Yogic flying: credited with reversing Bill Clinton's fortunes. Photograph: Seth Perlman/AP
This story about a row over the future of the former HQ of the Natural Law party, Mentmore Towers, left me wondering whatever happened to the party best known for yogic flying (which, to the uninitiated, looks a bit like bouncing cross-legged on an invisible Space Hopper).
A trip to the Natural Law party website reveals it slipped (flew?) off the UK political scene in 2001. It turns out that the adherents of the teachings of the Beatles' guru of choice, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, have now jonined an organisation called the Global Country of World Peace.
The GCWP doesn't appear to be planning to field any election candidates in the near future, because - well, the Global Country of World Peace doesn't really have a parliament, as far as I know.
The Natural Law party site lives on, and continues to display the movement's remarkable claim to have engineered a reverse in the fortunes of Congress and then-president Bill Clinton by assembling 4,000 yogic flying experts in Washginton DC for two months to create "positivity and coherence".
At least the NLP had a historic pile and a memorable form of meditation to help secure its place in Britain's collective political memory: the same can't be said for the Jolly Small Brewers party of the 1992 general election. Remember them? No, neither do I.
If anyone recalls voting for the JSBP (as they might have been known), or can reminisce about their Worcester candidate, one M Soden, do make yourself known ...
