May 3 – Monkey Business
WHEN the Labour government swept to power in 1997 they introduced a system of directly-elected mayors that they believed would encourage the electorate to get more excited by the dull-as-dishwater world of local government.
Much to the chagrin of Blair and his cronies, this was proved right in Hartlepool, as football fans flocked to the ballot boxes and elected Hartlepool United’s mascot H’Angus the Monkey as their new boss of City Hall today in 2002.
H’Angus – or Stuart Drummond as his mother calls him – ran on a promise of ‘free bananas for all schoolchildren’ and narrowly beat local businessman Leo Gillen to the £58,000-a-year post. We’re not sure whether his salary was paid in cash or peanuts though.
H’Angus’ nickname comes from the affectionate term of ‘monkey hangers’ that Hartlepudlians have been known as since an incident during the Napoleonic wars.
According to local folklore a French ship was wrecked off the coast of Hartlepool, with the only survivor being a monkey dressed in a full French uniform. A group of locals took the opportunity to hold an impromptu trial and asked the monkey a series of questions. With many of them not knowing what a Frenchman looked like and the monkey not giving many answers the mob decided the simian passenger was a French spy and hanged it from the mast of a fishing boat. As you do.
H’Angus had often courted controversy during his time on the sidelines, twice being thrown out of away games for simulating sex, once with a female steward in Scunthorpe and once at Blackpool for frolicking with an inflaterable doll. Still, that makes him slightly better behaved than your average MP.
Downing Street was not amused by H’Angus’ election, issuing a terse statement that read: “It is only to be expected that new faces come to the fore.”
Labour chairman Charles Clarke was more damning, telling Radio 4′s Today Programme: “The one in the monkey suit ridicules the whole system.”
Drummond, a 28-year-old who had formerly worked in a call centre, was given control of a £100m budget and pledged to take his new role seriously.
“I’m not going to be taking any whoopee cushions into meetings,” he reassured the electorate as he hung up his tail and got to work. Drummond was as good as his word, doing such a good job that he was re-elected three years later in a landslide victory.
Perhaps we can convince Arsenal’s Gunnersaurus to take note and challenge Boris Johnson in 2012, as we’d much rather have a bright green dinosaur in charge of our capital city than a foppy haired, bumbling … er … dinosaur.
See H’Angus getting involved in some monkey business with Hartlepool’s most famous fan below and find out what else was going on today here.
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