Dead Man Wins Election

When Harold Macmillan became prime minister in 1957, his appointment took second place on the front page of his local paper in Sussex, beaten by a report of a Brighton and Hove Albion football match. He kept the cutting on his desk at No. 10 in order, he said, to guard against the temptation toward self-importance. Most politicians are not like Macmillan. As they seek to climb the greasy pole, the animal inside is all too often revealed in bizarre ways.

QUESTIONABLE CHARACTERS

Julian Castro, campaigning to become mayor of San Antonio, Texas, in 2005, threw away his chances when he dealt with a clash of schedules by getting his identical twin brother to stand in for him at a civic parade while he attended a campaign meeting. Leading in the opinion polls at the time, he had brother Joaquin, a state legislator, walk in the city’s high-profile annual River Parade, waving to the crowds, while he attended his meeting. Claiming afterward that he had never intended to deceive, and blaming a parade announcer for misidentifying his brother as himself, Castro failed to survive the controversy. It did not help that the brothers previously had similar incidents, Julian having been accused of impersonating his brother when Joaquin ran for his state legislator seat.

Julian lost the election 51 percent to 49. “I don’t think he was ready to become mayor,” said his victorious opponent, diplomatically. He bounced back, however, and eventually won the mayoralty in 2009.

A CANADIAN POLITICIAN FROM the national House of Commons received criticism in January 2001 for his own bizarre attempt to deceive. Rahim Jaffer, MP for Edmonton and chairman of the Opposition Canadian Alliance Party’s small business committee, was impersonated by his assistant for nearly an hour for a radio interview after a diary mix-up meant that Jaffer was unavailable for the talk show. The station, tipped off by suspicious listeners, contacted Jaffer afterward to confirm it had been him. He initially maintained that he had done the interview, before later confessing that his aide had fulfilled the commitment. By way of contrition, he told listeners that his assistant had resigned. Although his party suspended him for several months, he hung on to his seat until losing it in the 2008 election.

PAUL REITSMA, A LIBERAL Party member of the British Columbia legislative assembly in Canada, appeared to enjoy wide support among his Vancouver Island constituents if the local papers were anything to go by. They were always carrying letters to the editor from the community praising his performance. Reitsma’s world collapsed in 1998 when one of the local organs used handwriting comparisons to show that he had been writing them himself. He confessed to being responsible for penning dozens of self-praising letters over a 10-year period, sending them under fictitious names to laud his own work and cast aspersions on his opponents. He was promptly expelled from the party, although he refused to resign his seat. Over 25,000 outraged local voters signed a petition for his dismissal under a new provincial recall procedure. After hanging on for two months, he resigned, shortly before he would have become the first Canadian politician to be forcibly removed from office by the procedure.

BOURNEMOUTH LOCAL COUNCILOR BEN Grower was unmasked in 2009 as having submitted Internet postings under a disguised identity to praise his own performance. As he was one of only a handful of Labor members on the 54-seat council, generating publicity evidently required extra help. He turned to leaving laudatory comments on the website of his local newspaper, the Daily Echo, under several pseudonyms, extolling the contribution he was making to services. Examples of his comments were published by the paper when it traced the posts back to an address owned by Grower. He left comments like, “At least two councilors seem to be concerned about this mess. Well done Cllrs. Ratcliffe and Grower,” and “Just shows that the area does have councilors who care about their residents. Well done Ted Taylor, Ben Grower, and Beryl Baxter.” Another purported to come from a detached observer: “I have friends who live in the area. They say councilors Ted Taylor and Ben Grower fought hard against the proposals.” Initially denying the claims, Grower eventually acknowledged the ruse, saying that other councilors were doing the same to get their names in the media.

GLOUCESTER LIBERAL DEMOCRAT COUNCILOR Jeremy Hilton, trying to whip up support for his campaign to become the local MP, was caught in March 2010 trying to write his own fan mail. He was caught emailing scripts of letters to others, asking them to “cut and paste” them into letters, which they would send to the county’s newspaper under their own names. They would proclaim him as the best man for representing the city at the coming general election. The ruse only came to light in a way that questioned his organizational attributes for the role he aspired to—he mistakenly fired off the obsequious email to the newspaper itself. More woe followed at the May election—he came in a distant third.

