Mason - Dead man wins election : the ultimate collection of outrageous, weird, and unbelievable political tales

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 citys 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 dont 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 Partys 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. Reitsmas 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 countys 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 tohe mistakenly fired off the obsequious email to the newspaper itself. More woe followed at the May electionhe 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 personhimself. 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 didnt 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.