CURIOSITIES OF POLITICS

Fidel Castro once spoke for four and a half hours to the United Nations, while Captain Henry Kerby, MP for Arundel and Shoreham during the 1960s, reputedly only ever asked three parliamentary questions in his entire career: two were written questions and the third was, 'Could somebody please open the window?' And when Lonnie Donegan had a heart bypass operation in the 1980s, a Japanese journalist reading the wires mistook the name for Ronnie Reagan and caused a panic drop on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
'We treat politics as the greatest spectator sport yet invented, so everybody is enjoying the crisis immensely,' said an Irish political commentator of Albert Reynolds' resignation at the end of 1994. Politics is a subject imbued with curiosities: from the rites associated with it to the curious figures who play a part in it. As Disraeli shrewdly observed, 'What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expect generally happens.' In this timely investigation, Jonathan Rice considers the many curiosities of politics in the modern world.
From around 1860 there have been many bizarre political parties - such as the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, which might be described as being perfectly named except that it is neither liberal, democratic nor a party; curious voting systems: Enver Hoxha of Albania got 99.99988 per cent of the vote, when one voter out of the electorate of 1,627,968 failed to support his party in the 1982 election; political leaders whose wives really ruled, and those who changed their names before taking office. There is strange political language - it is acceptable in the UK to call a fellow-MP a 'pig's bladder on a stick' but not a 'nosey Parker', which was banned in 1955; and, of course, the inevitable scandals, which perhaps demonstrate that the honest politician is always the curiosity.