What the headline means: “please god, national newspaper sub-editors, stop with the puns”
Back to the day job for me today, and already I feel bad that I’m not sticking around to help the campaign. Still, got to earn the daily bread. If you can, come up and help out.
I only got to meet Tamsin briefly, but she struck me as exactly the kind of fiesty, charming, no nonsense woman who would make a great MP.
I suspect the Tory campaign know this too, which is why they’ve kept their candidate as silent as possible while his campaign team spent their time briefing stuff about Tamsin (including claiming she lied about changing her name, getting sock puppets to post on Labour blogs criticising her, calling her an arrogant Labour stooge, getting activists to lie to her then publicising their conversations…)
All of which would be fair enough (we’re big boys and girls, we can take it) if they weren’t at the same time ludicrously claiming to gullible hacks they were running a “positive” campaign.
Today the campaign will become a lot clearer as David Cameron moves to reclaim the mantle of Thatcher by pledging to cut spending and “live within our means” which means reducing public expenditure, natch.
All of which might come as a shock to the Tory candidate in Crewe, who’s merrily been saying he wants to cut taxes and at the same time saying how important schools and hospitals are to him. – Perhaps we’re going to find out exactly how important they are – important enough to stand up to his leader?
One last thing I wanted to say was a congratulations to the campaign organisers. The amount of material, voter contact and campaigning they’ve crammed in to the last couple of weeks is nothing less than incredible. Each and every one of them deserves huge thanks from the party.
3 Comments
May 19, 2008 at 9:57 am
Crewe-cially that Conversation revealed Gordon Brown was personally supervising this attack on local foreigners as well as the infantile “Toff” stuff.
A somewhat misjudged campaign. You should have stuck the the record on poverty and not tried to win on issues where you will never be trusted .
Will there be re-crewe-minations ?
May 19, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Yep, that’s right. Only a Central Office stooge would criticise the Labour campaign. Like op-eds I’ve read in, er, the Independent and, er, the Guardian.
You really really don’t get it, do you? Not just that you’re on a wind-up of the evil nasty Tories (though I appreciate that might be a happy by-product), but really don’t get it.
How to spell it out? Slagging opponents off because of their background and not their views is mendacious and malicious. Doing it when you’re the Government is desperate. Completely abandoning any attempt to defend your party’s record after 11 years of office in order to fill your leaflets with pictures of top hats is down the pan.
Never mind my own Tory proclivities, even if I weren’t one I would say Labour deserve to be Crewe-cified (boom boom missus!) on Thursday.
May 19, 2008 at 9:41 pm
You know, I think some of these Tories really believe that background makes no difference in forming candidates’ concerns and priorities. Yes, I know it seems ridiculous, but not all their anger over this can be put-on.
They really think that a vague desire to serve people in the constituency and the probability that their candidate is a nice kinda guy will produce the same results as a genuine first-hand understanding of the daily lives of real people.
Parasite – it is not what people profess to believe that matters most, it is what they do. Without a crystal ball, we have a number of tools we can use to make judgements about that. One of the most important is their background and life experience.