You really have to smile….Tories, Labour and Lib Dems get millions from wealthy donors, have hundreds of salaried staff, use PR firms, advertising agencies, focus groups and pollsters to finetune carefully crafted propaganda campaigns all backed up by their palace guards in the media and the impact is….zilch…

UKIP (no big donors, minimal staff) get a former BBC dj, well past his sell by date to write, sing and record a calypso, a musical genre briefly popular circa 1955 and the whole thing goes VIRAL!!!!!!!

What’s more the lyrics spell out the main threads of UKIP policy while the chorus plops Nigel Farage directly outside No. 10 Downing Street….

The lefty smellysocks on Twitter go mental and the Telegraph and Guardian sneer at full throttle and the usual suspects cry RACIST…

Media elite annoyed – TICK

Lefty Race Card operatives head’s exploding – TICK

Massive publicity for UKIP – TICK

Boost for UKIP funds via downloads – TICK

Yup…all the right boxes ticked – Farage does it again….they’re playing Snap, he’s playing three dimensional chess.

BTW…don’t tell anyone but it’s reached number seven in the download charts…..lol…

Jo Swinson, the Minister for Women, who became a LibDem MP five years after leaving university (she worked in Marketing and PR) made a sneer at “Call The Midwife” and old fashioned views of mothering at the recent LibDem Conference

‘The very idea of men caring for small children or mothers forging successful careers is anathema to many Tories, who’d apparently rather have a Call the Midwife version of parenting. At least we recognise that women might want both a fulfilling job and family life.

It’s odd that Ms Swinson should have used CTM as a term of disparagement. The BBC series is one of the most popular programmes of the last twenty years, regularly gathering 10 million viewers per episode. It is gritty and does focus on serious social issues but part of the appeal is also in the characters of the midwives themselves and their relationships. By today’s standards they are very prim and proper and,astonishingly, there is no sex….a bit of kissing and cuddling and that’s all.

You wonder if part of the appeal of the programme is embedded in the absence of sex as an obsessive topic. There was, of course, plenty of sex going on in the 1950s but it was generally considered a very private matter..a quaint old fashioned view for many of our media elite but possibly those values still appear attractive to many

The respect and love shown for the Queen in her Jubilee year, the popularity of the Great British Bake Off….could it be that the Jo Swinsons of our world are missing the point a little?

The top brass at the Telegraph obviously felt that they were publishing too many positive reports and comments about UKIP so they rang up their ace travel hack Tom Rowley and ordered him to get up to Clacton and write a bit of a sneer piece about the natives (y’know, mocking their ignorance and parochialism) to undermine UKIP’s candidate Douglas Carswell in the forthcoming by election.

“…after all, Tom, they’re not real people over there. Unlike we clever Telegraph types they don’t live in Somerset rectories or go to dinner parties in Notting Hill…normally we wouldn’t bother with such a bunch of losers…but with all this UKIP/Farage/Carswell nonsense they do seem to be getting ideas above their station. David says that Samantha is telling him he needs to be a bit tougher on them as she’s damned if a crowd of has beens and pensioners from a crumbling seaside town will edge her out of Downing Street….without all that publicity how can she market those bags?…..Anyway, Tory HQ is putting the squeeze on us so if you want more of those gigs in New York, Austria or Barbados you’ll get to the Essex coast pronto – or you might end up in Monrovia reporting on cut price hotels next to hospitals…don’t worry, we won’t allow any comments, they only come from the readers and what the hell do they know..”

Naturally Tom rushed to Clacton

Eileen Mattacks, at least, was hearing all the right things. Across the road from a shop selling all manner of mobility scooters, the elderly voter embraced Mr. Carswell. “For years I voted Conservative but I don’t think they’ve done the job properly,” she said. Despite her Huguenot surname, she, too, is concerned about immigration. “We are only a small island,” she said. “And we’ve got too many here.”

