Screaming Lord Sutch, who has committed suicide aged 58, was an outsider, shaped by postwar poverty, who achieved celebrity in the early 1960s, and fame in the Thatcher era as founder and frontman of the Official Monster Raving Loony party. When his mother was asked about her son and his exploits, she explained that it was, after all, just an act, indeed that his whole life was just an act.
Sutch ran for parliament 39 times, first as the National Teenage party candidate in the 1963 Stratford-on-Avon byelection that followed the Profumo scandal. The narrowly victorious Conservative, Angus Maude, treated him, Sutch recalled, like "vermin from another planet". In the 1966 general election he fought Prime Minister Harold Wilson in Huyton and picked up 585 votes. Four years later, he ran in Westminster as the Young Ideas party candidate, and in 1974 for the Go To Blazes party in Stafford and Stone.
But it was in the next decade, with the flowering of Thatcherism, that Sutch first ran as an OMRLP candidate. The contest was Bermondsey, the Labour candidate Peter Tatchell, and the victor the Liberal Simon Hughes. Sutch advocated a statue to Tommy Steele - "the Bermondsey bombshell and the only decent thing to come out of the place" - and attracted 97 votes.
Soon after, at the Darlington byelection, the local paper reported that more people were in the toilets at Sutch's (pre-election) victory party than attended the Social Democratic party's rally. Sutch won 374 votes. In the 1983 election 11 candidates ran for the OMRLP, with Sutch "against Margaret Thatcher - a nasty experience, as Denis can testify". The following year it was Chesterfield and Tony Benn.
Thus did a decade unfold where, whatever the national crisis, whatever the earnest fatuities of the victorious byelection candidate, there on the edge of the screen would be Sutch, or a sidekick, a Shakespearean antick for the TV age. It was a great joke, but the viewer could never be absolutely certain that Sutch was in on it.
Sutch was born in north London. His father, a war reserve policeman, was killed in an accident when his son was 10 months old. His mother - to whom he was devoted - was a fan of Dickens; she christened him David after David Copperfield. For most of the next 15 years they shared a flat and poverty in what he called a dead-end street in Kilburn, while she worked as a cleaner and shop assistant. Entertainment was Saturday morning pictures and the Metropolitan Music Hall, Edgeware Road. In 1956, after David had left school, they moved to south Harrow, where he became a window cleaner.
It was the birth of British rock music; a time when the young and desperate could pursue a new escape route. What he called his "wild man of Borneo look" got Sutch a spot singing at the Two I's coffee bar in Soho. His style evolved, or lurched, out of that slurry of music hall (he was a Max Miller fan), horror movies, Grand Guignol, pulp comics, slapstick and transatlantic pop. Thus did the black American rhythm & blues singer Screaming Jay Hawkins provide a name, and the basis of an act.
I n 1961 he was spotted by the curious and doomed independent record producer Joe Meek. "I was doing the horror," Sutch once told me, "screaming and yelling. I had 18 inches of hair and I was running around in buffalo horns and my auntie's leopardskin coat. The scout said 'You've got a different approach. You want to make a record?'" Sutch made records, and recorded with a clutch of (later) distinguished British rock musicians. The early subject matter focused on disembowelment and graveyards - on one occasion Meek posed Sutch, as Jack the Ripper, in Whitechapel at night. Both men, observed Sutch, were intrigued by horror films. But he had no real hits. Indeed, by 1963 his career had been swamped by the Mersey boom.
It was then that he went to Stratford, campaigning for commercial radio, votes at 18, abolition of dog licences and his share of the spotlight, with the mix of native wit and puerility that marked his aimless - or dadaist - media courtship. The live act around Europe, and playing small halls and pubs, provided an income.
His last political hurrah was in the 1995 Littleborough and Saddleworth byelection (the OMRLP didn't have the money to run in the last European elections). But more than finances, it was perhaps the times that had finally run out. His autobiography, Life As Sutch, written with Peter Chippindale was published in 1991.
Sutch is survived by his partner Yvonne Elwood, and his son Tristan, from his relationship with Thann Quantrill. The death of his mother, in 1997 on the eve of the last general election, greatly affected him.