is Britain's longest-serving party leader, having led the Official Monster Raving Loony Party from 1983 to 1999.
2. Before entering politics, he was a musician. Although he freely admitted that he wasn't a great singer, he staged a horror themed stage show based on Jack the Ripper, in the 1960s.
3. He once co-owned a radio station with his manager, Reginald Calvert. They took over Shivering Sands Army Fort, a Maunsell Fort off Southend in 1964 and started Radio Sutch, to compete with other pirate radio stations such as Radio Caroline. Broadcasts consisted of music and Mandy Rice-Davies reading Lady Chatterley's Lover. Sutch got bored with it, though, and Calvert bought him out and ran it as Radio City until 1967.
4. Before the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, Sutch represented the National Teenage Party.
5. Sutch founded the the Official Monster Raving Loony Party in 1983. He never won any of the 40 or more elections he contested - he often stood directly against existing party leaders - and although he sometimes gained a respectable number of votes, his highest ever share was 4.2%.
6. The party had better results in council elections and did take a couple of council seats from the Tories in the late 80s and early 90s.
7. Nevertheless, the Official Monster Raving Loony Party did help shape British politics in a couple of ways. It was after Sutch polled several hundred votes in Margaret Thatcher's Finchley constituency in 1983 that the deposit paid by candidates was raised from £150 to £500, to try and deter non-serious candidates. Sutch merely put on music concerts to raise the money and carried on. Then, in the Bootle by-election in 1990, he got more votes than the candidate of the Continuing Social Democratic Party (SDP), led by former Foreign Secretary David Owen. Devastated that they couldn't even beat the Raving Loonies, the SDP dissolved itself within days.
8. Not all Raving Loony policies were completely daft. Some of them actually became law, for example, votes at 18, "passports for pets", and all-day pub openings first appeared in Loony manifestos.
9. Screaming Lord Sutch, suffering from clinical depression after the death of his mother, Annie, in 1998, committed suicide on 16 June 1999. This didn't spell the end of the party, though. The members held a ballot, and the result was a tie between Alan "Howling Laud" Hope and his cat, Catmando so they became joint leaders. The cat sadly died in 2002, leaving Hope to lead the party by himself, as he does to this day.
10. Although Sutch never won an election in real life, he has done in some alternative realities. In the ITV comedy The New Statesman, he came second in the 1987 election, ahead of Labour and SDP. In The 2009 adventure game, Time Gentlemen, Please! the OMRLP were voted in and handed Britain over to the United States, allowing it to become the 51st state.