No caption necessary…
WALTER CRONXITE on the latest ham-fisted bungling social media campaign from the local Conservatives
Could Conservatives in Croydon be about to emulate their party colleagues at a national level and stage a leadership contest?
After a long, hot and – as far as Croydon Tories’ leader Tim Pollard was concerned – quiet summer, the grumblings of discontent among the Town Hall opposition group have been growing.
Yesterday produced what appeared to outsiders an obvious affront to the dignity and reputation of the local party leader, when his photograph was plastered over social media above the headline: “Demystifying the anus?”
A whole week after Inside Croydon had broken the story of the council’s £10,000 of arts grants for a performance festival which included shows featuring butt pluggery and induced incontinence, the dozy local Tories had finally seized upon it.
The slow-witted Croydon Conservatives had jumped on this particular bandwagon two days after the story had appeared in the Rotten Borough’s column of Private Eye, a magazine which is only published once a fortnight.
Private Eye knew about Croydon’s butt pluggery before Croydon Tories
Pollard had just managed to do a turn for BBC London Radio.
In the entire snorefest that followed – where Pollard admitted that he had known nothing about the performance arts festival entitled Tempting Failure and staged at several council-owned venues in July – there was no mention whatsoever of the title of one of the more contentious performances, entitled “Demystifying the anus”.
Yet whoever it was that pushed out the links to the recording of Pollard’s seven minutes of fame managed to use that title and position it right under a photograph of their great leader.
With the mere addition of a question mark.
Are they trying to tell us something?
Now heaven knows this is a tough enough time for Croydon’s leading Tories.
There’s gaffe-prone Gavin Barwell, the ex-MP now the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, floundering around with Theresa Mayhem in her retreat from Salzburg summit, still trying to maintain that their Chequers proposals are any sort of basis for a “successful” Brexit (whatever that might be).
Barwell’s bag-carrier, Coulsdon councillor Mario Creatura, must be heavily weighed down with the bags full of bullshit he has to lug around for his boss, and his boss’s boss. Creatura is hired by No10 to be a Special Adviser, a SpAd, to run her Twitter account for her.
This, yesterday, included the shambles of a prepared statement, delivered for social media by Mrs Mayhem, recorded with all sorts of Austrian police cars, sirens blaring and lights flashing, behind her. No one in the No10 top team – including Barwell and Creatura – had the wit, professionalism or experience to think of binning the recording and re-shooting Mayhem’s soundbyte, with a calmer background, so that she might not have seemed to be presiding over… well, mayhem.
Creatura, too, has had a rough couple of days, what with the final collapse of the Tory astroturfing local freesheet/website which he had been influential in setting up.
So it is reasonable to assume that Creatura, pictured left, might have been a tad too preoccupied to be orchestrating his local party’s Pollard-Anus tweet disaster yesterday.
Which only raises the question as to who might be responsible for such an unfortunate coincidence of image and message, and whether they might have leadership ambitions of their own… Anyone heard from Jason Cummings lately?
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So Mario’s Mag has had to shut down. “The Citizen is simply too short of love and money to survive.” I do not know what exactly Tim Pollard is short of, but it appears that he really shouldn’t be revealing it to the public.
I didn’t know Mario was behind it. I always wondered how its more left-leaning board members tolerated its obvious Tory spin.
His smug mug appeared on the website at launch among the co-founders. To be followed by unconvincing denials thereafter.
Then there was the company’s director who agreed to chair a Gerrard Batten event at the Fairfield Halls…