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LORD
SUTCH |
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SCREAMING
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Parkfield Road, South Harrow, that is - where the mere mortal christened David Edward Sutch had tumbled out of bed just prior to the mid-afternoon newsflash. After keeping his usual Dracula hours, he hadn't exactly laid awake,but there'd been long wakeful periods during that final sanctuary before he'd no longer be able to not credit it. The paradox of the new development had fogged even the acute intelligence that peeped out through the coarse norf London articulation, albeit one that wasn't laced with swearing any more. Yet when the wheels of the universe had come together, and the returning officer had announced the results of the Bootle by-election shortly after midnight that April Friday back in 1990, it shouldn't have seemed all that peculiar that, seven years on, a chap once as crassly distinctive as the Michelin Tyre Man - perpetual ear-to-ear grin, leopard-skin jacket and outsized top hat, and with a ludicrous nom de theatre - should be on the brink of becoming the most powerful political animal in the land,the king of the jungle. The ballot that had blown the metaphorical weather-vane in this direction was itself traceable to the fatal heart attack of the incumbent Labour MP Michael Carr. Helping the voters in this marginal seat make up their minds had been Mrs. Thatcher's poll tax riots the previous Saturday - which resonated across the following week's news bulletins - an abrupt surfacing of unsavoury and easily verifiable details about the Labour candidate's past; a clearer run than expected because of no other fringe flotsam-and-jetsam, and the SDP fellow's third stomach operation in as many months making him an obvious health risk. Anyway, the Monster Raving Loonies had beaten the SDP - and further so-called 'serious' rivals - in Newbury two summers previously. Bootle's was an overwhelming no-vote majority, but the favourite - just - of those that bothered was one, who belying his stage alias and persona, talked like an ordinary geezer - and, fundamentally, that's what Dave Sutch was, rather than a toff cultivating a 'common touch' to get into Westminster, very much the opposite. Indeed, as he reminded listeners during a natter on Radio City, he'd been a sort of cultural ambassador during the fag-end of the 'British Invasion' of the States in the Swinging Sixties, 'posing as "the Sixth Earl of Harrow" with my Union Jack Rolls. It had a trailer painted likewise, full of "I'm Backing Britain" products, mostly records and Carnaby Street clothes. I did mainly trade fairs between gigs, and put on an upper class accent.' Sutch was advantaged too by instinctive if indelicate crowd control, essentially left-wing (and anti-Thatcher) opinions - and a lot more calm sense than hitherto imagined. It turned out that many of his policies had proved astonishingly prophetic. Votes at eighteen - which became fact in 1969 - had been to the fore when he'd spoken at Stratford six years earlier in the hustings prompted by the resignation of Profumo. Next up had been the Loonies' advocation of the legalisation of commercial radio, passports for pets - and pubs staying open all day via, so David had suggested, the repealing of a law introduced during the Great War to dissuade the home front from dulling its patriotic, Hun-hating resolve with booze. To the woomph of flash-bulbs that greeted the Bootle quirk of fate, there'd been some knee-jerk silliness instanced by the poker-faced what-are-you-laughing-at response to a question about who he'd pick as Deputy PM if this was the thin end of the Loony wedge: 'I was thinking about my Mum...' When milk-floats were hissing around in the grey of morning, he was still routinely playing the fool, and more than one media organ was to put him on a par with 'Chance Gardiner', the character portrayed by Peter Sellers in Being There, the movie in which an idiot was taken for a homespun philosopher and finished up running for supreme office. They started changing their tunes in the light of a soberly-attired maiden speech at the House of Commons. An almost conversational beginning - with a reference to 'tax and all that' - prefaced a verbal crescendo of Wagnerian intensity. A worrying demand from the Inland Revenue in March had led David to look into income tax, and discover that it had been an emergency imposition in the first place - to allow William Pitt the Younger to pay for the war against Napoleon - and after Waterloo, we'd be rid of it for a while. Theoretically, it remained only a temporary measure, expiring at the end of each fiscal year - meaning that every April the fifth, Parliament has to re-apply it through an annual Finance Act. 'Instead of being levied at source,' the newcomer concluded, 'You should only have to pay extra on what you actually purchase or use. Why should you have to cough up for working hard? It's an invasion of privacy too...' On the rebound, the newspapers were full of David Edward Sutch, Member of Parliament, wanting no more to do with Screaming Lord Sutch, a universal figure of fun like a kind of rock 'n' roll Gertrude Shilling, the lady who wore extravagant millinery creations at Ascot. Furthermore, as it had been with Henry V and Falstaff, he was distancing himself from the very organisation he spearheaded. Shocked by their lord of misrule's absence from that summer's regular Loony congress at the Golden Lion in Ashburton, Devon, the likes of Baron von Thunderclap, Raving Reg, Lord Toby Jug, Jersey Flyer, Rockin' Robbo, Freddie Zapp, Top Cat, R.U. Serious and other of his retinue of clowns were also at a loss to comprehend why they never knew Dave's precise whereabouts anymore, why he could seldom be contacted directly, and why, if he wasn't 'too busy', 'in a meeting' or 'on the other line', he's always have a plausible excuse why nothing was happening yet - or ever would be. This apparent volte-face was rooted in Sutch's experience that, however strange or unexpected the situation in which you found yourself, you simply let yourself be driven along whatever route fate ordained, even if it was one that had been unimaginable, and just get on with the business in hand