THE 500-ODD RESIDENTS OF the small Maryland community of Friendsville (motto: “the friendliest little town in Maryland”) have lived up to their name by reelecting their mayor, Spencer Schlosnagle, 13 times in succession from 1986 despite his wayward record in public decorum. He has been convicted on three separate occasions, in 1992, 1993, and 1995, for exposing himself in public. For the 1993 offense, he had to undertake 30 days’ community work, returning to jail each night. Then, in 2004, he was fined $100 for leading police on a car chase when being apprehended for speeding. His political standing, however, did not seem to suffer. He still went on to win reelection in 2006, and at the time of writing is still mayor, up for election again in February 2012.

ILLINOIS ASSEMBLYMAN ROGER MCAULIFFE, a former policeman, successfully introduced legislation in 1995 that enabled all former police officers who went on to serve in the state assembly to be eligible to draw pensions from both the police and the legislature. At the time of its introduction, the measure benefited precisely one person—himself. There may have been divine justice, however. The following year, McAuliffe drowned in a boating accident. He was a day short of his 58th birthday, and never got to draw on the benefits he had craftily created.

THE NEW ZEALAND PRIME minister Helen Clark was discovered in 2002 to have signed a painting done by an unknown artist as her own work for a charity auction. The piece, described as “a splashy abstract landscape,” had been done three years earlier when Clark was leader of the Opposition for an animal welfare charity who had sought daubings from celebrity figures. A staff member had quietly commissioned an obscure artist, Lauren Fouhey, to do one for her. Clark then signed both the front and the back of the picture, and it successfully earned $1,000 at the event. “I was trying to be helpful when I didn’t have the time,” she explained when the disgruntled businessman who had bought the picture as a potential investment found out the truth. Adding to her embarrassment, Clark was by then also minister for Arts and Culture, a post she had awarded herself days after winning office in 1999, saying that her personal pet project was furthering the arts. Although fraud offenses carried a punishment of up to 10 years in jail, police authorities decided after looking into the case for three months that a prosecution was “not in the public interest.”

IMAGE PROBLEMS

Former president Bill Clinton, who portrayed his presidency as the watershed period for the modern “Information Age,” was revealed after he left office to have been a little less of a pioneer than he purported to be. In 1998, for example, in a speech to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he lauded how the information technology that had been harnessed and promoted by his administration had been responsible for more than a third of America’s economic expansion and confidently gushed how “all students should feel as comfortable with a keyboard as a chalkboard, as comfortable with a laptop as a textbook.” Three years after his departure from the White House, staff at his presidential library archiving the president’s records disclosed that of the 40 million or so emails that his office had produced, Clinton himself had sent just…two. One of these did not officially qualify as it was a test message to check that he knew where the “send” button was. In actuality, it appeared that he only sent one real message—to orbiting astronauts in a publicity stunt. Skip Rutherford, the library’s president, commented, seemingly unnecessarily, that Clinton was “not a techno-klutz.”

MITT ROMNEY, FORMER MASSACHUSETTS governor, got off to a rocky start on his 2008 presidential campaign as he tried to establish a profile for himself as a man of the common people. Declaring himself in April 2007 to have been a hunter “pretty much all my life,” it later transpired that this amounted to going hunting twice—once when he was 15 years old and not again until the previous year. He dropped out of the race within a month of the first primary votes in early 2008.

AS THE 2000 U.S. presidential election approached, former vice president Al Gore established his future campaign credentials around concern for the environment. Even before the campaign officially opened, observers noted his visits to key states had taken on a suspiciously election-style feel. In July 1999, he went to New Hampshire, which happened to hold the crucial first primary election. His aides suggested he do a press call paddling a canoe on the picturesque waters of the Connecticut River that runs through the state. It later emerged that U.S. Secret Service agents had insisted the local authorities release four billion gallons of water from an upriver dam to ensure that the VP’s canoe did not get stuck on the riverbed. Water was at unprecedented low levels, as the whole of New England was suffering its worst ever drought. By the time Gore performed his sail-past in front of the assembled press corps, the Connecticut was 10 inches higher, ensuring a safe passage. Within minutes of his departure, the water was shut off and the river sank back to a trickle.

