May 2nd, 2010
Tony Blair was looking increasingly aged, and his skin tone was now such that he probably wouldn’t have been able to repeat his feat of achieving peace in Northern Ireland, being accused of clear pro-unionist bias. Labour pulling him out was a two-edged sword, an act of desperation in some ways: on the one hand he reminded everyone of years of prosperity under a Labour government. On the other, he reminded everyone of Iraq.
Inevitably, of course, journalists’ questions were loaded, and many of them were irrelevant. Blair visibly bristled at one now. “No, I would not say ‘Gordon Brown is a failure’,” he said, putting the quoted words in a slightly mocking tone. “He has done a very difficult job in some highly trying times for the United Kingdom…”
*
Seventeen minutes after the improntu Blair interview was uploaded to ITN’s Youtube channel, a manipulatively edited clip of Blair saying “Gordon Brown is a failure!” was uploaded. Two and a half hours after that came a stupid statement dance mix of an autotuned Blair saying it to a rap beat over a montage of disasters from the past three years and unflattering photographs of Brown.
Nick Clegg had mixed feelings about that; on the one hand it potentially damaged Labour, on the other, it distracted from phase two of their viral campaign. Firstly they had put up a vignette semi-sequel to the original video on the official channel. This showed what happened to the red and blue ‘football supporters’ around the two busts after Clegg had led off the voter. As soon as Clegg and the voters were out of earshot, the reds and blues abruptly stopped shouting at each other and convivially sat down for tea and sandwiches, talking about what they would do next time to fool the voter. He was particularly proud of an addition where a pair consisting of one red and one blue reported to their leaders, saying that they had had a shouting match in front of a voter and had scored a victory. “Who for? Who is he going to vote for?” asked the leaders, only for the supporters to reply “Nobody—we’ve put him off voting altogether!” The leaders then gleefully noted that there was another citizen who they could abuse with no worries about consequences.
Laying it on a bit thick, Clegg supposed, but he felt in that case the message was important enough to justify it. The second video had already been discussed on the news because of a statement from the Electoral Reform Society, when Clegg had been concerned that the campaign might fizzle out after the first video. It had kept the momentum going. Then had come the ‘unofficial’ additions. There had already been animated GIFs going up—mostly created in secret on Clegg’s orders but ostensibly ‘spontaneous’—taking segments from the two videos. Probably the most popular was the one showing the Tory supporter in the background polishing the Cameron bust’s forehead with his blue scarf. There did seem to be a few actual spontaneous ones in the mix; Clegg had seen one that had been edited to focus on Clegg himself leading the voter away, only for the ‘camera’ to zoom in on his face while it happened to be frozen for one frame in an unfortunate come-hither expression, with the caption “SOON” appearing below. Unfortunate, but any publicity was good publicity…
“Are the others going up now?” Clegg asked.
The young man from the Liberal Youth federal executive nodded. “Or to be more accurate, we’ve ‘accidentally’ made them public not private,” he said. “We’ll ‘realise our mistake’ in an hour and hide them again, but not before someone ‘unfortunately happened’ to copy them and will reupload their own copies.” You could practically hear the quote marks falling into place.
Clegg smiled. There were two videos, both supposedly raw footage from the first video that had not been intended for release. One, shot deliberately amateurishly on a phone camera, showed Clegg arguing with the director about what policy points to put in the video. Of course in reality that had already been agreed, but Clegg had been persuaded that this would be a useful way of getting more Lib Dem policies out there than would comfortably fit into the original video. And because this was supposedly an embarrassing accidental release, more people would watch it and pay attention to what he said. Reverse psychology.
The other video Clegg was a bit less sure about. The fake backstory was that they had intended to add it to the end of the original video but had decided against it. It showed Clegg and the voter on a rollercoaster with a point of view camera. Supposed to be an attempt at depicting how things could be more pleasant with the Lib Dems, but really badly judged, looking comical and cheesy. So they had decided not to use it. Until they ‘accidentally’ released it. Everyone would laugh at Nick Clegg in something that looked like a Jim’ll Fix It stunt. They might dismiss him, like Hague in his baseball cap a decade ago. But the thing was, they would also remember he existed. This could easily backfire, it was a calculated gamble, but the fact it was framed as having been accidentally released would help—unlike Hague, people wouldn’t think that Clegg had thought it was a good idea. Reverse psychology again.
“Give it an hour, then call the BBC,” Clegg said, “I’ll need to give an interview about how this action was unauthorised and somebody’s head will roll over this mistake.” He smiled to himself.
*
May 4th, 2010
“So in summary, the papers’ endorsements,” Huw Edwards said.
“Well, it will be of small surprise to anyone that the Daily Mail and the Telegraph have backed the Tories,” Nick Robinson said. “The Sun, for the first time in many years, has backed the Conservatives as well, as have most of the other tabloids. The Mirror is an exception, remaining loyal to Labour. The Guardian and the Observer have, unusually, issued no endorsement, but rather a sort of ‘anti-endorsement’, encouraging the voters to vote for whichever party is most likely to beat the Tories in their constituency. Perhaps the strangest of all is the People, which is advocating a hung parliament and a National Government.”
“Not very good news there for Gordon Brown, then,” Edwards observed.
“A phrase I think we have come to know very well over the last few years,” Robinson said dryly. “The question is, Huw, will we still be using it a week from now?”
*
“Dammit,” Cameron muttered as he scanned tomorrow’s papers’ front pages. “How did that leak out?”
Andy Coulson shrugged. “People are always more open than they think they’re being these days; they still don’t really understand the technology they’re using to communicate. Besides, it might have been a deliberate leak on their part. Does it matter?”
“It makes us look unconfident,” Cameron said. “Like we’ve accepted that we’re not getting a majority based on these polls. And that could be a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“I don’t think it’ll have that big an effect,” Coulson said. “Don’t worry about it. It does rather make all that palaver over those stock image billboards look a bit silly, though, doesn’t it?”
Cameron had forgotten about that. He sighed. “I still think it’d have gone better if we’d had a better acronym…”
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