UPDATE : His name is Ben Butterworth, and he is a blogger.  Of course…

For what he no doubt thought was a quick hit, John Prescott has come under fire for advocating online fraud:

For those less technically competent:

“Parties may wish to harm a competitor who advertises in the same market by clicking on their ads. The perpetrators do not profit directly but force the advertiser to pay for irrelevant clicks, thus weakening or eliminating a source of competition. As with vandalism, there is an array of motives for wishing to cause harm to either an advertiser or a publisher, even by people who have nothing to gain financially. Motives include political and personal vendettas. These cases are often the hardest to deal with, since it is difficult to track down the culprit.”

In his ever tactful and smooth style, Prezza has put his foot in it and publicly attempted to organise a conspiracy to commit fraud, making it much easer to “track down the culprit”. Better flee on the Prescott Express…

UPDATE: Channel Four News have lifted/weighed in. CCHQ web guru Rishi Saha told them “if a senior figure in a business sent an email to all his staff saying “click on our competitors advertisements”, that would be a serious issue. This is the former Deputy Prime Minister doing this!” Google are apparently ”aware of Mr Prescott’s tweet“.

UPDATE: David Prescott is now spinning that it was “nowt to do with us guv.” He says his dad only “re-tweeted” the idea. Intriguing, doesn’t look like a retweet. Also if you care to look at the stats on who has used the link you can see Prescott was the first, and created it.

Caught red-handed in a dirty clicks campaign.

Despite turning his back on the Tories and slamming Dave in the leadership election, suggesting that the combination of “Eton, hunting, shooting and lunch at Whites” made him the wrong man for the job, the embattled Speaker has resorted to plastering images of his old leader all over his election material. He also uses Tory fonts. What would Sally say?

Worse than that though is the blatant spin about his expenses. “In the latest available figures, only 7 MPs claimed less in expenses than John.” While that may well be true for the last quarter, Bercow has been living at the taxpayers additional expense in the Speaker’s  plush grace and favour pad in the Palace of Westminster, which begs the question, why is he claiming anything at all?

And lest we forget, in all the years running up to the current set of figures Bercow has fluctuated between the rank of 1st and 3rd on the troughing scale.

Anyone who finds themselves in a little difficulty regarding hiring illegal immigrants can have some free legal advice from the Attorney General. Having originally briefed the press about seeing a passport and Home Office letter showing that her Tongan maid had the right to work in Britain, the highest law officer in the land was “close to tears” as she argued she had been duped. She went on to say she had been going through a ‘very tough time’ when she took her cleaner on.

So if the person responsible for drafting and passing the law can get away with breaking it with this line, so can all the businesses bankrupted for falling foul of the rules, right?

Yesterday the Cider Party was launched with the intention of fighting seats in the south-west on the issue of the cider tax hike. “”I thought we ought to start a political movement. The Americans have got the Tea Party movement so I thought, well, perhaps a cider party,” it’s leader said. Well late last night the tax was dropped. The quickest concession anyone has ever got out of this government.