Singer's widow plays the grief card and romps home in sunny style

THE FUNERAL baked meats did coldly furnish forth the election party tables.

The widow of the freshly dead Sonny Bono won a landslide election for the US Congress in the electoral district of Palm Springs, the resort in the California desert where the rich and aged play.

Running on the grief ticket, Mary Bono, a Republican, took the seat in the House of Representatives vacated by her husband when he was killed in a skiing accident on 5 January.

On Tuesday night in a ballroom in Palm Springs packed with jubilant supporters, Mrs Bono, 36, enthused: "Sonny would have said `This is big'. He would have been very, very proud."

Bono, best known for his musical association with his previous wife Cher, brought a dash of showbiz nostalgia to the musty corridors of Capitol Hill. Otherwise the record shows he contributed nothing of any lasting value to the national debate.

The early signs suggest that his attractive widow, 26 years his junior, may add something to the aesthetics of the dismal Hill but is unlikely to shake the Republican party out of the ideological quagmire in which it has found itself since President Clinton hijacked all their best policies.

When asked yesterday morning on NBC television whether she meant to follow her husband's agenda, Mrs Bono looked momentarily mystified.

"I don't know that Sonny necessarily left an agenda," she said, "other than being a mainstream conservative Republican." Collecting herself, she added: "The issues are constantly changing to some degree. I think because of that I will have the opportunity to strike out on my own."

Which she may be able to do, so long as her mother-in-law does not strike her out first.

Jean Bono wrote a letter to the editor of a California newspaper last month informing voters that her son would not have supported Widow Bono's candidacy. "It would disturb him greatly that, if you hired her for the job, his children would essentially become orphans open to abuse by strangers," Mrs Bono, 83, said in the letter.

Notwithstanding the mother-in-law's treachery, Mary Bono, who has two young children, collected more than twice the number of votes of her Democratic challenger, Ralph Waite.

Mr Waite, who used to play "Pa" in the television series The Waltons, is currently playing the role of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

After the Loman character commits suicide a friend says, "Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy."