‘Rainbow’ George Weiss
Colourful serial political fringe candidate, former squatter and Hampstead chum of Peter Cook
GEORGE WEISS, better known as “Rainbow George”, who has died aged 81, was a former diamond dealer, lifelong Newcastle United supporter, drinking buddy of the comedian Peter Cook – and self-styled “Hampstead village idiot”.
He also had a busy, though unsuccessful, political career, standing in by-elections and general and European elections, setting a record in 2005 after running for 13 different constituencies in the general election. Over the years he formed parties with names like the Vote for Yourself Rainbow Dream Ticket Party, the Make Politicians History Party and the Euro-visionary Party.
With the last of these he scored a victory of sorts in 2015 by fielding Ronnie Carroll, a former 1960s crooner (who entered the Eurovision Song Contest for Britain in 1962 with Ring-a-ding Girl), as candidate for the marginal seat of Hampstead and Kilburn in the general election.
Carroll died before the polls opened, but by a quirk of electoral law his name still appeared on the ballot paper. He won 113 votes and Rainbow George, his election agent, got his £500 deposit back for the first time ever.
The wherewithal for later escapades largely came from Rainbow George’s successful squatting of a mews house in Perrins Walk, Hampstead, three doors up from Peter Cook. Weiss had first moved into a flat in the threestorey house in 1969, but stopped paying rent in 1984 after a dispute with the landlord over repairs, remaining there as a squatter for 20 years.
In 2004 he claimed squatter’s rights and HM Land Registry awarded him possessory ownership of the property. He went on to make a profit of £710,000 from the sale of the house.
The money, he told The Daily Telegraph at the time, would be used to relaunch the career of Carroll, a veteran candidate in Rainbow George’s political campaigns, with whom he had recently recorded a remake of the Thunderclap Newman hit Something in the Air. This would be distributed free of charge but would be followed by a 16-track CD to be sold in the shops.
Like his political gambits, however, Rainbow George’s pop promotion venture came to nothing; most of the CDS remained unsold.
The son of a Hatton Garden diamond merchant, George Weiss was born on October 13 1940. After leaving school he worked for his father for 15 years, during which time he moved into the house in Perrins Walk. Peter Cook became a neighbour and friend in 1974.
The course of Weiss’s life for the next 20 odd years is, to say the least, confusing. A profile in The Observer from 1999 summed it up as follows: “There’s the tale of how Captain Rainbow’s Universal Party (Crup) was born out of Peter Cook’s What Party, in which George Weiss served as Minister for Confusion. Then there’s a bit where Weiss spent four and a half months in prison for selling a few tabs of acid to two reporters from the News of the World.
“There’s the part where Weiss tried to launch a series of ‘penny parties’ (a penny to get in and £3 to get out) in order to raise cash. And then there was the time he attempted to hire Wembley Stadium (he wanted everyone in the world to spend five minutes thinking about the same thing)…” and so on.
Weiss enjoyed chatting, and a big part of his life was phoning in to radio stations, usually under pseudonyms. He would regularly call LBC’S Clive Bull night-time show, often with Peter Cook posing as Sven, a depressed Norwegian fisherman living in Swiss Cottage.
Until the last year of so of Cook’s life (he died in 1995), Weiss and Cook would while away the hours together in Weiss’s squat, sometimes with “Bronco”, a Hampstead vagrant, watching television, drinking and setting the world to rights, Weiss yammering on about his political beliefs and Cook musing on the “speed of darkness” and what he would do if he were God for a day.
Weiss recorded many of these conversations over the years and in 2002, following a long-running row with Cook’s widow Lin Chong over rights to the material, released Over at Rainbow’s, a CD of excerpts from 100 hours of recordings.
He resented being described as Cook’s drinking partner, however. “I’m not much of a drinker,” he told the Telegraph’s Peterborough column. “However, I am a well-known smoker of illegal substances.”
Weiss had begun his political odyssey in the 1980s as leader of the Rainbow Alliance of several small groups, which he had founded after being contacted by “an extraterrestrial soulmate called Sterling Silver”. Weiss stood as its first candidate in the 1984 Enfield Southgate by-election; Michael Portillo won and Weiss polled 48 votes.
Highlights of his political career thereafter included his recordbreaking performance in 2005. His Vote for Yourself Rainbow Dream Ticket Party record was also surpassed on the same occasion by the party’s candidate in Cardiff North, Catherine Taylor-dawson, a model, who polled just one vote – but not from herself as she was not eligible to vote in the constituency.
Weiss stood in all four Belfast constituencies during the 2007 Northern Ireland Assembly election, his Make Politicians History campaign including a proposal that Belfast should be renamed “Best City”, after the late George Best, and become self-governing with its own currency called the Wonder. To promote his campaign, Weiss enlisted the former snooker ace Alex “Hurricane” Higgins as front man and organised an unofficial postal referendum, asking the people of Belfast what they thought of the proposed name change.
When Higgins stepped down before the campaign launch, having been offered a gig in Newmarket, Weiss complained that he had had to reprint all the ballots, costing him £100,000. In the event only 2,000 referendum votes were returned.
Subsequently, Weiss claimed, Higgins burst in to his room in a Belfast hotel demanding money for his involvement and threatening to send in paramilitaries if he did not pay up.
Weiss moved for a brief period to Ireland before returning to London. His last foray into the political arena was in 2017 when he stood in the general election in Hampstead and Kilburn after a homeless friend gave him the £500 needed to register his candidacy. He had originally tried to register his name as “Apprentice Prophet” but was told that was not allowed. His central policy was to create a “European utopia” based on a “Europe with no countries”.