Tories and IT, A Match Made in Hell

“Ah, but is is she one of us”?*

This story about London Tories shooting themselves in both feet from Recess Monkey will drive anyone who’s still hoping the Conservatives under Cameron will one day step up, get rid of the current incumbents and just bloody fix things to hair pulling despair:

Carla Jones had a couple of hundred “friends” on Facebook. She’s a self-declared Conservative and was a member of various Conservative supporting Facebook groups.

That was until http://www.londonspinnews.com outed her as an under cover Mirror journalist looking for “dirt” on Conservatives’ Facebook pages.

Mass defriending, much twittering, then ritual denunciation on Tory blogs led to Carla Jones being subjected to a deluge of abuse and threats of that special, conservative kind:

This weekend a flood of CCHQ Press Office emails and text messages warned Tory politicians and activists nationwide of the sedition of Carla Jones and called on them to “de-friend” her or on Facebook.

Tory blogger of record Iain Dale posted a warning to readers, as did the usually level headed Shane Greer. A number of Tories changed their Facebook statuses to messages like, “…warns all CF members that “Carla Jones” is not a Tory at all, but an underhand hack from the Daily Mirror!”

Oooh, those pesky meedja whores, they get everywhere. Hurrah for London Spin News, fearlessly exposing the Evil MSM’s minions! Ah, but wait … fancy that, London Spin News turns out to be… a Tory PR guy’s fake news site, which he writes using a pseudonym from the ‘dole scum’ comedy Shameless. So droll! How they must’ve chortled at the Conservative Club bar!

But fair enough, no one likes a spy in their party and surely it’s reasonable enough to warn your fellow party members, isn’t it, even if you are a lying git yourself? Ah, but it gets worse…

Recess Monkey actually knows Carla Jones. We met at a Conservative Way Forward event at Tory Conference last year. And amusingly, she’s not only nothing to do with the Daily Mirror, but she’s a former CCHQ staffer…

Steven describes himself as a “former Vice Chairman at Exeter University CF where he quadrupled the membership and ran the 2005 election campaign across campus. He is an experienced PR consultant specialising in technology, business and financial services.”

So “experienced PR consultant” Steven George is using a fake ID to trigger the bullying and ostracism of a young woman on the grounds that she is using a fake ID – and in the process accusing the Daily Mirror of using underhand tactics to gain access to Tory facebook profiles…

A young woman who’s actually a colleague. Oops. It takes a perverse kind of PR talent to shoot both feet with both barrels at the same time.

Go read the whole thing; what I’ve quoted gives only the merest flavour of the bumbling incompetence. I’d laugh if it weren’t so bloody tragic; this shower of useless hoorays and failed bankers may just get elected, not because of but in spite of their lack of policies. We’re past caring, just get rid of Labour, enough already.

But if the Tories can manage to attack and destroy one of their own best activists with Facebook alone, can you imagine what they could do in power someone they don’t like, given control of RIPA or Contact Point? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

[*Explanation for those not quite so ancient as me]