The Tories’ attempts to orchestrate their allies in the rightwing press on Thursday to smear Nick Clegg backfired seriously, generating more publicity (and a fair deal of sympathy) for Nick, starting the worldwide-trending Twitter irony-meme #nickcleggsfault, and leaving the old media looking desperate and out of touch.
And it also inspired some spoof posters – here are three of the best I spotted, courtesy the wonderful folk at We got Rage Against the Machine to #1, we can get the Lib Dems into office! and their 140,000-plus creative members …
And here’s one of the unintended consequences of the Tories’ bully-boy tactics:
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4 Comments
This would call for a Downfall spoof… had those humourless Germans not ordered YouTube to remove them.
So the result of this is a load of posters that most people won’t see and Stephen Fry saying he may vote Lib Dem. Oh, and some new trend on twitter which has a disproportionate number of left-wing users anyway. Wow, massive backfire there! This is the sort of nonsense spin one expects from the right-wing press. You’re supposed to be above this!
Seriously chaps, if you want to stop the Tories, instead of fannying around on Twitter and drawing up posters to make yourselves better, get your chequebooks out and start donating. Or maybe go canvassing?
I quite agree with the last post from Richard. There’s no point preaching to the converted and this is a critical time for all those in the cosy club to get out there and talk to those Mail/Express/Sun/Telegraph readers and do the job that James Sharkey and others at the LibDems strategy unit are singularly failing to do (with the exception of Nick Clegg’s expenses where quickly released figures proved a non-story to be just that.)
Get real about the electoral system, too. If the polls slip a point or two from where they are – already down from last week’s highs by a point or two (see Electoral Calculus site for current seat projection) – there may well be a Conservative majority and all dreams of electoral reform gone, perhaps for a generation. Reducing the “right seats” as William Hague says ( you’ll notice not right number of seats) by 10% could give us a Conservative government in perpetuity. I know it’s a worst case scenario but , as David Elstein says, press opinion accounts for about 3-5% of a bias in favour of the Tories. Plans must be made for those days after the third TV debate when enough voters may be browbeaten or scared into returning to their traditional Conservative allegiances.
I quite agree we must work flat out until all votes are counted. We can be sure that the Tories will through their supporting newspapers further attempt to scaremonger the electorate about the consequences of a ‘hung’ parliament and if that does not work produce some scandalising material against Nick Clegg or the Liberal Democrats immediately prior to the polls making it almost impossible to refute. They might also attempt to influence public opinion through ‘selective’ polls building up Brown. It will be something unlikely to rebound on them before the election. Lets hope the public are wised up to this.