While UK Prime Minister Theresa May has her long-term detractors, even they must have had a little sympathy for her, not only for doing badly in the General Election in June, but also for having to stand next to the joke candidates at her constituency during the result. The Prime Minister was pictured next to Lord Buckethead, self proclaimed “Intergalactic Space Lord”, who obviously takes his dark-masked style from Star Wars’ Darth Vader, albeit with the addition of a tall bucket on his head. These strangely dressed types usually stand for election in the Prime Minister’s constituency just to get on telly (TV).
Mind you, Lord Buckethead has also stood against Prime Ministers past including Margaret Thatcher and John Major. And this time he was in self-congratulatory mood as he managed to get 249 votes on his electoral pledge to invest in: “Schools, NHS, Housing Social Care, Local Infrastructure…and other things that humans vote for.”
UK Prime Minister and Conservative leader Theresa May next to Lord Buckethead, Intergalactic Space Lord. Courtesy: Lord Buckethead
He also promised to nationalise the singer Adele in his manifesto. “In order to maximise the efficient use of UK resources, the time is right for great British assets to be brought into public ownership for the common good,” he explained.
Sounds good enough for this writer. Why did so few vote for him? Prime Minister May won in the Maidenhead constituency with 37,718 votes.
Of course, the trend in joke candidates was started by the late Screaming Lord Sutch, who led the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. It continues to field candidates including, in the Maidenhead constituency, Alan “Howling Laud” Hope. There is much fun to be had when the commentators and announcers have to read out “Loony” after a vote count. By the way, Hope succeeded Sutch in 1999 to jointly lead the party with Sutch’s surviving cat “Cat-Mandu”.
This story has another space connection. “Loony” is the slang word for lunatic – a crazy person. The derivation comes from the Moon (La Lune) given that a full Moon was supposed to cause madness in some.
Mind you, like Lord Buckethead (who stands as an independent), sometimes the “mad” joke candidates come up with better policies that the serious ones.
One previous Official Monster Raving Loony Party policy was to put all those people wanting to exercise onto a treadmill, and to use this to drive a generator to power old people’s homes. Not such a Loony idea.
