23 Comments

• Dan Falchikov 29th Apr '08 - 12:04pm

  Utterly appalling – particularly the ‘village idiot’ one.

  Given they will lose Paddick votes with each viewing – perhaps it is best if they were taken down from a site purporting to support the party…

  If this is what Paddick’s highly paid US advisers are coming up with then I think they should perhaps get back over the pond asap and ruin Hillary Clinton’s chance of getting to the White House.

• David Blake 29th Apr '08 - 3:14pm

  I agree with Dan, especially about the ‘idiot’ one.

  We all have our views about Boris, but it really does us no good to be putting out rubbish like this. It just makes the party look desperate.

• Russ 29th Apr '08 - 3:31pm

  I agree that neither video seems very appropriate electioneering material. But it’s always good to see liberal values placed against Mayor Ken’s love for the regimes in Cuba and Venezuela. For that reason, among others, I think LibDems have an excellent reason for wanting to see Ken gone.

• John 29th Apr '08 - 3:55pm

  Are these really the product of Americans? I don’t understand why we want to go down that path – or more exactly why our leaders want to.

  It’s very superficial, isn’t it? Are there no real issues to talk about in London?

• SpottedCow 29th Apr '08 - 4:18pm

  Looks like the press and the majority of the comments on YouTube disagree with the comments posted here.

  http://adamboulton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/04/paddicks-team-g.html

  What is wrong with bringing up legitimate issues with Boris and Ken in a humorous manner?

  Perhaps this is the only way we can reach voters that haven’t really been paying attention.

• Alix 29th Apr '08 - 4:36pm

  I wouldn’t mind the negativity aspect if they weren’t so pant-wettingly unfunny. I do find it genuinely odd how far political broadcasting is behind mainstream media. It’s like someone’s been stored in a time capsule for forty years, made to listen to a ten-minute lecture on the intervening history of political satire and then locked in the editing suite of a moderately well-funded secondary school.

  At least the Ken one sort of gets away with it by subverting the tackiness of the genre, though it isn’t consistently funny enough to carry it off and it may well, in any case, be a total accident. The Boris one is just weepingly piss-poor. How can this utter dweebery exist in the same world as Armando Ianucci?

• Alix 29th Apr '08 - 4:44pm

  Oh, it’s all ok everybody! Adam Boulton says they’re funny. We are saved. Just pop your self-respect in the bucket on your way out.

• Julian H 29th Apr '08 - 4:47pm

  “How can this utter dweebery exist in the same world as Armando Ianucci?”

  Because they don’t have the pie with the jokes in it.

• Hywel Morgan 29th Apr '08 - 4:51pm

  “Perhaps this is the only way we can reach voters that haven’t really been paying attention.”

  I know plenty of people who aren’t engaged in politics. But we’re confusing people who find a YouTube video funny with rengaging people with politics.

  If people are disillusioned with politics and see everyone as negative and all the same how does saying “he’s an idiot, he’s an idiot” for 2.5 minutes change that.

• David Blake 29th Apr '08 - 5:28pm

  Exactly, Hywel, people are fed up with politicians sniping at each other and by putting out this sort of publicity we are lowering the tone of our campaign.

• Hywel Morgan 29th Apr '08 - 6:10pm

  “Looks like the press and the majority of the comments on YouTube disagree with the comments posted here.”

  And lets be clear there are 12 comments in total on YouTube at this point!

• Jennie 29th Apr '08 - 6:18pm

  I know I have been banging on about this for ages, but now I have the statistics to back me up: if you don’t tell people about the voting system and the fact that they CAN safely vote for Brian without letting either of their most-hated in, even card-carrying Lib Dems won’t put him down as a first preference.

  No amount of rubbishing the other two will help that if people think it’s pointless to vote Brian.

• asquith 29th Apr '08 - 7:43pm

  People who use youtbue as a campaigning tool are generally old-timers making a failed attempt to appear hip. I’m 23 and I’m sick of being talked down to by the usual idiots. This generation is better educated and more intelligent than any in history. Perhaps that is why we don’t fall for the usual mediocrities any more, and want someone who actually has solid, decent policies rather than blind loyalty.

• cgp 29th Apr '08 - 8:03pm

  asquith wrote:
  “I’m 23 … This generation is better educated and more intelligent than any in history.”

