Following Boaks' death, popular opinion towards road safety has become closer to his views. While recovering from being struck by a motorcycle, Boaks was one of Sutch's counting agents at Bermondsey in 1983. He successfully campaigned with Sutch and others to pedestrianise London's Carnaby Street.
īoaks thought that increased traffic and more roads would cause problems, and he addressed road safety with flamboyant campaigning and a variety of tactics, including private prosecution of public figures who escaped public prosecution for drunk driving. Boaks proved influential on Sutch's direction as the leading anti-politician: "It's the ones who don't vote you really want, because they're the ones who think". Boaks campaigned and stood for election for over thirty years on limited funds, always on the issue of road safety.
Raving lunacy serial#
Īnother serial offbeat by-election candidate was Commander Bill Boaks, a retired World War II hero who took part in sinking the Bismarck. Reverting to his original name, Dougrez-Lewis stood for the new party in Cambridge in the 1983 general election. Dougrez-Lewis became Sutch's agent at the notorious Bermondsey by-election mentioned above, where the OMRLP banner was first officially unfurled. Their Oxford University equivalents were the "Oxford Raving Lunatics".
CURLS were an "anti-political party" and charity fundraising group formed largely as a fun counter-response to increasingly polarised student politics in Cambridge, and they were responsible for a number of fun stunts. He had changed his name by deed poll from John Desmond Lewis, on behalf of the Cambridge University Raving Loony Society (CURLS). Two others were important in the formation of the OMRLP: John Desmond Dougrez-Lewis stood in the Crosby by-election of 1981 (won by the Social Democratic Party's co-founder Shirley Williams) and Dougrez-Lewis stood in the by-election as " Tarquin Fin-tim-lin-bin-whin-bim-lim-bus-stop-F'tang-F'tang-Olé-Biscuitbarrel", taken from the Election Night Special Monty Python sketch. There had also been a "Science Fiction Looney" candidate competing in the 1976 Cambridge by-election. The "Raving Loony" name first appeared at the Bermondsey by-election of 1983.Ī similar concept had appeared earlier in the " Election Night Special" sketch on Monty Python's Flying Circus, in which the Silly and Sensible parties competed and a similar skit by The Goodies, in which Graeme Garden stood as a "Science Loony". After being shot during a mugging attempt whilst living in the United States, Sutch returned to Britain and to politics during the 1980s. The party's name was intended to highlight what Sutch and others viewed as hypocrisy, since teenagers were unable to vote because of their supposed immaturity while the adults running the country were involved in scandals such as the Profumo affair. At that time the minimum voting age was 21. Starting in 1963, David Sutch, head of the rock group Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, stood in British parliamentary elections under a range of party names, initially as the National Teenage Party candidate.
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