“Well done, Tom – you hit all the right buttons…just the sort of copy the Telegraph wants. Mrs. Mattacks just doesn’t realise that here in London we simply couldn’t survive without cheap baristas, nannies, builders and gardeners from the outside world…why, I don’t expect she even knows what a barista is…”

At the weekend I joined up with over fifty UKIP members who popped into Rochester to do a leaflet drop for Mark Reckless who resigned as the local MP a few days ago because he had left the Tory Party and joined UKIP. Being a man of honour he felt he needed to seek the permission of Rochester’s voters  to either endorse or reject him under his new colours so he has provoked a by-election. He didn’t have to do so – over the last few years several MPs have crossed the floor to other parties and refused to budge from Westminster.

Not so Mr Reckless – and it’s a brave move. Rochester has been fairly low down on the UKIP target list so it will be a tough fight (though early signs are promising for UKIP). Furthermore both David Cameron and Boris Johnson (perhaps regressing to their Bullingdon Club coarseness) went quite public with disparaging remarks more suited to midnight at a freshers ball than the halls of political discourse.

I came across a local gentleman who appeared to stand foursquare behind Cameron on this matter. He returned our leaflet accusing Mr Reckless of being a “traitor” to the Conservative Party. I pointed out that, since he was submitting himself to the will of the electors of Rochester there could be no accusation of treason since, in a democracy, there exists a loyalty that must always overide any party subscription – loyalty to one’s own fellow citizens.

That is why I went down to Rochester  – to support a brave and honest politician….a rare breed in our current political climate, I fear.

I don’t usually have much time for Andy Murray’s views on anything outside tennis but I have to admit that his last minute tweet in favour of Scottish independence did resonate with me.

Huge day for Scotland today! no campaign negativity last few days totally swayed my view on it. excited to see the outcome. lets do this!

The Telegraph was naturally very sniffy about this – perhaps because the paper’s coverage of the referendum campaign over the last few weeks has been one never ending barrage of negativity against the Yes campaign

I do not deny the right of the DT to have an editorial stance – what I have found disturbing is their refusal to provide much in terms of column inches for supporters of independence. Instead hack after hack has been wheeled out to blather on and on about the evils of Salmond and the SNP. Any organ that aspires to be above the level of a tabloid ought to give some room to both sides of the argument. I don’t expect an even balance but it is clear that, at the very least, a substantial minority of Scots support independence. To demonise them as simpletons being manipulated by a sinister cult leadership which is distracting them from the benefits of this mystic “union” is hardly the stuff of quality “journalism”. There is a case for independence and any organ that has pretensions to intelligent analysis ought to treat it with a certain degree of respect.. Instead the Telegraph’s tone has been shrill, hysterical and as one sided as any series of articles in the Volkischer Beobachter…

Worst of all it is the voice of a particularly patronising element of the Home Counties middle class which still perceives Scotland through the lens of Walter Scott culminating in an endless parade of Burns night dinners where Reigate golfers and their wives pretend to be striding through some heather strewn glen, waxing lyrical about a place very few of them would ever visit.

But for me the clincher was the DT’s attempt to trump Murray’s declaration with a list of those “celebrities” who are campaigning for a No…..

More than 200 famous names, including rockers Sir Paul McCartney, Sting and Mick Jagger; composer Andrew Lloyd Webber; comedian Eddie Izzard; model Stella Tenant; actresses Helena Bonham-Carter and Dame Judi Dench, Simon Cowell, and Stephen Hawking signed a letter urging Scotland to stay in the union.

I rest my case…..

As the country closes down for August there is one little factoid that our fearless media have somehow “missed” (I wonder why?…lol..)

Yup, despite all the efforts of those bright young things (and the bright not so young things) at the Telegraph and Times and the cut and paste hacks at the Mail The YouGov monthly average over the 18 months since January 2013 shows support for UKIP steady and firm at around 12/14%. Remember the Labour bean counters who reckoned even without winning a seat a 9% UKIP vote could siphon off enough numbers from the Tories to lose them several key marginals? Remember the recent Ashcroft poll that suggested the possibility of UKIP slipping out in front in some seats where Lab and Con are neck and neck on 30% each?

BTW – don’t just take my word for it….read what this leading electoral academic has to say…

All of them, the political class and the media class are very very nervous about all this. It just doesn’t fit into their cosy world view….there’s a whiff of Wat Tyler in the air – and a bloody good job, say I….

