The party members decided they must continue his work of wearing odd clothes and losing their deposits in every by-election.In the leadership election, Hope, who co-founded the party with Sutch in 1979, triumphed over Maroney after another candidate, TC Owen, otherwise known as Bananaman, withdrew. Hope initially shared the leadership with his cat, Mandu, but has manfully shouldered the burden on his own since 2002, when his co-leader expired beneath the wheels of a car.After suffering a split soon after Sutch’s death, when a group formed a breakaway movement called The Rock’n'Roll Loony Party, the Official Loonies now boast a membership of 5,173, each paying £15 a year to “show the world that your marbles are indeed lost!!!” Maroney will stand in Sedgefield against the Prime Minister, and Lord Toby Jug (they all call each other by their Loony names) will contest Michael Howard’s seat. I’m campaigning for the Royal Navy to go back to sail power.” Then a shortish man in yellow trousers and an old, quilted dressing-gown approaches “I’m Baron Harryhog, Minister for Insane Hedgehogs. A tall man in a badge-studded tailcoat and cocked hat introduces himself: “I’m Admiral Lord Horatio Hornblower, Minister for Defence.

“It’ll be the only political broadcast people dash home to watch,” Hope says.Although so far the conference resembles a small get-together in a pub, several key party figures are here. They hope to field enough candidates to earn them a party political broadcast. Apart from the outlandishly-dressed customers and the photos of the party’s previous leader, Screaming Lord Sutch, it looks like any other pub where beery carpets and scuffed tables hold out against gentrification and stripped pine.Attendance is a little sparse: but then, even Lord Sutch often failed to turn up. We should have a new cabinet arriving,” he adds, “because the last one fell apart.”
For a candidate who has just come 12th out of 14 in the Hartlepool by-election, Hope seems pretty cheery. But then, the leader of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party is used to judging success by a rather different yardstick to that employed by what he calls the “unofficial” loony parties – namely, all the rest “We never come last,” he tells me proudly. “Even in Kensington and Chelsea, we got 20 votes.”We’re at the bar of the Dog and Partridge – the pub in Yateley, Hampshire, that Hope owns – at the start of the OMRLP annual conference.

That’s when we all get inside a cabinet and then we all get out again with different ministries to shadow. “Tomorrow,” says Alan “Howling Laud” Hope, “is our cabinet reshuffle. “I think Robert is beginning to understand that politics is a bit more serious a business than he might have been engaged in for a while.”He added: “But he must understand that we can’t forever tolerate people who cannot toe the party line. We have disciplinary procedures – it is not a question of that as yet.”He wants to be party leader apparently. The leader of the UK Independence Party has warned the outspoken MEP Robert Kilroy-Silk to “toe the party line” or face disciplinary action.
Roger Knapman said that the party could not “forever tolerate” off-message members. He urged the former television presenter – whose outspoken comments are believed to have driven away its key donor, Paul Sykes – to become more of a “team player” or face disciplinary action.His comments followed Mr Kilroy-Silk’s claims at the party’s weekend conference that Mr Knapman had agreed to let him take over as leader of UKIP. He must start to think about being a team player,” he told BBC Radio 4.

Mr Knapman maintained yesterday that there had “never, never ever” existed any such deal.”It is one thing to be ambitious. By cutting waste, the Tories would “put us back on the path to lower taxes” He added: “So be in no doubt. When I can, I will cut taxes.”Mr Howard suggested the Tories would target the poorest people, who “shoulder the highest burden”, and middle-income earners such as teachers, doctors and police officers who had been sucked into the 40p in the pound top rate of income tax by Labour.Dismissing criticism that cutting inheritance tax would help the rich, he said people who had bought their council houses were now being caught by it.. Some Tory activists wept as he described how his grandmother was killed in a Nazi concentration camp and declared that he wanted to give “a tiny bit back” to Britain because he owed “everything I am” to this country.