Tory spin doctors are hard at work at the moment. The Conservatives were crushed in the Kingswood and Wellingborough by-elections, with the swing to Labour in Wellingborough making history as the second biggest since WWII. But a party spokesman gave a sanguine view of it all. “The Government of the day rarely win by-elections,” they reasoned. “Both of these seats have been Labour recently and they require smaller swings than were seen in recent by-elections.”
We’d love to hear their definition of “recently”. Kingswood has been a Tory seat for fourteen years, and Labour last held Wellingborough nineteen years ago, in 2005. By that metric, Tony Blair was recently re-elected Prime Minister, and the iPod shuffle was recently invented. Congratulations are also in order for Charles and Camilla on their recent nuptials.
Economical with the truth
Meanwhile CCHQ are up to their own high jinx on X/Twitter. The Conservatives posted a video of Sadiq Khan’s gaffe on Sky News, where he said that Labour is “proud to be both anti-racist, but also anti-Semitic”. Except they clipped out the bit where Khan quickly corrects himself, saying he meant Labour are “tackling anti-Semitism”. The post has received widespread backlash, but the video remains standing.
Chairman of the party Richard Holden rejected the accusation that the Conservatives were peddling disinformation. “It’s not been edited. It was clipped,” he explained to Times Radio this morning, after dodging the question for two minutes. “I work in audio production, Mr Holden,” the presenter responded. “That’s exactly the same thing.” Perhaps they felt they were providing, as Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway once put it, “alternative facts”.