ISRAELI NEWSPAPERS HAD A field day in February 2007 when Defense Minister Amir Peretz, who had been widely criticized since his appointment the previous year for his lack of military background, was photographed looking through binoculars with the lens caps still on. Of particular hilarity was the fact that he raised the glasses to his eyes three times, nodding in acknowledgement each time as the chief of staff drew his attention to objects on the horizon, giving no apparent sign he was having difficulty seeing what his guide was pointing out. He quit the post four months later.

DURING A RECORD DROUGHT in Victoria, Australia, in 1982, the state premier hosted a morale-boosting press visit to the worst-affected farms. As the media set up in the middle of a remote, parched field for a press conference to be carried live on early evening news, almost on cue a dramatic rainstorm broke. The premier persevered, and the scene was captured for posterity of 30 politicians and local dignitaries bemoaning the effects of the drought—in the middle of a muddy field huddled under umbrellas and the odd sodden newspaper.

MISTAKES THAT REVEAL

Irked by a political opponent who had called him a liar, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger succumbed to temptation in October 2009 when he wrote back to the lawmaker vetoing his proposed legislation. Encoded in the official-looking response to San Francisco Democrat Tom Ammiano was an obscene message. Reading vertically downward, the first letter of each line spelled out “fuck you.” Officially, Schwarzenegger’s press spokesperson was “surprised” at the “strange coincidence.”

A MORALE-BOOSTING COMMUNICATIONS DRIVE by Britain’s Labor Party headquarters to help MPs keep up-to-date with the leadership backfired in early 2005 when some members failed to read the material fully before dispatching thousands of copies of a self-promoting letter around their constituencies. Draft pro forma letters containing a fulsome account of the government’s achievements were sent to all MPs, littered with uplifting sentiments such as “And nowhere can we be more proud than here in.” with helpful markers indicating “(insert constituency name here).” Unfortunately, at least nine MPs simply cut and pasted the text unamended onto their own letterhead and sent them on their way.

DOING IT MY WAY

Harold Gunn, campaigning as a Republican candidate for the Texas House of Representatives in 2000, lost at the primary stage in March when it emerged that he had written and appeared in a pornographic film featuring naked women jogging through a Houston park and lathering themselves with motor oil. Gunn said this showed him to be “a communicator,” adding, “It’s as tasteful as it can get with naked women in it.” He was trounced by his opponent 78 percent to 22.

VICENTE SANZ, A MEMBER of the Spanish center-right Popular Party in the regional assembly of Valencia, was sacked by his party in June 1994 for his honesty. He had said in an interview that he was in politics “to line my pockets.”

THOMAS KRÜGER CAMPAIGNED AS Social Democrat candidate for Berlin in the German federal elections in 1994 by plastering the city with posters of himself in the nude, accompanied by the slogan: “An honest politician with nothing to hide.”

THE MAYOR OF GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador’s biggest city, responded to local journalists’ harassing style at press conferences in 2003 by hiring a parrot to speak for him. Jaime Nebot, who had been rankled by the press corps’ criticisms of his policies, introduced the bird saying, “Some people only approach me with nonsense talk, so the parrot will answer back in the same way. I need to use my time to work.”

THREE WEEKS AFTER SHE won election to Maidstone Borough Council in May 2003, Annabelle Blackmore announced she was leaving Kent to accompany her financial consultant husband, who had been posted to Bermuda for two years. She rejected suggestions that she should resign as councilor, maintaining she could “do an OK job” representing her constituents in the village of Marden just as effectively from the island, 3,500 miles away. “If I resigned, I feel I would be relinquishing my responsibility and letting down those who voted for me.” Blackmore survived a complaint to the English Standards Board, which oversees conduct of elected officials. It found that she had not brought her office or council into disrepute, or broken any code of conduct. She appears to have completed the long-distance service adequately enough to continue to be reelected to the council where, by 2009 and back in Marden, she had become chair of the Environment and Leisure Committee. According to the council’s log of meeting attendances, it was September 2007, four and a half years after her election, before she actually attended her first meeting.

