A little less conversation, another lost deposit please.
We may have a Queen, but David Bishop is the Election King.
Satire, frivolous and joke candidates are a plague on the by-election. Almost every single by-election has a person with far too much money to spend and a silly hat rocking up onto the candidates stage just to show off how weird they are. They almost always look like a rejected Butlins act who are seeking to make it big in the world of comedy despite having left the trade in 1986. Their platforms attempt to convey "serious issues" in a depressingly tiresome way via outdated references to 80s sitcoms and the word fart. They're some of the bravest pensioners humanity has ever seen, proudly smiling when it's declared that they got 44 votes and have just lost £500. Doing that schtick once must be enough for a lifetime but one man has had the nerve to go and do it 12 times. In today's By-election Bonanza we'll explore the serial loser of deposits David Bishop from the Church of the Militant Elvis Party, and what he tells us about Britain.
David Bishop, alternatively known under the pen name Lord Biro, first stood for Parliament in 1997. He ran in Tatton against the incumbent MP Neil Hamilton (yes, the current UKIP leader, Neil Hamilton) who was under heavy scrutiny for the 'cash for questions' scandal. This public sleaze prompted Bishop to stop complaining and actually try to make a change under the 'Lord Biro versus the Scallywag Tories Party'. This first campaign yielded little success for Lord Biro with only 116 people having voted for him but it was the catalyst that inspired him to continue on despite losing.
This journey has taken Bishop on a whirlwind tour of Britain. The map below documents every single seat that he has contested:
Bishop has been all over the place. With £6000 on lost deposits and a whole lot more on train tickets, what is there to show for it? Cumulatively he has gained 1,106 votes in parliamentary elections across his 22 year political career which isn't even enough to win a constituency. It's hypothetically not even enough to hold your deposit. You just have to ask what made it all worth it?
Bishop sets it out clearly. He does this because "I like raising issues other people don't campaign on." The primary example of this is on the cost of pets, for example when he ran in Sleaford and North Hykeham for the 2016 by-election he had the policy of "free neutering for cats and Boris Johnson" to bring attention to how much vets charge for basic services, and that Boris Johnson has a lot of sex. There's also the intention to make people laugh. The manifestos from across his various political campaigns hold some nuggets of humour but give off the impression most of it was written by The Daily Mash:
Scrap the HS2 High Speed Train, the money saved could be used to keep the bus-pass and improve bus and rail services
Bring back the dog license and Nationalise Veterinarian Services, £10 a year license for dogs and cats. Use the money raised to fund a Nationalised Vets Services.
Nationalise brothels and pay the sex workers a state wage called 'the knobseekers allowance.’
Turning public schools into pound shops.
Invade Antarctica and tell it to stop melting.
Overthrowing the capitalist state
Place CCTV in the bedroom of Nick Clegg
Putting Cherie Blair in prison before she speaks about her sex life.
The range of genuine satire, e.g. 'Scarp HS2' to the simplistically unfunny leaves those with a desire for clever critiques of our system to question the state of British electoral satire. Die PARTEI in Germany does electoral satire well by being funny and exposing genuine systematic issues. For example, they were able to close off a loophole in German party funding by satirising the far-right AfD who were exploiting it, you can read about that further here. The direct comparison to our satire exemplifies that observation of something being wrong. I think Bishop summarises it best in a BBC interview where the journalist asks him if he thinks he'd be taken more seriously if he ditched the Elvis jacket:
"You are competing with all these fringe parties like the Raving Loonies and all the other ones," he said. "You get all these wacky people standing and if you want to get any media attention you've got to compete with them."
It's that focus on the word attention, is that what this is all about? Spending £500 to stand next to a politician on polling day doesn't highlight anything wrong with the British political system, it basically says nothing at all, but it certainly gives you 5 minutes of fame. The fundamental problems with British politics, e.g. voter apathy, a disproportionate electoral system, the lack of public funding aren't exactly countered by any of these types of candidates standing and David Bishop exemplifies this. 22 years and basically nothing has changed. His place in the history books is for political nerds like me to go "gosh, isn't that a funny party name" leaving an empty hole for those who want to pledge their vote for someone who cares about changing our system under the presentation of apathy. The whole conceived point is to mock everything that's wrong yet our satirical candidates seem incapable. The by-election makes this situation worse because suddenly the entire country is focusing in on one little community and journalists want to dig up whatever exciting snippet of information they can to put into their coverage, allowing joke candidates to suddenly have a platform to deliver their one-liners or to have an article dedicated to their campaigns.
