The Carlisle News & Star has broken a story which might rank alongside Damian McBride’s emails for its scandalous content: it appears that the Lib Dem parliamentary candidate for Carlisle, Steven Tweedie, is involved in a website (prepare yourselves) “calling for Eric Martlew to be ousted as Carlisle’s MP”.
The paper’s revelations go further: “Anonymous opponents of Mr Martlew have used the website to urge voters to support any candidate in preference to him at the next General Election.” Imagine!
The site, www.byebyeeric.com, is now unavailable, but the Google-cached copy – currently available here – is all pretty innocuous stuff (though the grammar is a bit lacking). For example:
Eric Martlew has been the MP for Carlisle since 11 June 1987. The editors and contributors to this website would like to say bye bye to Eric and usher in a new era of high quality representation at Westminster. Carlisle is a great city, and has been for over 2000 years, under the representation of Eric Martlew our city is at risk and has declined in many ways since he was elected, we’ll be posting some images below which speak for themselves.
Next week, the local paper will reveal that the Liberal Democrats intend to take their campaign even further, and actually put up a candidate against Mr Martlew at the next general election.
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5 Comments
How scandalous! Maybe we should use the ‘S’ word before any harm is done to our reputation.
The point the Carlisle News and Star makes, and which you don’t seem to dispute, is that what appears to be a non-partisan website is in fact a Lib Dem front operation, and that Steven Tweedie was being deceptive in denying his connection to it.
Are you saying that if you discovered someone from Brent Central Labour Party was behind a website attacking Sarah Teather (and portraying her in a witch costume), you wouldn’t consider it worth telling people about?
David, actually the paper doesn’t make that point, although it’s probably trying to. Steven Tweedie didn’t deny his connection to it – he said he was effecively babysitting it for someone, so did admit the link.
Never mind, here’s the follow-up story for next week “Brown admints – ‘Cable was right all along’.” Followed closely by “Dennis Skinner – ‘Thatcher was a goddess'”
I agree with David – at the very least an imprint would have kept things above the belt. Why was it important that it was kept anonymous – to avoid scaring Tories away? That’s not electorally logical and it’s not “how we roll” (to paraphrase Cllr Allan), after all we want Carlisle Lib Dems elected not just Labour out!
update, i was told eric is standing down after the next election.