THE MAYORS OF TWO Paris suburbs engaged in a skirmish on traffic congestion in 2009 by declaring the same stretch of road a one-way street, but in opposite directions. Patrick Balkany, conservative mayor of Levallois-Perret, decided to improve flows in his area by designating a main road as a one-way route. His neighbor, socialist mayor of Clichy-la-Garenne, Gilles Catoire, complained that the decision increased congestion in his area and declared the stretch of the road under his control one-way, but in the other direction. The stalemate was referred up the lengthy administrative chain to the prefect of Paris for a ruling. Balkany eventually won out.

NO EXCUSES

Philadelphia city councilor Angel Ortiz was discovered in 2001 to have been driving for the last 25 years without a license, including 17 years when he was a municipal employee or council member, “I kept trying to make time to get a new license,” he claimed, “but it seemed that something pressing always took precedence.” When police delved further, they found he also had 53 outstanding parking tickets.

WHILE CHAIRMAN OF A 1982 New Zealand parliamentary committee examining a toughening of the country’s drunk driving laws, junior minister of Trade and Industry Keith Allen was convicted and fined NZ$145—for drunk driving.

LIBERAL POLITICIAN BARONESS SEEAR failed to fulfill her engagement as a guest speaker at a British Institute of Management conference in 1979. A spokesperson tactfully put it down to “an unfortunate slip in transport.” The conference was entitled “Can Women Manage?”

DATUK LEO MOGGIE, MALAYSIA’S telecommunications minister, laid on an elaborate publicity event in 1986 to herald the country’s advances in telephone technology and mark the signing up of the millionth subscriber. In front of the press corps, he dialed the lucky customer—and got a wrong number.

THE LEADER OF THE Swedish Conservative Party, Ulf Adelsohn, was charged with illegally importing a cordless telephone in 1985. His claim not to know it was against the law rang a little hollow. The act banning such phones had been passed and signed by him when communications minister.

BRITISH ENVIRONMENT MINISTER ALAN Meale attended a conference in Peterborough in April 1999 to press the government’s green credentials and speak about the environmental damage caused by excessive car travel. He turned up at the venue having been driven the two miles from the railway station in a stretch limo that did 17 miles to the gallon. Meale was soon lecturing the audience that “the way we travel is damaging our towns, harming our countryside and already changing the climate of the planet.”

LABOR DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER John Prescott got into the same hot water at the party conference in Bournemouth that September by using a three-car convoy to take him and wife Pauline the 300 yards from their hotel to the conference hall. He was due to deliver a speech on increasing the use of public transportation. He initially, and in the media’s eyes unchivalrously, blamed the journey on his wife’s dislike of having her hair blown around by the sea breeze. He then cited security. The next day, he walked.

FRENCH CAR MAGAZINE AUTO Plus in October 2003 caught two French ministers speeding on their way to the official inauguration ceremony of the country’s first speed cameras. Transportation minister Gilles de Robien was clocked by a journalist’s radar gun going 61 miles per hour in the suburbs of Paris where the limit was 43 miles per hour. Future president Nicolas Sarkozy, then interior minister, sped past at 64 miles per hour. De Robien’s office later did not contest the evidence, explaining that the minister was running late and had to be present, as he was presiding at the ceremony. In contrast, and perhaps indicative of his future trajectory, Sarkozy yielded no ground, getting his spokesperson to tell the media that they were “verifying the conditions under which the speeds were recorded.”

TWO YEARS AFTER ITS creation, Argentina’s Ethics Office, established to set standards for integrity and honesty in government, was voted by a survey of electors as one of the most corrupt institutions in the country. Of 40 public institutions covered in the poll, the graft-busting office was seen as the fourth most corrupt body, after the country’s trade unions, customs service, and the judicial system.

IGNORANCE IN MOTION

A satirical magazine in Washington, DC, shed an alarming light on the lack of worldly knowledge of newly elected members of the 1993 Congress. During apparently serious interviews, the reporter threw in a question about an entirely nonexistent country. To the question, “What should we be doing about the ethnic cleansing in Freedonia?” a large number of politicians rolled out very serious answers. Corrine Brown, a freshly elected Florida member, called the situation “very, very sad,” adding, “We need to take action to assist the people.” James Talent (Missouri) opined, “Anything we can do to use the good offices of the U.S. government to assist stopping the killing over there, we should do.” Jay Dickey from Arkansas took the easy route and blamed then-president Clinton for the debacle. Jay Inslee, a Washington State representative, confessed not to be familiar with Freedonia, but urged action nevertheless as, “It’s coming to the point now that turning a blind eye to it for the next ten years is not the answer.” Steve Buyer (Indiana) acknowledged, “It’s a different situation than the Middle East.” The magazine commented that politicians “are asked a lot of dumb questions, and they are all used to supplying answers.”

