OFF: Lord Sutch

[Paul Mather]

   Electronic Telegraph UK News

   ISSUE 1483 Thursday 17 June 1999

   Death of Looniest leader in politics
   By Sebastian Berger


   SCREAMING LORD SUTCH, founder of the Monster Raving Loony
   party and a fixture of British elections for decades, was
   found hanged yesterday afternoon. He was 58.

   Police were called to his late mother's house in Harrow,
   north London, at about 3pm. "A man was pronounced dead at the
   scene," a spokesman for Scotland Yard said.

   David Sutch first stood for Parliament in 1963 and went on to
   run in dozens of elections, regularly losing his deposit but
   always bringing colour to politics. Among his ideas were
   turning Battersea power station upside down and using it as a
   snooker table, and converting the EU butter mountain into a
   ski resort.

   The questions he asked included "Why is there only one
   Monopolies Commission?" and the party slogan ran: "Vote for
   Insanity - You know it makes sense!" More seriously, he
   proposed lowering the voting age to 18, the introduction of
   local radio, and honouring the Beatles, all of which
   eventually happened.

   His biggest success came in 1990, when he beat the SDP
   candidate in a by-election at Bootle. The result forced Dr
   David Owen to disband the party, which had remained outside
   the merger between the Liberals and mainstream Social
   Democrats, to avoid further embarrassment.

   Alan Hope, the party's chairman and deputy leader, said he
   was appalled and shocked. He said: "I'm astounded. It's going
   to take a day to sink in. Over the years he has been a bit
   down, when he owed the bank a lot of money, and when his
   mother died, but he had bounced back since then. I spoke to
   him last week and he was buoyant and full of fun."

   Mr Hope, a pub landlord, is mayor of Ashburton, Devon. He
   promised last night: "The party will carry on. The Lord is
   dead, long live the king."

   Sutch was born in London in 1940 and his father, a policeman
   was killed in the Blitz. He became a rock 'n' roll singer and
   adopted the sobriquet Lord from a hat he wore on stage which
   looked like a coronet, adding it to his name by deed poll in
   the late Sixties.