Ryan MacMillan

Funny, isn’t it, how as soon as a certain type of people start doing things you like doing, that you kind of stop wanting to do them? That happened for me with absolutely all forms of social media yesterday, when the Conservative party announced a half-million quid “advertising campaign to recruit online ‘friends’ of the party.”

Shadow Chancelloer George Osborne (me neither) called it, apparently with a straight face, a ‘groundbreaking move in British politics’. Sweet, really. I hear that later on they’re going to try out this newfangled carrier pigeon business they’ve been hearing so much about.

But laughing at the Conservatives is like shooting dead fish in a very small barrel and it becomes us not to laugh at their charming attempts to get down with the kids, no matter how much said attempts resemble a those of a portly middle manager volunteering for extra project responsibilities because he just keeps on getting passed over for that promotion. Far more worthy of our bile is the BBC, and the mind-gougingly stupid way in which they reported this:

In an echo of Radiohead’s recent album launch, there will be no fixed charge for becoming a Conservative supporter on Facebook, MySpace, iVillage or Bebo. “People can pay as little or as much as they want to,” said shadow chancellor George Osborne”

Did you quite get that? In an echo of Radiohead’s recent album launch. Radiohead. The Conservatives. I mean, they’re all miserable bastards, but surely here the reverberation of soundwaves has been stretched to its metaphorical breaking point? Perhaps the BBC forgot to insert the phrase ‘what is no way at all’ after the ‘In’? Are we at a point wherein the distance that a BBC journalist is willing to reach for an illustrative example is inversely proportional to the distance that example will have to be stretched to make even the slightest sense? An anxious public demands to know.

But lo, apparently it was the Conservatives themselves who made the comparison, being ‘impressed’ with Radiohead’s launch of In Rainbows (is Thom thingy on suicide watch?) thus rendering this the digital equivalent of David Cameron’s Converse. And rendering the BBC even lazier and hackier still for buying the Conservatives cooler-than-thou spin.