My favourite election moments, in no particular order: Posters go viral. Donal Blaney gets disavowed. David Vance decides to test the ripcord on his suicide vest before going on the mission. Tory candidate quotes TheyWorkForYou on his leaflet; DemocracyClub volunteer gets tasked to document local campaign; uploads leaflet to TheStraightChoice; rejoicing and LotsOfInterCapping on MySociety…
Read More what hits?A quick lesson in political plane-spotting: we observe, about 2.25pm today, a small business jet type, with minimal wing sweep and a tail about half-way up the fin, in an approach profile heading northwest over North London. Conclusions? It’s an RAF Hawker 125 heading into Northolt, and Gordon Brown is probably back in London. This…
Read More how criminals communicateI’m actually quite pleased with our little demo. I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic when we assembled in Trafalgar Square, where various speeches were made of which not one word was audible (note to the various orgs involved: I’d happily spring for some batteries for the loud hailer. I mean, my student union would have got that…
Read More I don’t know what they mean by that…So how did I spend the election night? As it happens, I decided to go to bed about 1am, noting that I was beginning to get as drunk as most of the people on the BBC visibly were and there was still a while to go before any really substantive data came through. Did anyone…
Read More a great time to be a crazy backbencherWhat have they done to Kenneth Clarke?
Read More ruhbarab rhubrabb rhubarbMichael “The Arabs Are Comeeeenk” Gove on t’telly. Not convincing as a master manipulator. Even he doesn’t dare claim victory. Says we need “humility”. Loads of guff about uniform national swing projections based on the exit polls. UNS probably doesn’t work on this data. Everyone agrees with that. But everyone’s being Tebbly Serious about the…
Read More you know what to saySo here’s the plan; it looks like Bush vs Gore 2.0. Bullshit, bluster, and fake it ’til you make it. This is actually incredibly outrageous – we’re in the middle of a contested election and one party doesn’t feel itself bound by what is, effectively, the constitution. And the original version of the Grauniad story…
Read More resist the stitch upThe Institute for Public Policy Research has issued a report on the correlates of BNP membership and support (pdf). Fascinatingly, they reckon that there is very little or no correlation between BNP support and key socio-economic indicators like GVA per capita, growth, unemployment, immigration, etc. It’s as if a typical BNP supporter was, well, a…
Read More IPPR: I agree with…So, that election. I should be out delivering leaflets; but my leaflets haven’t turned up. Such is life in the sinister Lib-Dem election machine. More interestingly, it’s been a week of truth. We kicked off with David Yelland‘s and Michael Wolff‘s pieces about the likely panic in the Murdoch world about the Lib Dem surge…
Read More thuds and screams in WappingThis Crooked Timber points to a column in the Economist about interns on the Bush campaign carefully hand-writing a range of fake homemade signs, confiscating the ones their positively vetted audience had brought along, and issuing them to the crowd for the media to wow over their rural authenticity. Well, not surprising. And the Economist…
Read More David Cameron…and the MAFIA, but not in the way you think