IN MARCH 1993, BUCHAREST television conducted a similar survey of Romania’s legislators. Reporters asked several members for their reactions to the high levels of hydrogen being found in drinking water. Most expressed themselves appalled and concerned. An Opposition spokesperson described the “problem” as “yet another proof of the government’s incompetence.”

IN SEPTEMBER 2007, A New Zealand MP fell for a long-running hoax exposing the gullibility of MPs who jump on political bandwagons. She wrote to the country’s health department demanding immediate action to curb use of the drug dihydrogen monoxide. Jacqui Dean, Opposition National Party member for Otago, urged health minister Jim Anderton, in charge of government drug policy, to have his advisory committee on drugs take a view. He wrote back pointing out that the substance was…water.

ITALIAN POLITICIAN TOMMASO COLETTI provoked fury in 2006 when he used the infamous Auschwitz slogan “Work makes you free” to promote local job centers in his area. The president of Chieti province in the south of the country, Coletti wrote, “I don’t remember where I read this phrase but it was one of those quotes that have an instant impact on you because they tell an immense truth.” His regional governor quickly apologized to the local Jewish community.

WHEN THE HOUSE OF Commons editors of Hansard, the daily verbatim record of parliamentary debates, analyzed a week’s worth of proceedings in July 1989 to discover what size of dictionary base they needed for new computerized shorthand machines, they discovered that MPs used only 12,000 words. The average vocabulary of an educated native English speaker is estimated to be about 24,000 to 30,000.

DESPERATE MEASURES

In September 1994 Japhet Ekidor, assistant minister for Lands and Settlement in the Kenyan government, bit off the ear of a political rival in a brawl during a public meeting in the rural district of Turkana. The pair was locked in a dispute over who should be the head of a local charity. Ekidor severed the ear of Danson Ekuam, the local MP, after Ekuam had bitten him on the arm. Despite calls for the minister’s dismissal for embarrassing the government, it was the MP who ended up being charged with assault.

FRENCH TOURISM MINISTER OLIVIER Stirn resigned in disgrace in July 1990 after he used a novel way to ensure a high-profile policy summit he was organizing was a successful event in the eyes of the media. The three-day Dialogue 2000, a centerpiece of the socialist government’s program, attracted a stream of government ministers on the first morning, but the audience dwindled dramatically in the afternoon. With two days still to go, and thinking to spare blushes, Stirn’s aides hastily contacted an employment agency and secured 200 out-of-work actors to fill the seats. For the rest of the conference, the press witnessed a rapturous and intense audience hanging on every word of the party spokesmen. The ruse was only discovered at the end when a departing journalist was mistakenly handed an envelope with the agreed day’s fee.

LORD PALMERSTON HOLDS THE all-time record in British politics for ministerial service --48 years, including war secretary for an unbroken 18 years, three times as foreign secretary (16 years), once as home secretary (2 years) and twice as prime minister (over 9 years). He combined unparalleled energy for work with a fearsome temper that was always on the point of boiling over into a rupture with his cabinet colleagues. He was renowned for regularly threatening to leave the government by firing off a resignation letter to the prime minister of the day. His preferred method of delivery was to employ a lame war veteran as messenger, who would be dispatched across the quadrangle of the Ministry toward Downing Street and the PM’s office. Invariably, Palmerston’s temper cooled nearly as soon as the messenger had left, so he retained the services of a second (able-bodied) valet, among whose duties it was to head off in pursuit of the first man and overtake the slow-moving letter-bearer before he had chance to leave the precincts.

