Isaby has scooped another story for ConservativeHome, the news that Lynton Crosby is advising Declan Ganley on running a slate of candidates in Britain for June’s European elections.  Guido suggested early on that the Tories should have associated themselves with the Libertas pan-European ticket.  Maybe they felt there was little to be gained in doing so in the UK.  In the wider post-EPP environment after the election it might have been useful, assuming Libertas win any seats.

Lynton is a business-like strategist, he knows he has three major problems; firstly the policy position taken by Libertas is nearly the same as the Conservative stance towards the EU, secondly British voters who are particularly interested in the EU tend to UKIP.  His third problem is name recognition, few have heard of Libertas.  Will be fascinating to see what strategy he comes up with since Crosby has a reputation as a realist when it comes to campaigning.  If he wins a single UK seat he will have done well.

UPDATE : The Fink asks Is Libertas Pointless? He basically draws a venn diagram of potential voters and finds the Libertas subset to be very small.

At the request of readers Guido has been trying to avoid blogging about Draper, so this plug is a bit of a, hopefully forgivable, relapse.  This anecdote is to illustrate the difference in the approach taken by Draper (spin) and the rest of the blogosphere (authenticity).   Do you recall when Guido wrote about the suspension of Dolly’s Twitter account for abuse of the service?  A co-conspirator has just pointed out that at the time Derek’s rapid rebuttal claim was:

“Guido and Iain Dale are upset that I am the most followed political twitterer.”

Mike Power, the long established blogger retorted via Twitter:

In the reality-based part of the blogosphere we know that Draper has a little over 3,000 followers and Boris Johnson a little short of 20,000 followers – none of whom Boris spammed for attention.

Yet another example of the same old Derek, same old spin.

Some of you will be looking forward to the Daily Politics Draper v Guido show next week. It might not be as exciting as you think, the producer is determined that it will not be a personal slagging match and we are to be restricted to the subject of Labour’s approach to blogging.  Guido will be contrasting Prescott’s authenticity with Draper’s artificiality.  Draper’s CV has unfortunately been ruled off the agenda.

As many co-conspirators speculated at the time, the Blockbuster DVD box set gifted by Obama to Gordon is Region 1 DVD locked – meaning it won’t play on UK DVD players.  According to the Telegraph

Alas, when the PM settled down to begin watching them the other night, he found there was a problem. The films only worked in DVD players made in North America and the words “wrong region” came up on his screen.

Downing Street is very touchy about DVDs, when Martin Bright reported that they had compiled a DVD of Obama apologies for the Prime Mentalist to learn from, Damian McBride went into overdrive, denying it and even texting Bright to demand a correction.

McBride really should stick to dictating copy to Derek Draper – at least he reprints it.

Just noticed (via the ASI Blog) that David Aaronovitch fears the populist influence of “potty-mouthed right-wing bloggers on some political journalism”.   His Times colleague Daniel Finkelstein credits Guido with helping to focus mainstream media attention on the sleaze and petty corruption of politicians.  The raison d’etre of this blog is to foster an anti-political atmosphere by encouraging popular scepticism about politicians and their client media.  This is because Guido wants to de-politicise more areas of human action, increasing the non-political space in our society and culture, for which a necessary pre-condition is the discrediting of politicians by exposing their venal, self-interested behaviour.  Aaronovitch is right to fear.

He is wrong on one thing, and Polly Toynbee makes this mistake as well, Guido is not the “potty mouthed” author of profanity on the blog.  The readers comments however are a different story, there the anger is allowed to let rip.  If it tells our political masters anything, it tells them they are hated.  It may not be polished prose, but it is genuine anger.  They read it, they know it is real and it stings them.  David Miliband, Peter Hain and Ed Balls will, if you ask them, tell you how much they despise this blog.  Yet they still read it, just as Caesar listened to the baying mob at the circus.  You can’t spin the booing of a crowd.  Politicians should consider the blog’s potty mouthed comments a free and unfiltered focus group.