Douglas Carswell

What were they thinking?

How clever it must have seemed. What a wheeze! When the ad agency unveiled this poster at Conservative campaign HQ a few weeks ago, I bet they chortled at their own brilliance.

"Yeeess!" the assembled aides would have agreed. "Ed Miliband in Alex Salmond's pocket. Ha! Doesn't it just show why people need to vote Conservative!"

To me this poster shows something rather different. It illustrates quite how detached the political classes, who design these sort of things, have become from actual voters.

Standing in front of one of these posters here in Meredith Road, Clacton I got talking to passers-by about it. Many simply did not recognise Salmond. Some thought it was Gordon Brown. My impromptu focus group, like me, simply could not see what point the poster was trying to make.  It is far too SW1.  

There is nothing in the poster that speaks to ordinary folk in Clacton worried about a shortage of GPs. It has nothing to say to someone struggling to get by on wages that have flatlined for six years.

But, of course, no one at that meeting in Conservative HQ would have seen it that way. That's because politics to them is not about the real concerns of ordinary people. It's a game of clever-dickery. With people like George Osborne running their party, it's all about clever tactics and cunning wheezes.

This poster tells us how tepid the Tory party has become. The party that once produced Thatcher is, under the Cameroon clique, reduced to saying "Vote for us, or you will end up with someone even worse. Ha!".

Indeed, this poster is so bad, I feel free to break that political rule about not flagging up your opponents election material. I hope more folk get to see it in Meredith Road.

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