On the other hand, those who desire electoral satire are seemingly in the minority. There is no clear audience or base that is large enough for joke parties to sell themselves to. Apathetic voters are often touted as the base of joke parties, after all in the 2019 General Election 15.5 million people didn't vote which is more than the votes received for any single party. However there is a fundamental flaw in that a funny comment that resonates isn't going to make them suddenly change their mind and vote, their apathy is a major problem that the millions of pounds and constant media attention of the major parties can't solve, so it's unlikely that a party with a fraction of that can solve it. If that was the case, in the 2015 General Election, Al Murray wouldn't have lost his deposit in South Thanet. It's more likely the case that Britain just doesn't have the voters who want it, and if nobody wants it, they aren't going to win.
That's also not to say that Bishop is a bad candidate, there's also lots to admire with him and the Church of the Militant Elvis Party which counter the argument that British satire candidates have nothing to say at all. Bishop has good ideas about the importance of having public lavatories available across cities and towns in the UK, especially given their dire state currently. Between 2010 and 2018, councils have stopped maintaining 13% of public toilets. This has huge regional variations with Cornwall Council having stopped maintaining 94% of their public toilets, which is a major issue for those with disabilities. Bishop is lighthearted, he jokes in an interview I had with him that "we've only got one public toilet in the centre of Nottingham now... we used to have about four... so my campaigns haven't done any good". He's evidently a man who recognises that he hasn't had a big impact and that it doesn't faze him because it was never really the intention. He's also just like any other normal voter in the issues he cares about with local bus route cuts being a big one as well as HS2. He told me that he gets tired of politics and that it "wears him out". He isn't this big character like many satire candidates pretend to be, he's surprisingly normal. Despite his attitude almost reflecting that of the traditional British voter, it hasn't stopped him from being accused by members of the public of being "like any other politician", only for him to quip back with "we're not we're worse." How someone can see how he dresses and call him a "politician" is beyond me in the first place but likely reflects my point of there simply not being an appetite for satire candidates.
David told me of an anecdote where he brought a yeti plush on stage with him at a count in 2017. He'd make the yeti clap every time a candidate's votes were declared and at the end of it all, a Conservative candidate came up to him and told him "Thank you for bringing some charm to this election." That moment of actually making someone smile made him realise that his entire political career was worth it. It's made me realise that for this one man, doing something he loves, he should absolutely have the liberty to do whatever he wants and not be judged for it. Let him do what he does best and make people laugh along the way because ultimately that's what our dreary and awful politics needs, not a satirical intention he never attended to achieve. Having shared this story from David there is the hope that those who criticise candidates like him look elsewhere because ultimately it isn't about some wider picture, it's about embracing our democracy and recognising that this is a fun quirk of it.
David isn't the Monster Raving Looney Party, a party which rivals that of Die PARTEI or The Hungarian Two Tailed Dog Party in national fame, he's just a normal bloke having fun. I've come to a conclusion that I'll later explore in By-election Bonanza that it's not the joke individuals, it's those satire parties that irk me...
There is one actual example of electoral success for the Church of the Militant Elvis Party (although he still ended up losing) when Bishop ran for Nottingham City Council in 2014. He ended up coming fourth and pushed the Liberal Democrats into fifth. This rather small defeat for the Liberal Democrats was, in my opinion, Bishop's best creation of political satire as it highlighted just how poorly the Liberal Democrats were doing nationally in the final years of the Coalition Government. Whether this was intentional or not is yet to be concluded.
Thank you so much for reading By-election Bonanza, I've been Adam Lawless and I'll see you in 2 weeks where we'll be exploring the most pointless by-election in British history.
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P.S. The Church of the Militant Elvis Party was featured in the no2av referendum campaign with this newspaper clipping:
I can only describe them as rattled.
P.S.S. Here's an interesting little fact, the focus on Elvis in a by-election hasn't been done by Bishop alone as in the 1984 Chesterfield by-election Sid Shaw ran under the Elvisly Yours Elvis Presley Party. I couldn't find any connection between the two but it's certainly weird that Elvis has come up twice.