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Labour’s poster depicting David Cameron and George Osbourne as the so bad they’re funny X Factor twins John and Edward (”Jedward”) with the tagline “You won’t be laughing if they win” has got a good deal of press coverage, far exceeding the impressions the paid billboards will chalk up. In this sense it’s already a hugely effective piece of viral advertising.

But it’s another story that makes me think.

Jedward have faced huge public hostility, hate campaigns on Facebook, and deafening booing at X Factor performances. But last Saturday it was all cheers. The criticism became so unfairly harsh and personal, and they held up so strong, that they have become popular.

Could Labour do the same? The recent argument over Gordon Brown’s letter suggests it’s possible. If The Sun and others don’t want a Labour victory, they mustn’t victimise Brown.

Tim Yeo isn’t your typical revolutionary. He comes from Suffolk, writes for Country Life and Golf Weekly Magazines, and is a Conservative former Countryside Minister. But on Monday he struck a blow for freedom - the freedom not to wear a tie!

For years now the neck tie has been on the way out. They’re restrictive, uncomfortable, utterly pointless and - worst of all sometimes - an open invite for novelty Christmas gifts.

Businesses have been ‘dressing down’ gradually since Margaret Thatcher sent the bowler hat and umbrella to historic oblivion, and today’s new business - from Google to Innocent Smoothies - is a largely tie free, “smart casual” environment. Creative businesses argue that staff are more creative in a relaxed, individualistic and stuffyness free office.

So why does Parliament still side with Erskine May, the Parliamentary bible of convention, who states that “gentleman members are required to wear a jacket and tie”. Erskine May died in 1886!

More jokes harvested from various sources about MP’s expenses.

Labour MP said his claims were “1000% within the rules”; the same amount he claimed on his mortgage.

Politics. From the Latin ‘poli’, meaning many, and ‘tics’, meaning blood sucking parasites.

How many MP’s does it take to change a lightbulb? None, they’ll stick it on expenses.

People say politicians need to be more transparent, that’s rubbish. Politicians are more transparent now than ever, the entire country can see right through them.

Vote Labour. We’ve got what it takes to take what you’ve got.

Speaker Michael Martin has been removed. The last time I saw a speaker removed so fast it was under someone’s arm in Dixons.

A florist goes into a hairdressers for a haircut. Pleased with the result she goes to pay but is turned down. “I’m on community service this week, I’m not charging”. The florist goes away happy and the next morning the hairdresser arrives at work to find a thank you card and a bouquet of 12 roses from the florist. Later a baker has his hair cut and again is told not to pay, and the next morning the hairdresser discovers a thank you card and 12 cakes on the door. Later an MP has his hair cut and again gets it free. Wondering what she will find the next morning, the hairdresser is shocked to find a thank you card and 12 MPs wanting free haircuts.

David Cameron must be in a cooking mood. A round-robin letter by an anonymous person - claiming to be a Tory MP - accuses him of using ‘Stallinist tactics’ and anger at the expenses scandal to remake the party in a new image, using ‘kangaroo courts’ of his close supporters to force out old MPs. The old adage that you can’t make on omelette without breaking some eggs springs to mind.

Now I am certainly not in favour of Stallinist tactics or the ousting of elected representatives by party leadership. But - and it’s a big but - many MPs have acted very badly, breaking the expenses rules or at the very least having their snouts very firmly in the trough.

Caught out, many of what are described as ‘old guard’ have reacted terribly to the revelations. Disgusting arrogance, rudeness, dismissive responses, a ‘my right’ culture. Douglas Hogg walking away from reporters. Anthony Steen accusing his constituents of jealousy. And now Brian Binley - who claimed over £50,000 for a flat rented from his own company and £2,115 for a truly dire website I half suspect he made himself - being absolutely petulant in his assertations that he won’t repay anything even if asked!

With friends like these, who needs enemies? Each are surely guaranteed to lose their seats if they stand again - they simply have to go! Yes it is a blessing in disguise that a few people who are tired, stale and old (in the sense they have been MPs for too long, not actual physical age) are being replaced by hopefully better new recruits, but it is still vital.

Of course if we had Open Primaries and Voter Recall, we wouldn’t have this problem, but I can’t see these ‘old guard’ wanting that. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.

ToryBear notes that whoever designed Brian Binley’s shockingly bad website didn’t factor in the thought that the scrolling BBC news feed might one day be leading with a scandal about their boss:

And it is a shockingly bad website too, which “was funded from the Incidental Expenses Provision” and cost a rip-off £2,115 according to his expenses claims!

The website has no “Webdesign by……” footer, instead reading “Brian Binley MP is responsible for this site”. Hmmmmm. Either he did it himself, or he hired the World’s worst web designer at a rip off rate!

