Catmando

Catmando holds one of the most unusual political distinctions of any animal: he was, briefly, the joint leader of a registered British political party. When the founder of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, Screaming Lord Sutch, died in 1999, the party's leadership passed jointly to Alan 'Howling Laud' Hope and to his cat, Catmando. The arrangement was, of course, in keeping with the Loony Party's tradition of cheerful absurdist satire — the party had long campaigned on deliberately ridiculous manifesto pledges as a gentle mockery of mainstream politics. Catmando "co-led" the party until his death in a road accident in 2002, an event the party marked with genuine fondness and mock-solemn tributes. His brief tenure became a favourite piece of British political trivia, a reminder that a fringe party could make a serious point about the seriousness of politics by appointing a cat to help run it. For a few years, Britain could honestly claim to have a political party led, in part, by a cat.