Election season is silly season this year. The race has started (sort of) and Labour are off -- running in clown costume, It's a Knock-Out style, with a knock-about leaflet as their baton.
Glossy card, one side assuring the people of key LibDem / Labour marginal Oxford East that only the party that invaded Iraq and began the dismantling of the NHS can 'beat the Tories' here. The pithy prose comes complete with bar-chart. That claim, you would think, would make the other side redundant: a pleasing orange colour, but with a picture of la bete bleu of British politics, snatcher Thatcher. The purpose is to purport a link between the LibDems and the Tories in their heyday. Why waste their money on that assertion when they want to claim we're irrelevant?
What makes it all the more a work of genius is the attention to detail: Thatcher wears a Labour-looking red rose, a subliminal reminder of how Messrs Blair and Brown continued so many Tory policies. And they credit the attack on Clegg with a newspaper quotation -- from the Daily Mail. I am sure the present MP for Oxford East believes everything he reads in that source.
I have a sense this is going to be the first in a series of amusing election communications.