ODD IDEAS

Instead of concentrating on his constituents’ more worldly concerns, maverick Nebraska state senator Ernie Chambers embarked on a quixotic mission in September 2007 to sue God. Claiming he was doing so to reinforce the right under the U.S. Constitution to bring any issue to court, however frivolous, Chambers lodged a claim in the state courts seeking an injunction preventing God—whom he cited as causing “calamitous catastrophes resulting in the widespread death, destruction, and terrorization of millions upon millions of Earth’s inhabitants”—from inflicting further “grave harm” to his constituents. He lost the first hearing in the district court and his appeal was thrown out a year later on a technicality—that God, not having an address, could not be served papers to be notified of the proceedings as required by the Constitution. Chambers announced that he disagreed with the ruling on the grounds that since the court acknowledged God’s existence, and hence His omniscience, “as God knows everything, God has notice of this lawsuit.” However, by the time the verdict came, Chambers had had to retire from the Senate in compliance with term-limits laws Nebraskans had—they might now think wisely introduced a few years earlier.

THE ULTIMATE INSULT

It is one thing not to be recognized by the common people; another when it is one’s own staff. Hungary’s new defense minister, Janos Szabo, suffered that indignity in 1998 when he arrived to preside over an officers’ inauguration ceremony. Guards on the gate of the army base refused to allow him in, as no one recognized him. Szabo later issued photographs of himself to every military base in the country, with orders to put them up at gates and in duty officers’ rooms.

A SURVEY BY PARIS MATCH magazine in 1991 discovered that more than 8 of out 10 French people could not spell the name of their leader, François Mitterrand, almost 10 years into his presidency.

PERHAPS THE MOST HUMBLING discovery for the egocentric politician is the realization that people do not take much notice of them. A 1982 experiment by West Germany’s reputable Emnid Institute tested the knowledge of the electorate with spectacular results. Asking respondents to rank the popularity of a list of current cabinet ministers, an entirely fictitious minister whom the survey had invented for the exercise came in sixth. “Minister Meyers” beat a number of German heavyweights, including the ministers of both defense and the interior.

FROM THE HISTORY BOOKS

The most durable elected politician of all time is believed to be József Madarász, who has the longest span of service, spanning 83 years. He was a member of the Hungarian Parliament, initially between 1832 and 1836 and again between 1848 and 1850, but then continuously after 1861 until his death in 1915.

THE LONGEST CONTINUOUSLY SERVING elected national politician is believed to be Charles Pelham Villiers, who sat in the British House of Commons for 63 years and 6 days until his death in January 1898, aged 96.

CONSERVATIVE MEMBER CHRISTOPHER SYKES represented three Yorkshire constituencies in his 27-year parliamentary career dating from 1865 to 1892. In all that time, he spoke only 6 times and asked 3 questions.

GEORGES CLEMENCEAU, ONE OF France’s greatest politicians, who had a 40-year career in Parliament and served twice as prime minister—between 1906 and 1909 and again during the crisis of the First World War—was paranoid about being caught unprepared. He took to the habit over decades of sleeping fully dressed, replete with shoes and sometimes even gloves. On waking each morning, he would promptly change.

THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY was so unconcerned about his appearance that when he was in Monaco recovering from illness in the summer of 1886, he was turned away from the casino at Monte Carlo for being too scruffy. He had just ceased being prime minister at the time.

WITH SHADES OF MODERN PR concerns, Italian dictator Mussolini compensated for his short stature by standing on hidden stools to make speeches and sitting in a specially created higher chair at meetings to bring him up to the same level as others. Photographers were strictly forbidden from disclosing the aids. When first in power, he had taken to wearing a bowler hat, until his advisors told him that the Anglo-Saxon press was remarking on the image’s similarities with “the fat one” of the comic duo Laurel and Hardy.

IN SEPTEMBER 1942, AS the tide of the Second World War turned against the Fascist powers in Europe, with Italian troops facing acute shortages of ammunition, uniforms, and supplies, and the country 10 months away from being invaded by the Allies, Mussolini approved the expenditure of several million pounds to improve the winter sports facilities at Cortina, in the hope that he might win the right to host the first postwar Winter Olympics.

BEING THE VANGUARD OF the Marxist revolution, champion of workers’ power and proponent of social equality did not stop Lenin from accumulating nine Rolls-Royces. According to the company, Lenin ordered and received a unique model—one fitted with tank-like tracks at the rear and skis at the front, which allowed him to get about in the frozen Russian winters. The explanation given at the time, that he was simply using vehicles that had been requisitioned from the czar, was entirely untrue. Lenin employed a buyer in London to purchase all his cars new.