Alongside “Rainbow” George Weiss, Screaming Lord Sutch was a political dilettante. As leader of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, Sutch stood in 39 parliamentary elections between 1963 and 1997, but Weiss outdid him to set a record at the 2005 general election by standing in 13 constituencies simultaneously.
He polled a grand total of 1,289 votes, less than 100 for each seat in which he was a candidate.
Over the years the hopelessly optimistic Weiss fronted a variety of political parties, including the Make Politicians History Party. In many of them he was the only member. In his final shot at power in the 2017 general election, he formed a Rainbow Alliance between his Captain Rainbow’s Universal Party and the remnants of Sutch’s Monster Raving Loonies.
Weiss’s political career owed its genesis partly to his friend and Hampstead neighbour, the late comedian Peter Cook. When Cook jokingly formed the fictitious What Party, he appointed his friend Ciara Parkes as minister for lifts, his mother as minister for ladders and Weiss as his minister for confusion.
Weiss’s first genuine candidacy came soon after, when he stood against Michael Portillo in the 1984 Enfield Southgate by-election. He polled only 48 votes but was in his element and became an “election junkie”.
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Standing for the www.xat.org party in the 2003 Brent East by-election Weiss believed the 11 votes he mustered had set a record but was crestfallen to discover that a candidate in Kensington some years earlier had polled five votes. He was proud to seize back the record in 2005 when a candidate for his Vote For Yourself Rainbow Dream Ticket party in Cardiff North scored just a single vote.
His own idiosyncratic method of measuring his popularity involved telling the electorate not to vote for him and “then counting the number of people who didn’t vote and claiming them as my supporters”.
His most successful election result came when he persuaded Ronnie Carroll, whose Ring-a-Ding Girl was Britain’s entry in the 1962 Eurovision Song Contest, to stand for the Eurovisionary party in Hampstead and Kilburn at the 2015 general election. With Weiss as his agent, Carroll secured 113 votes despite dying before polls opened. It was too late to take Carroll’s name off the ballot paper and as a result, for the first time, Weiss’s party got its deposit back. “Perhaps I should find more candidates at death’s door,” he observed.
In addition to Cook, other friends who were charmed by Weiss’s bohemian eccentricity included the businessman and gallery owner Charles Saatchi, the comedian Russell Brand and the musician Ian Dury. A fanatical fan of Newcastle United, he also befriended Jackie Milburn, the club’s most celebrated footballer, and persuaded him to stand for election for the Rainbow Party in the 1985 Tyne Bridge by-election. When the former striker pulled out at the last minute, Weiss stood himself, getting just 38 votes.
In later years he funded his political career with the proceeds of the sale of a mews house in the cobbled Perrins Walk, Hampstead, three doors away from Cook. Weiss had taken up residence in 1969 but stopped paying rent in 1984 after the roof caved in and many of his possessions were ruined. He sought compensation and demanded his landlord repair the roof but never heard from the owner of the property again. He remained there rent free until 2004 when he claimed squatter’s rights and HM Land Registry awarded him possessory ownership. He went on to make a profit of £710,000 from the sale of the house. He squandered the cash not only on election deposits but on an array of madcap projects, including launching a referendum to rename Belfast Best City after George Best, chartering a plane on which to host a month-long party around the world, and hiring the Camden Palace for a concert that offered free admission but for which he charged £1 to leave.
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He was also a compulsive gambler and in 2008 staked £333 at 3,000-1 on aliens arriving during the Olympics opening ceremony.
A self-styled “dreamer and schemer”, his manifesto centred around an egalitarian form of universal income which he called The Wonder and which was philosophically based on the lyrics of John Lennon’s Imagine.
During the 2019 general election in which Boris Johnson stood on a “get Brexit done” ticket, he proposed a new European Union “that has no countries to support or governments to obey” and was “peaceful, harmonious, leisure-oriented and poverty-free”.
“He wanted a world with no money, no boundaries, no borders,” his friend Sebastian Wocker, editor of the Hampstead Village Voice, said. “He wanted everyone to be OK and no one to want for anything. But the way he went about it was too eccentric to cut any cheese with anyone.”
He never married and after a number of failed relationships opted for the life of a “solitary mystic”.
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George Weiss was born in Hampstead in 1940 as London was under nightly bombardment from the Luftwaffe. The son of a Hatton Garden diamond merchant, he failed his 11-plus and on leaving school went to work for his father for 15 years.
In 1974 he found his unlikely soulmate when Cook moved into a house a few steps away from Weiss’s Hampstead home. An Observer profile in 1999 noted that Weiss “could have been one of Cook’s absurdist creations” and until shortly before Cook’s death in 1995 they saw each other most days, often in the company of “Bronco”, a Hampstead vagrant. Cook found Weiss “endlessly amusing”, especially his conviction that political success was just around the corner.
“Peter enjoyed the spectacular nature of my failures really,” Weiss reflected. “He got great fun and enjoyment out of them.”
When George’s mother said she would not let him have the £30,000 his late father had left him until he agreed to see a psychiatrist, Cook would delight in playing the part of a Teutonic psychiatrist in a series of rehearsals for the real thing. The money was duly inherited and quickly spent. He fielded 50 candidates for his Rainbow Party in the 1997 general election, giving them £500 each for their deposits. Nineteen of them absconded with the money.
Weiss watched television with Cook most nights, he with a spliff in his hand, Cook with a glass of wine or vodka. They would ramblingly debate what they would do if appointed God for a day and call radio phone-ins to share their anarchic conversations with the world, Cook often posing as Sven, a depressed Norwegian fisherman living in Swiss Cottage.
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Weiss recorded many of their conversations and after a long-running dispute with Cook’s widow, Lin, over the rights, in 2002 he released Over at Rainbow’s, a CD of excerpts from his hundreds of hours of tape.
His life was peppered with other chaotic incidents and bizarre happenings, such as his imprisonment in 1989 when he was caught in a tabloid sting at the Swiss Cottage Holiday Inn, where he was filmed exchanging 100 tabs of LSD for £150. To his great amusement he was described in the News of the World as “the master pusher behind the acid house craze”.
Michael Palin, in his diaries, recalled Weiss complaining to him on another occasion about how hard it was to get publicity for his political campaigns and so he decided to get himself arrested by walking into Hampstead police station with a huge joint.
“Rainbow” George Weiss, dreamer and schemer, was born on October 13, 1940. He died in his sleep on December 1, 2021, aged 81