Wow….it didn’t take long. That Ashcroft poll marking Thurrock and Thanet South a possible UKIP gain (and Great Yarmouth almost as close) obviously made the folks at Cameron’s PR HQ (aka The Telegraph) nervous because it undermined their carefully cultivated narrative. Ever since the Euro/local elections last May the message has been clearly defined. May was “peak UKIP”, Cameron was “relaxed”, Labour was imploding  Miliband, Clegg was drowning, the economy was now in upturn. Throw in “tough” talk about Juncker, glam up the cabinet with a few skirts and – hey presto!!! – the polls would turn around. Only they didn’t….the Tory “bounce” failed to appear, even under the disastrous Ed Labour  stayed ahead and, above all, UKIP did not melt away.

Then Nigel Farage announced UKIP’s “cabinet”, a collective which would act as the public face of the party. Shockingly the new team confounded those racist, misogynistic stereotyped images so lovingly projected by a largely hostile media.

Klaxons were now blaring at Telegraph House. Team Cameron wanted something done and done pretty damned quickly so an editorial conference was obviously convened to implement some  damage control.

The results, unfortunately, merely helped to demonstrate the general perception of a once great newspaper unable to escape from a cycle of decline.

First James Kirkup was tasked to write something “witty and amusing”….he could only come up with some meaningless survey which appeared to show that UKIP supporting men were shorter than anyone else……even Kirkup probably realised it wasn’t his finest hour.

Then Iain Martin penned a thousand words saying how Farage’s “reshuffle” wasn’t worth writing about (never mind, Iain, you survived the purge so you obviously got paid for that pointless exercise)

But the crowning glory came from Political Correspondent Georgia Graham who was obviously told to write a hit piece on Diane James and the other women in the UKIP team. It was a shallow, poorly researched collection of sneers. Ms Graham, in common with every other Telegraph hack, made no effort to find out more about them. She just cut and pasted stuff via Google and filled the column to order

Many of us had hoped that after May the new regime at the Telegraph would actually have started to use some serious journalism in their approach to UKIP rather than recycling Tory Party agitprop. It is clear, however, that we were naive in the extreme. They have no intention of exhibiting anything but blatant bias which is why Dan Hannan’s peculiar little salvo against UKIP quite enlightening.

I have great deal of respect for Dan. His euroscepticism springs, like mine, from a feeling that our long established mistrust of rulers who are unelected and see themselves as above our laws makes us a poor fit for a bureaucratic one size fits all regime like the EU. Yet he remains a loyal Tory and puts all his trust in David Cameron.

For that reason he gets some negative comments on his Telegraph blog and on Twitter from UKIP supporters or those who claim to be UKIP supporters. He claims these are hurtful (lol…join the club, Dan) and then comes up with an astonishing suggestion

A fair number of online haters are happy to identify themselves as Ukip members. That party would do itself a huge favour by expelling, with much fanfare, the next cyberkipper whose words bring it into disrepute.

Several other Telegraph “pundits” have made the same complaint. They write something critical about UKIP and then are shocked by the “venomous” response…..UKIP people are so ….aggressive…..

In actual fact, Dan and all you other Telegraph pundits, it’s not the criticism of UKIP that is the issue……it’s the sneering, dismissive and contemptuous manner in which you do it. None of you has made any serious attempt to use up some real journalistic shoeleather and talk with party members at branch meetings or conferences. Instead, like Georgia Graham, you rehash old stories (sluts, anyone?) to pad out your googling.

It’s clear that the upper echelons at the Telegraph (owners? editors?) have no interest any serious analysis of what makes UKIP tick. Perhaps, as a party of political outsiders, its members, unlike LIBLabCon (sorry…couldn’t resist it) simply do not inhabit the upper middle class North London milieu of our media elite. The idea that the concerns of Thurrock and Great Yarmouth should be treated with as much respect as those of Islington and Notting Hill is probably simply incomprehensible to the likes of Kirkup, Graham and Hannan.

Or perhaps it is simpler than that

“The most insignificant people are the most apt to sneer at others. They are safe from reprisals. And have no hope of rising in their own self esteem but by lowering their neighbors.”

Yes, William Hazlitt often did hit the nail on the head…..