  In fact, if it only had a little more humility, it would be perfect in every way …

  Chris Phillips

• asquith 29th Apr '08 - 8:29pm

  I’ve promised myself that if I ever get old, I’ll take a tolerant view towards young people. I’ll never develop Daily Mail/UKIP attitudes. It’s a bit strange, already I see myself slipping away from teenagers because I can’t understand them. But I admire them.

• Geoffrey Payne 29th Apr '08 - 11:14pm

  What a waste of money!
  The biggest complaint about the Lib Dems is that no one knows what we stand for.
  Not surprising when we are more interested in attacking the others.

• Norman Scott 30th Apr '08 - 12:23am

  You need reasons not to vote for the others so there’s no problem with ‘attack’ Geoff. But the issue here is just how bad the attack campaign has been.

  First you don’t have the candidate engaging in purile personal attacks directly and in such a nasty way. Brian has come across at his worst when making smug remarks about Johnson’s adventuring johnson, and Livingstone being nasty. It makes him look petty rather than making them look weak.

  Second the point of a political attack is to say something that then get picked up by others, not simply be an echo chamber for points others have already made many times. Doughty Street did the corrupt Ken line much better with their online attack ad and the media have been harping on about his dodgy links for ages. This is not a new reason not to support Ken.

  The Boris vid is wrong on every level. Alix is dead right it’s not funny. It’s a middle-aged posh woman lecturing in a smug tone of voice, unlikely to appeal to the young viral video auidence on YouTube. The nearest I can liken it to is the cast of To the Manor Born attempting to act out a Red Dwarf episode. Perhaps that’s why Boulton liked it. And it says nothing new about reasons not to back him.

• Sunny 30th Apr '08 - 5:51am

  I like them! They’re not as funny as they could be, as Alix pointed, but its a step in the right direction.

  And what the hell is wrong with attack ads? Its just a video version of what Brian Paddick has been saying in the debates anyway (as have the other candidates). Seriously people, grow some hairs on your chest. This is where politics is headed. It’s time the Libdems got more angry and used new media to full effect. Especially if you want to get noticed.

• David Morton 30th Apr '08 - 8:54am

  OH MY GOD !

  You’d get away with this if they were funny but they aren’t. So the appalling negativity is what comes across.

• Simon 30th Apr '08 - 10:57am

  I thought the Ken Livingstone world tour was rather good. I would have thought it is legitimate to be angry that London has a Mayor who would rather keep company with Latin American dictators than vist a lot of London Boroughs.

• cgp 30th Apr '08 - 8:50pm

  Jennie wrote:
  “if you don’t tell people about the voting system and the fact that they CAN safely vote for Brian without letting either of their most-hated in, even card-carrying Lib Dems won’t put him down as a first preference.”

  .

  Well, quite.

  The Daily Telegraph says:
  “A message sent by the Liberal Democrat party to supporters said: “We need you to talk to your friends and neighbours and help them understand that they can vote for Brian Paddick first preference and vote tactically with their second preference.” ”

  Ye gods! “Talk to your friends and neighbours and help them understand …” !

  Considering we’ve known all along that this election was going to be a contest of unpopularities, did it really not occur to them to mention in any of the countless leaflets we’ve been delivering for weeks that there’s no danger of a vote for Paddick “letting Livingstone/Johnson in”?

  The one I’ve been delivering today was full of tripe about blondest suicide notes, fictitious “Big Boris Boycotts”, Elton John and even David Furnish. The only comment I can see on the electoral system is – in _incredibly_ small type – “If you wish, you can give a 2nd preference to another candidate”.

  Chris Phillips

• sanbikinoraion 30th Apr '08 - 9:33pm

  Those vids are just a bit crap, really. If you’re going to do humourous attack adverts, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD make sure that they are, actually, funny. Surely there are plenty of liberal comedians that would write scripts for these things for peanuts?

• Jennie 30th Apr '08 - 10:50pm

  CGP, indeed, I (and various others) have been banging on about this for weeks, but it seems the party didn’t take it seriously, and now they’ve realised, it’s too late. Still, it’ll all be the media’s fault, I expect, for not giving us any coverage or anything. After all, it’s not like Brian has even been on Question Time or Newsnight or anything, so it must be the media’s fault…