The Monkey Mayor of Hartlepool (2002) w/ Tim Harford

This Day in Esoteric Political History

Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia

History

4.6 • 982 Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2022

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s April 28th. This day in 2002, the northeastern English town of Hartlepool is gearing up for a mayoral election, where they would end up voting in… the local football club’s monkey mascot to run their government.

Jody, Niki, and Kellie are joined by Tim Harford to discuss the story of how H’Angus the Monkey got elected, and how the man inside the suit, Stuart Drummond, went on to be a very effective administrator.

Be sure to check out Tim’s excellent podcast “Cautionary Tales” from Pushkin Media.

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And don’t forget about Oprahdemics, hosted by Kellie, out now from Radiotopia.

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Our team: Jacob Feldman, Researcher/Producer; Brittani Brown, Producer; Khawla Nakua, Transcripts; music by Teen Daze and Blue Dot Sessions; Julie Shapiro and Audrey Mardavich, Executive Producers at Radiotopia

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.
0:07.0	My name is Jody Avergan.
0:10.0	This day, April 28, 2002, in the northeastern English town of Hartlepool, population
0:17.7	about 100,000 or so, a man by the name of Stuart Drummond was about to be
0:22.4	elected mayor. The election would happen on May 4th and that's when Drummond would become mayor.
0:27.0	Some notable things about Stuart Drummond, he was only 28th, pretty young. He had a degree in business and languages from the University of
0:33.7	Salford. He'd worked at a call center and on a cruise ship. All right, let me cut to the chase here.
0:38.6	I'm burying the lead a little bit about Stuart Drummond. Stuart Drummond was a monkey, or at least Truman was a monkey mascot.
0:44.6	He was the guy in the costume at the local football club games.
0:49.2	The team's mascot was a monkey for reasons we'll get into.
0:51.8	And Stuart was inside that costume firing up the
0:54.5	crowd and that was basically his only claim to fame he ran as a joke and he won as a joke and
1:00.8	funnily enough he actually became a pretty good mayor and there are some
1:05.2	lessons in there I would say about democracy and political credentialism and the power of
1:09.5	free bananas as your platform so let's talk about all of this, the monkey mayor of Hartlepool,
1:16.0	with our very special guest back on the show, Tim Harford, undercover economist, host of the
1:21.0	wonderful show from Pushkin cautionary tales, and he tells the story of the wonderful show from Pushkin cautionary tales and he tells the story
1:24.6	of the monkey mayor in the latest season Tim welcome back to the show and congrats on
1:29.0	the new season. Thank you. Great to be back. What a wonderful introduction to Stuart Drummond and the town that elected a monkey for a mare.
1:37.0	I love it.
1:38.0	Yeah, well no one says his name.
1:39.0	They always say the monkey, so I figured give Stuart...
	...

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