Is the Monster Raving Loony Party a Brilliant Piece of Satire or a Tool For the Enforcement of Establishment Orthodoxy?

At the Bootle by-election of May 1990, the continuing rump of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), headed up by David Owen, an old grandee of the Labour Right, won fewer votes than the Monster Raving Loony Party – a group of weekend enthusiasts who stand in elections as a joke. For Owen, this was the final insult. The continuing SDP was immediately wound up, and Owen retreated into a life of Crossbench quietism.

But was he right to? To all observers, there could be no recovery from the humiliation of losing to the Monsters. But this is contradictory. If everyone knew who the Monsters were and what a defeat to them would mean, including Owen, then this would imply the existence of a well-established party brand. Clearly there is something else going on here.

A brand the Monsters are; more than this, they are a permanent fixture of national life. Britain’s media cannot stop reminding us of their existence, and make claims to their wit and eccentricity that are more asserted than shown. Few dare fail to be amused by their antics – not least the candidates themselves. The ostensible purpose of the Monster Raving Loony Party is to satirise our political system, and to embarrass the overmighty. Like all party platforms this is a conceit; it is Spin. It is Spin that can no longer be sustained. If the Monster Raving Loony Party is engaged in satire, then it is official satire. Far from being subversives, the Monsters are a powerful force for consensus.

Consider its choice of targets. The Monster Raving Loony Party seldom afflicts politicians at the height of their powers, but instead swoops down on beleaguered or insurgent candidates – that is, candidates whom the British media have declared to be beleaguered or insurgent. Their deployment is strategic; and always conforms to the prejudices of Britain’s governing classes. The Monsters dog the steps of Nigel Farage and Piers Corbyn, but were nowhere to be found during New Labour in its full pomp. The political purpose of the Monsters is to imbue any dissenting candidates with a vague air of silliness. It is a form of barracking, and a very selective one at that. The Monsters, along with latter-day contemporaries like Count Binface, reserve their greatest mockery for failure, not for Power. True to form, they are always found at the sight of any serious political reversal – no sooner had Matt Chorley declared Theresa May in 2017 to be “a busted flush”, there were the Monsters. One gets the sense that the Party is a little too eager to take on this role.

But where are the jokes? The Monster Raving Loony Party rarely treats us to any pranks, stunts, or capers. Little is ever made of their ‘Manicfesto’ – a list of Monster Raving policies. Instead, the Monsters assume that their presence at an election is ipso facto funny.

This scarcely matters. To Britain’s media classes, political satire is not meant to entertain us. Its role is a constitutional one, on the pattern of late Weimar Germany – it is a last line of defence against tyranny, or, latterly, Populism. Satire ‘holds power to account’. Ask someone to recount a funny sketch from Spitting Image and they will come up short, or, when pressed, will recall a fairly mirthless number about the internal politics of South Africa. During the loving Newsnight retrospectives on this programme, we are shown no ‘Dead Parrot’ analogue. As Paxman narrates, the puppets gesticulate in silence. When Spitting Image is on television, Satire is occurring; what is happening on the show itself is of no moment.

So it is with the Monsters: when they stand silently next to a candidate on camera, we are assured that power is being held to account. As satire, it is cliquey rather than witty. It aims to embarrass, not to mock. It is premised on the idea that to sic the weirdos on a candidate is to discredit them by mere association. It is passive-aggressive. It wrongly assumes that no one can be mocked and retain their poise. It is premised on the idea that democratic politics has no essential gravitas, and can be thrown off by the mere presence of kooky characters. It assumes that any blemish put on a politician’s carefully-cultivated image is death to their career. In other words, far from being a satire of political Spin, this brand of humour is entirely reliant on it. Like Alastair Campbell, the Monsters and their admirers assume that the worst thing that can happen to a politician is to be briefly laughed at; Charles James Fox, or a candidate for the Roman Senate, would not have cared.

As an organisation, the Monster Raving Loony Party flatters the tastes and prejudices of Britian’s ruling classes. For one, it embodies a supposed British eccentricity that is, again, asserted rather than shown. The knickerbocker style of the Party is much younger than, say, the Hellfire Club – but somehow feels much more dated. If this is eccentricity, then it is an official eccentricity, an eccentricity that always happens to be on the side of the winners.

What the Monsters also speak to is a crude anti-politics – authoritarian in premise. In a liberal democracy, we are at least supposed to believe that the elections themselves are in some way sacred, that this is a gathering of free citizens to deliberate seriously about the issues that will affect their lives. Other countries take this idea much further than we do, and would not tolerate the Monsters and their antics. Their disdain for the electoral process is surely of some note: they are the ultimate parachute candidates, and think nothing of wedging themselves into what are local democratic exercises, the outcome of which will not affect them. Britain’s establishment think little of electoral mandates either national or personal, and will come up with any thin excuse to cancel them. A mandate to sit in a national assembly is increasingly reimagined as a mandate only to serve as a local social worker; the twee of ‘Constituency Work’; the twee of ‘Dogs At Polling Stations’; the twee of bucolic local capers – this is the idiom by which MPs, and voters, are made faintly ridiculous characters in a general picaresque.

In this, the Monster Raving Loony Party is only too happy to oblige. A mandate from such a system is of little moment, and so it has proven. In the election of 2019, the British people were offered two real departures from the status quo. Would Britain choose a renewed Keynesianism, or an implicit British nationalism? These were real questions. The moment demanded more than the Monsters and Count Binface, who barracked proceedings endlessly. It tried to cheapen an event that Britain’s governing classes badly wanted to be cheapened. Both of the 2019 contenders have now been harried from national life by legal and bureaucratic methods; in this, the Monsters, with their breezy contempt for elections, have proven a useful adjunct. A showy disdain for politicians is a useful idea. No would-be despotism should do without it.

The Monsters, then, are not quite insiders – but are certainly part of an Establishment. We are told that they are funny. Everything about them is pro forma: pro forma interviews; pro forma praise; pro forma laughs. The whole thing reeks of obligation. What one encounters with the Monsters isn’t a parody, but the radical id of Britain’s rulers. There is, in other words, no shame in losing an election to them. David Owen should’ve fought on.

None of this may have convinced you. But consider this. One frequent refrain from the Party is that British politicians keep stealing their Monster Raving policies, from their Manicfesto. Well, quite.

J. Sorel is a pseudonym.