THE 6ft transvestite who stood against Neil Hamilton and Martin Bell in the 1997 battle for Tatton has died.

Miss Moneypenny, who jokingly promised to put the 'Tatt back into Tatton', was just 38. He had been ill for the past year.

Although HIV positive, as an Aids dissident, he continued to deny the virus caused his illness.

On Friday, Richard Smith, associate editor of Gay Times, said the events of 1997 in Knutsford had appealed to Burnel Penaul's sense of the ridiculous.

During a brief interview with the Knutsford Guardian in 1997, the drag queen said he did not care how people voted, only that they exercised their vote.

Martin Bell wrote after becoming Tatton's first Independent MP, though, that Miss Moneypenny was by no means the weirdest of the 10 candidates contesting one of the most absurd election battles in history.

"There would have been 11," he said. "But he blew his deposit on the 2.15 at Newmarket."

Miss Moneypenny, who wore a birdcage perched on top of his head, arrived in Knutsford at the beginning of Mr Bell's campaign to oust disgraced former Tory minister Neil Hamilton.

He wryly commented on the cash-for-questions affair by handing out fake £5 notes to potential voters.

Mr Bell was horrified and did all he could to elude him.

Christine Hamilton, on the other hand, found the man in the gravity-defying platform soles rather entertaining.

As did her husband Neil.

"He added to the gaiety of the occasion in more ways than one," said Mr Hamilton on Monday.

At the count at Macclesfield Town Hall in 1997, Mr Bell did his best to chat to the Glamorous One Party candidate by standing on a chair.

"It is not usual for a parliamentary candidate, at the climax of the democratic process, to have to make small talk to a 6ft transvestite with flashing nipples," he wrote in his book, An Accidental MP.

"At least I had it easier than Christine Hamilton, with whom Miss Moneypenny insisted on discussing silk underwear - a subject of greater interest at that moment to the transvestite than to the candidate's wife."

Mr Bell won with landslide victory; Miss Moneypenny went home to London, happy with his 128 votes.