as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Thus, having been made the representative of the good folk of Bootle, he was prepared to make a sensible go of it. Perhaps he'd have preferred a Number One hit (or any chart strike whatsoever) but this was a close second-best now that 'politics' - if that's what you called it - had come to have as great a bearing on his life as pop - to the degree that outlines had dissolved between them as exemplified by his last three singles, 'Election Fever', 'Rock The Election' and 'Number Ten Or Bust!' As 1997's General Election loomed , it was bust rather than boom for John Major's reigning Tories, now struggling to stay afloat thanks to defections and, under Tony Blair, Labour's unbroken run of successes in every council and by-election going - though when the referendum on the Scott Report had hung in the balance last February, Labour won by only one vote, courtesy of a coalition with Sutch's minority of one. It had been at this point that the head honcho of the Monster Raving Loonies - their Marat, their Danton, their Robespierre, their Mirabeau, their Bonaparte - defected to Labour. Within months, he'd be fronting a party political broadcast and be considered for a Shadow Cabinet post, having established himself as a vigorous, witty and, crucially, constructive orator, at the 1996 conference in Blackpool. Evidently, all those years of acting out his songs and defusing potential unrest amongst over-excited teenagers night after night in provincial ballrooms hadn't been wasted. Beneath early evening neon, circa 1972, Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages' overloaded van had bumped from an Oxford side road onto the gravel outside the Students Union hall of one of the University colleges. The support group, Ugly Rumours - formed by some of the undergraduates - helped lug the Savages' careworn equipment into the darkened auditorium. In the dressing room after the dance, Sutch endeavoured to instill into the ramshackle Rumours aspects of his own hard-won 'professionalism', but succeeded chiefly in amusing most of them with his name-dropping and endless anecdotes about the old days, particularly the incarcerations in police cells for sundry breaches of the peace; the guitar heroes - notably Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Ritchie Blackmore - who'd passed through the ranks of the Savages; the failed election campaigns that, nonetheless, boosted booking fees, and his inexhaustible efforts to elicit career-sustaining publicity, most recently at Brand's Hatch where a dim view had been taken of his Lordship pretending to black out at the steering wheel in the middle of a celebrity race, and then a coffin being rushed out to retrieve the 'corpse'. Becoming aware that only one of his small audience was rapt for the 'right' reasons, David's voice trailed off... Then he grimaced at the grubby carpet, raised his head and beamed a smile that just about slew Rumours vocalist Anthony Charles Lynton Blair who, in direct line of it, thought, just for that split-second, that he was the only person on the planet who mattered to the garrulous old shellback of British rock. Nevertheless, Tony joined in when everybody laughed. No-one knew why. They fell silent again in the manner that David had long been able to identify - a reluctantly awestruck feeling of deja vu mingled with a touch of scepticism as if he wasn't quite real. 'I need to piss,' he said importantly as if it wasn't something he did every day. As he stood up and wandered off to the toilets, it crossed Blair's mind that he'd never been more impressed by anyone in his entire eighteen years. Jump-cutting a quarter of a century, David might have imagined it, but, on answering the telephone late that fateful afternoon, there'd been a sufficiently strident urgency in the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition's educated whine to compel him to summon an instant taxi to the party's London headquarters. During the stop-start journey through the rush-hour, the twice-elected Member for Bootle ruminated that, while Labour was certain to take the country by storm in May, Tony himself wasn't too hale. Of late, the urbane mask had slipped sometimes, and the strain had shown. Already, he'd mentioned distressing symptoms of heart trouble to David and other intimates, even thinking aloud about packing it in. Nobody knew whether or not to believe him. On arrival, the normally hoity-toity receptionist conducted Sutch straightaway into the presence of Blair, who, indicated a chair and, prior to getting down to business, was obliged to deal with the visibly annoying trill of his mobile. Addressing the caller faux-jovially as 'John the Baptist', he signed off quickly with 'I can't chat now. The Chosen One's with me in the office.' 'Glad you could get here so soon, David,' Blair began, 'I couldn't tell you this on the 'phone, but you know I've been suffering from intermittent chest pains over the past year? Well, the doctor reckoned initially that there was no cause for alarm, but now he's detected something sinister. Next month, I'm going to be under the scalpel for a quadruple by-pass. Yes, really! There's no way, therefore, that I can carry on - and Cherie and I have decided that I ought to withdraw from public life.' Sutch shook his head uncontrollably as if it had become unhinged. 'Tony, the world'll look rosier after the first of May. All you have to do is convalesce and then take it a little easier. Don't chuck away what you were born to be.' 'But I'm not chucking it away. I'm giving it to you. If an actor can be President of the United States, a playwright be premier of Czechoslovakia, and a topless model an Italian government aide, why can't a rock 'n' roller be Prime Minister? You're our biggest chance. The future of the country's all yours, David.' His face filled with entreaty. 'Don't make it difficult for me.' 'OK. I'll do whatever you want me to do.' There was an incongruously orphaned look from the older man. 'I'll miss you...' Then Screaming Lord Sutch's eyes half-closed. He went quiet for a full minute as if in a trance. 'Yeah. Tell me again,' he said oddly, 'You know - about it all being mine.' 'It's all yours, David. It's all yours.' |
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