Sixties Mini Mokes seeing a Jolly good surge in values

Hard to believe that nice original Sixties Mini Mokes are now over £25k. Survival rates of BMC’S most basic Mini variant may be tiny but this seems monster money for something that left the factory so miserably specified that all you got was a driver’s seat, a single wiper and one colour – Spruce Green. But British-built Mokes have become hot property with Peter Vardy in Glasgow advertising a mint ’65 with 56k for £27,000 and Motordrome in Berkshire offering a ’67 with 35,000 miles for £24,995. Only 14,518 were built between 1964-68, with 90% exported. Production continued in Australia until ‘81 and Portugal until ’93 but the early home market cars are the ones everybody wants. Given that most rusted away or were brutally modified, the ones that do survive with genuine originality and patina can probably be measured in double figures – hence the value explosion. And if you’ve got a perfect early Moke with its proper factory 850cc engine (numbers start with an 8) you could be looking at £35k. Initially marketed as a commercial vehicle, regular appearances on ITV’S The Prisoner TV series more recently have given the Moke a halo of weirdness (Silverstone sold one of the TV versions in 2015 for £13,750). It’s now seen as a fun beach car like the Fiat 500 Jolly. Projects start at £6k and there’s a private seller in Dartmouth with a running and Mot’d ’66 that needs restoring with a plausible 35k miles for £10k. But not everybody has heard of Moke Mania so treat any sensibly priced Sixties cars that pop up in the classifieds as golden opportunities.