Britain’s Greatest Political Eccentrics Throughout History
By the time John “Mad Jack” Mytton arrived at his own dinner party riding a live bear — in full hunting costume, naturally — his guests had learned to expect the unexpected. The bear, unimpressed by the formalities, bit him through the calf. Mytton considered it one of the more reasonable evenings that year.
Britain has a long and distinguished tradition of producing politicians magnificently unsuited to governance. These were not peripheral eccentrics. Several held actual office. Some shaped the law. One set himself on fire to cure his hiccups.
Mad Jack Mytton: The MP Who Lasted 30 Minutes
John Mytton served as Member of Parliament for Shrewsbury from 1819. He secured his seat by handing out £10 notes to voters, spending £10,000 in total — equivalent to around a million pounds today. He attended the House of Commons once, found the debates confusing and the atmosphere tedious, and left after thirty minutes. He declined to stand again. The habit has proved durable: two centuries later, a sitting MEP managed one of his fisheries committee’s 42 meetings across twenty-one years in the job.
What he did instead was more interesting. Mytton kept 2,000 dogs, feeding his favourites on steak and champagne. His horse Baronet had the run of Halston Hall and slept in front of the fire. He hunted naked through snowdrifts. He swam winter rivers in full flood. His life, one biographer noted, was “a series of suicide attempts.”
The hiccup incident took place in Calais, where Mytton had fled his creditors. Woken in the night by an attack of hiccups, he seized a candle and applied it to the tail of his cotton nightshirt. He was instantly engulfed in flames. Friends beat the fire out. The hiccups, reportedly, were cured. He died penniless in a debtor’s prison at thirty-seven, of delirium tremens. Three thousand people attended his funeral.
Lord Rokeby: The Gentleman Who Became the Sea
Matthew Robinson, 2nd Baron Rokeby, was a perfectly normal aristocrat until a trip to Aix-la-Chapelle introduced him to the supposed health benefits of cold-water immersion. He took to it with the zeal of a convert and the obstinacy of a barnacle.
Back in Kent, he walked to the sea every day regardless of weather, swam until he fainted, and had to be carried home by servants. He installed a glass-roofed pool at his estate and spent hours in it alone, refusing to heat the water. He grew his beard to his knees — striking in the clean-shaven Georgian era — which, combined with his increasing isolation, generated rumours that he was a cannibal. He was not. He ate mainly beef tea and nibbled at venison. He lived, by way of vindication, to the age of eighty-eight.
Sir Francis Dashwood: The Chancellor Who Couldn’t Read a Bar Bill
Sir Francis Dashwood served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1762 to 1763. Even his fellow rakes were embarrassed. John Wilkes, himself no model of propriety, noted that Dashwood “could not settle a tavern bill of five figures.” His one significant policy achievement was a tax on cider that caused near-riots across rural England. He resigned after a year.
What made Dashwood genuinely remarkable was everything else. He founded the Hellfire Club — properly the Order of the Friars of St Francis of Wycombe — which met in a cave system he had personally commissioned beneath West Wycombe Hill. The “monks” included politicians, aristocrats, artists, and, by some accounts, a Founding Father: Benjamin Franklin was a regular guest at Dashwood’s estate. Club activities were described as “obscene parodies of religious rites” combined with “much drinking, wenching and banqueting.” The caves are now a tourist attraction and open to the public.
Screaming Lord Sutch: 39 Elections, Zero Victories
David Sutch — Screaming Lord Sutch, founder of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party — contested thirty-nine parliamentary elections between 1963 and 1997. He lost his deposit every single time. Guinness noted the record. Sutch treated it as a career achievement.
The OMRLP’s policies were not without substance. In 1963, Sutch campaigned to lower the voting age from 21 to 18 — a position considered preposterous at the time, enacted into law five years later. The party also backed legalised pirate radio, all-day pub opening, and pet passports; all eventually became law. By 1993, when the British National Party gained its first local councillor, Sutch pointed out that the Monster Raving Loony Party already had six.
His finest hour came at the 1990 Bootle by-election, where he received more votes than the candidate for David Owen’s continuing Social Democratic Party. Within days, the SDP dissolved. Sutch said nothing. He wore a leopard-print coat and a top hat and waited for history to catch up.
The 5th Earl of Bridgewater: Dinner for Dogs
Francis Egerton, 5th Earl of Bridgewater, hosted formal dinner parties at which the guests were his twelve dogs. Seated at table, waited upon by footmen, dressed in miniature leather boots to protect the floor, the dogs dined on the best food available. Any dog that showed poor table manners was demoted to the servants’ table for a week.
After his death in Paris in 1829, Egerton left his fortune to fund the Bridgewater Treatises, a series of scientific works on the evidence for God in nature. It is not recorded whether any of his dinner guests were consulted on the theological implications.
Each of them — the bear-rider, the sea-bather, the Hellfire chancellor, the perennial loser, the man who dressed his dogs for dinner — held, or contested, or purchased public office. And several, in their strange oblique way, turned out to have been right. The tradition did not die out, either; it simply acquired a press officer — see Very Brexit Problems on the modern man-of-the-people act.
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