….how exasperating the day appears to be today! Desperate not to do X for illiteracy or the obvious X for Xmas, there does still need to be a slight link to the forthcoming festive season…. ish….
X is, of course, the Roman numeral used for ten. On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me, Ten lords a-leaping and so today, to discuss the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. Slightly random you might think….?
Its founder, David Edward Sutch, was born at New End Hospital, Hampstead, London on 10 November 1940. In the 1960s, he changed his stage name to ‘Screaming Lord Sutch, 3rd Earl of Harrow’, inspired by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, despite having no connection with the peerage. His legal name remained David Edward Sutch.
After his career as an early 1960s rock and roll attraction, the UK press referred to him continually as ‘Screaming Lord Sutch’, or simply ‘Lord Sutch’. During his time as leader of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party from 1983 to 1999, he stood in numerous parliamentary elections and holds the record for losing all forty (four times ten!) elections in which he stood.
There have been many eXuberant and eccentric politicians over the decades (X) though few have just decided to be referred to as ‘Lord’ of their own volition.
Dying in 1999, Sutch was survived by a son, Tristan Lord Gwynne Sutch, born in 1975 to American model Thann Rendessy. Writing his autobiography with Peter Chippindale, Sutch published Life as Sutch: The Official Autobiography of a Raving Loony in 1991 and after his death in 2005, Graham Sharpe, who had known Sutch since the late 1960s, wrote the first biography, The Man Who Was Screaming Lord Sutch.
And so, we near the end of the alphabet…. What to do after Z?
