Why I Love Political Satire

On Lord Buckethead and the Foundations of Democracy

Photo by Daniel Tong on Unsplash

As many of you will know, I am part-British.

This is not something that I usually like to admit, especially when I travel. Many people from around the world have some understandable bitterness towards so-called Great Britain. Not only did we steal many lands and plunder many goods, but we also still refuse to teach our schoolchildren about it in the national curriculum.

Being a ‘Third Culture Kid’ means that I have the unique advantage of changing my answer to the question, ‘Where are you from?’ whenever it suits me. In India, I emphasise that I am South African. In France, I’m an Aussie. In America, I’m English (for some reason, they find it charming, despite the history). And everywhere else, I just say, ‘It’s complicated.’

I must also confess that despite holding a British passport, and despite having lived here for almost 15 years, my allegiance to this country during any major sporting event drastically changes depending on who is winning.

For the most part, I have never been a ‘proud’ Brit.

However, there is one exception to this rule.

There is one time that comes around every few years where I am immediately filled with deep, unmistakable national pride. That time of course, is the election season.

Please do not misunderstand me; I am not a nationalist. I promise.

But there is one beautiful instance where my heart swells with joy. There is one tradition that I have never seen anywhere else, and as far as I know, is unique to Britain. It is the fact that in every major election since the 1970s, the British public have taken it upon themselves to ensure that there is at least one spoof candidate running for every major high-profile seat.

Although some have famously found this to be very unfunny, I frankly think that it is utterly marvellous.

My favourite is Lord Buckethead, an intergalactic space lord who first ran against Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1987 before then running against John Major in 1992.

John Oliver arguably made Lord Buckethead an international (or intergalactic) sensation when he used him as an example to explain the British political spoof tradition to his American audience during the height of Brexit in 2017:

A particularly wonderful aspect of this tradition is when it applies to local mayoral elections. In the interest of fairness, the BBC has to give airtime to each of the candidates when they launch their manifesto. To make it even better, the newsreader is expected to announce this with a completely straight face. Here, Count Binface - one of the key rivals of Lord Buckethead - launches his manifesto for the London Mayoral Election of 2024:

The Big Issue states,

Notably, in the 2024 London mayoralty election Count Binface secured 3,741 more votes than a far-right competitor candidate. In response, Sadiq Khan [The Mayor of London] thanked Binface for his steely campaign and highlighted his successes as “another reason to love London”.

A moment that I particularly loved this year was that immediately after winning his electoral seat, Kier Starmer, the man who had just won a landslide electoral victory and ultimately changed the course of British politics, had one of his first-ever pictures taken as the Prime Minister-elect while shaking hands with Elmo.

But Elmo was not Starmer’s only political rival. The man with the enormous black and yellow hat in the picture above is none other than Nick the Incredible Flying Brick, the Minister for Abolishing Gravity from The Monster Raving Looney Party (TMRLP), founded in 1981. Their manifesto is utterly bonkers and includes this wonderful line on immigration:

Unsurprisingly, TMRLP did not just show up for the winners. They also made appearances during the announcement of some stunning losses.

While learning that he had been utterly punished by the British public, Tory backbencher Jacob Rees-Mogg had to learn of his electoral defeat while sharing a stage with Barmy Brunch, another TMRLP candidate who got 211 votes.

Our former prime minister, Liz Truss, absconded from her local hustings, which meant that TMRLP candidate, Earl Elvis of East Anglia literally spoke more than she did to her local constituents in the lead-up to the election. It’s no wonder that she too suffered a major defeat.

Is the whole thing immature? Of course.

Does it have a high-school-boy style of humour? Absolutely.

Does it hold any utilitarian purpose? Well, I think it might.

It is universally accepted that one of the perks of being an aspiring theologian is that you reserve the right to take something that is generally received as light-hearted and humourous and utterly ruin it by over-spiritualising it to the point where it loses all its charm.

Today, I intend to do exactly that. As such, for the remainder of this essay, I will argue that spoof candidates such as Lord Buckethead, Count Binface, Elmo, and members of The Monster Raving Looney Party are, in fact, playing an important role in championing democracy.

I have argued elsewhere that for most of human history, most cultures have assumed that some people are better than others. When Jesus of Nazareth began preaching in first-century Palestine, he brought one of the most politically subversive messages that Rome could ever have imagined, which is that in his kingdom,

“The first will be last, and the last will be first” (Matt 20:16).

This has had huge ramifications throughout the world, particularly in the West, where we have been governed by a culturally Christian meta-narrative for over a millennia.

For Jesus, and indeed the Judeo-Christian tradition, nobody is better than anybody else. We are all made in the image of God, which means that we have the capacity to do good. We are also all descendants of Adam and Eve, which means that we all have the capacity to do wrong.

This concept flatlines how we understand what it means to be a moral creature, and one of the largest ramifications for this is the dual notion that a) all have a right to vote for someone to represent their interests, and b) nobody - not even an aristocrat - is exempt from accountability.

This means that in Western political tradition, we have developed a deep instinct to punish those who are proven to be corrupt. One obvious way to punish is to vote them out, but another less obvious weapon is the use of humour and satire.

Over the last decade or so, we have seen an acute rise in political satire, especially in response to right-wing populism.

Comedy game show hosts in the US broke viewing records during the reign of Donald Trump, and over here in the UK, the crowd-funded group Led By Donkeys used art, humour and activism to ensure that we don’t take our leaders too seriously.

I have no doubt that Jesus and the early church did not specifically have this in mind when they preached the idea that rulers should be servants and God has a preferential option for the poor.

However, they did set the stage for the basis of human rights, democracy, feminism, the abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the Civil Rights movement, Just War Theory, a fair justice system, and the rights of the masses to hold the powerful to account.

One of the unintended consequences for Britain is that, as The Economist notes,

Voters can be confident that on election night they will get to see the prime minister, the leader of a nuclear power, standing next to a man in a cardboard space suit with a bin on his head.

I personally think this is a wonderful tradition. Long may it continue.

Until next time,

S