British democracy is designed in such a way that the collision of the country’s most powerful people and its most powerfully motivated pranksters is all but inevitable. To stand for parliament all you need is a deposit of £500 and ten signatures from people registered to vote in your chosen constituency. The low barriers to entry are a historical accident. Deposits were introduced in 1918, part of the same bill that extended the franchise to women over 30 and men who didn’t own property. The sum was set at £150 (about £9,000 in today’s money), seemingly designed to protect Parliament from being overrun by the men and women who were newly allowed to vote for it.

Yet inflation gradually lowered the cost until it was a mere inconvenience, opening the gate for a minor stampede of mad cows. Some joke candidates were single-issue satirists. In 1979 Auberon Waugh, a journalist, ran for the “Dog Lovers’ Party” in Devon against Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal Party (Thorpe had been charged with conspiring to murder his lover, Norman Scott, after a bungling hitman bumped off Scott’s dog. He was later acquitted).

Others had broader platforms. In 1983 the founder of the Monster Raving Loony Party ran as a candidate in a London by-election. “Screaming” Lord Sutch, a former DJ, wore a top hat and an animal-print jacket. A self-styled peer of the realm, he started a trend for joke candidates to adopt noble titles – a way to poke fun at the most obviously ridiculous element of British democracy.

Sutch proved something of a prophet – his “joke” policies kept being passed into law. As a young man he had founded the National Teenage Party, which demanded votes for 18-year-olds (the voting age used to be 21) and an end to the state’s broadcasting monopoly. (Check, check.) The Monster Raving Loony Party’s proposal for pet passports also eventually became law, and another long-standing Loony demand will be met if the Labour Party reduces the voting age to 16, as it has promised to do if it wins the election.

“Blackadder”, a popular tv sitcom, satirised the Monster Raving Loonies with its fictional “Standing at the Back Dressed Stupidly Looking Stupid Party”, while Peter Hennessy, a constitutional historian, praised them as being “part of the continuity of the realm”.

In 1985 the deposit was raised from £150 to £500 in an attempt to make sure only serious candidates stood for Parliament. By then it was already too late. Lamenting the flood of candidates “dressed like idiots, behaving like idiots and waving idiotic slogans”, David Mellor, a Conservative minister, said: “I think we are just going to have to live with this.”

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