Labour leader Ed Miliband spent 25 minutes with President Obama at the White House. At the end Ed asked him for some advice on how to ruin run a nation…….

We hear from James Kirkup, a resident hack at David Cameron’s fan club newsletter (aka the Telegraph) that the Tory Party machine is now big into “Data Electioneering”. Apparently this is the equivalent of the supermarket loyalty card where you use information gathered at the checkout to decide how you will stock your shelves

 It would amass information about voters and seats, information that could be used to ensure that the party knows where the electorate is, what it thinks, what it wants.The result is an extraordinarily extensive – and expensive – programme of opinion polls and focus groups generating huge volumes of data about voters’ views and preferences

 In other words the quaintly old fashioned idea of a political party being the coming together of a group of individuals with a common view of political principles and ideas which then seeks to persuade the voters to elect them into government is now so yesterday. Instead you fashion your policies around consumer research, social media reaction and, eventually, product testing. Presumably, after all that, you come up with a to do list which will aim to please mumsnet, greenpeace and the Daily Mail…

Good luck with that.

Of course, it’s all very expensive for the Tories – but when you have the bosses of the big global corporations who do well out of the EU trough and cheap labour via uncontrolled immigration in your pocket then why worry? OK your party membership at local level is collapsing but, like the banks, who needs branches when you can centralise?

Hence the reshuffle, aimed, we are told at

women, especially those with young families. Such women, alongside Ukip supporters who used to vote Tory, were a key audience for the reshuffle, both precisely identified by that polling operation for a data-driven reshuffle that is without precedent in British politics.

Odd, though, that “UKIP supporters” should be furrowing brows amidst all those data drivers at Tory HQ…..UKIP, a party led by political outsiders, permanently cash strapped with only the bare bones of a professional cadre and with no support from any national media outlet yet which consistently  polls well ahead of the Liberal Democrats. Enough, if it continues, to possibly win a seat or two, certainly enough to undermine the chances of the Tories getting a working majority in 2015.

There is little evidence yet of a fall in Ukip support now the European Parliament elections have passed, confounding the expectations of pundits who believed the European election victory was the “peak Ukip moment”. Our estimates have Farage’s party at 14.8 per cent, down just 0.1 per cent on last month. The Liberal Democrats, however, continue to slide to new record lows. This month they register just 8.8 per cent, down 0.5 per cent on last month, and an all-time low under our new methodology.

Much ink has been spilt, of course, over a lack of clarity over UKIP’s policies on tax, the NHS etc and, to be fair, some of this criticism has been justified. But then to what extent can people be clear about the policies of the three establishment parties on these issues. However most voters are aware that UKIP wants to withdraw from the EU (not negotiate) and impose stricter controls on immigration – and they say you cannot have one without the other. The three establishment parties claim to be concerned about uncontrolled immigration but don’t really want to leave the EU. They also have hang ups about upsetting the high priests of political correctness in the media. UKIP couldn’t care less about the media, focus groups or pontificating pundits – what you see is what you get and that message has resonated, pitching through all the spin and PR noise of modern politics.

One comment on the Kirkup piece (from Telegraf) encapsulated the vacuity and shallowness of the Tory data obsession “It’s good to know that politics is now simply a marketing campaign involving a brand on an empty box that once used to contain principles.”  But then what can you really expect from a party led by “a onetime PR man for ruthlessly profitable trash TV”

From David Cameron’s Official House Magazine

David Cameron is putting the finishing touches to a reshuffle that could involve a number of high-profile ministers being moved or demoted in order to promote women to the Cabinet.

Why women? Is it because the individuals concerned are really good? No….it is suggested that Cameron is “expected to address concerns about the lack of women in senior positions by giving jobs to a series of rising female stars.”

Now he has had over four years to “address those concerns” (code phrase for his ear being bent by the fragrant Samantha and/or harrumphing from BBC/Guardian harpies) yet only now, ten months to the election, will the clatter of high heels be magnified across the Cabinet Room floor. Does he really think that such a ploy in the dying season of his premiership will suddenly persuade women to vote for him and his Old Etonian chums?

Apart from ticking a box on Lynton Crosby’s to-do list it is the emptiest of empty gestures – yet par for the course for a slick ex PR man with zilch moral compass….