There’s something very alarming about Labour’s plan for compulsory community service for all school leavers.

Maybe it’s the vague similarity with conscription which the great Milton Friedman compared to a form of slavery “inconsistent with a free society”, inequitable and arbitrary, preventing young men from being able to shape their lives as they see fit. (The left always refers to Keynes as “the great” but never Friedman, so I will inverse).

Maybe it’s the awful language of New Labour’s vision of Citizenship with “young people being expected to contribute” (50 hours currently, probably rising) and the “do as we say” mindset behind it, the huge central authority directing the “young” so “the contributions of each of us will build a better society for all of us.” (Whatever “better” is defined as.)

Both of these things leave me uncomfortable, and I expect everyone who opposes this will be spun as siding with the hoodies and lay-abouts etc. But this doesn’t change my point. In a free country we are not bound to perform work for anyone but ourselves; and because we are free, when people do act in the interests of others and not themselves - as people often do - that act is all the better because it was heartfelt, voluntary and real. Because it was human and voluntary, not robotic and compulsory.

So for one morning I don’t look at the newspapers - “hey, it’s an Easter Saturday,” I thought, “what can possibly happen on an Easter Saturday” - and it seems the Guido-Draper blog war goes nuclear.

Guido and Derek Draper - with his “independent” LabourList website - have been trading blows for some time, but suddenly it seems there’s far more to it.

The Telegraph reports that emails sent to Draper from an “unnamed” senior advisor to Gordon Brown, “which made a number of unfounded, innuendo-laden suggestions about the private lives of David Cameron, George Osborne and other Conservative MPs, came into the possession of Paul Staines, who writes the Guido Fawkes political blog.”

The paper attempts to make more of an issue of the security breach and Guido-Draper spat but in reality the unnamed advisor was Damien McBride - Brown’s chief political advisor, a “close friend” of Peter Mandelson and a taxpayer paid civil servant! The emails were to appear on Draper’s LabourList site to smear a wide range of Tory MPs and bloggers, including Iain Dale, Guido and Nadine Dorries. Also involved somewhere is Tom Watson MP, who was copied into all the emails from McBride (who has now resigned) and lists Mudslinging: The 25 Dirtiest Campaigns of All Time among the top books to have influenced him!

But with all of these three spinning the dark arts where is the Slime Minister himself, Peter Mandelson? It all just seems to have his DNA all over it. Was he involved? We know he is good friends with McBride. He somehow feels conspicuous by his absence to me.

Today sees yet more protests, this time anti-NATO.

It’s a curiosity of the 21st Century in historical terms that we are accustomed to peace and freedom. We attribute no significance to the fact that we can work, act and travel largely without restriction and largely without fear of falling victim to some horrific act of war or some other perilous fate; and even less to the fact that you must go back several generations from that born today before you find one that must risk their lives under military conscription. No other generations have known peace, freedom and prosperity in such quantities as those since the Second World War.

This freedom and prosperity is the result of our liberal system, and these principles have been firmly underpinned for the last 60 years by a magnificent organisation. Despite EU claims that it has created peace, it hasn’t. No Eurocrat put up the fight for free nations in words, let alone bullets. I have not read every last one of its directives or laws or regulations, but I am quite convinced that not a single one prohibits war among its members, let alone protects them from the aggression of external forces.

You don’t have to look through the North Atlantic Treaty establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for long however to find such. At 1232 words including footnotes, it has just 14 articles, number 5 reading - in very plain English - “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them…shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”

It’s plain, it’s simple, and it’s why Russia didn’t come wandering into Western Europe: We want peace and to be left alone but if you attack us, we’ll attack you back, and so will our friends.

Which makes me wonder how anyone can be against NATO, and what on Earth they’d replace it with? They are rather like the G20 protesters - the usual suspects, the usual hotchpotch of things they hate and contradictory list of illogical demands. I think it’s summed up nicely by this quote from Kenneth Clark (the historian): “I can see them still through the University of the Sorbonne, impatient to change the world, vivid in hope, although what precisely they hope for, or believe in, I don’t know.” - Clark, Civilisation, Episode 12.

IF you can keep out of red when all about you
Are saying it’s just what you need to do,
If you can trust the people and let them do as they do,
But accept them and their failings too;
If you can wait for recovery, and not be tired by waiting,
Or not hire Mandelson-like creeps who pedal lies,
On banks being hated, not give way to banker hating,
And yet things don’t look good, but not plicate envied eyes:
If you can legislate - and not make yourself overbearing master;
If you can deregulate - so not make regulations take up all day;
If you can meet with Triumph, at least once anyway
And treat public and private sectors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve never spoke
Not set a tax trap or treat folk as fools,
Or watch the country they gave their life to, be slowly broke,
And not send their predecessors off with worn-out tools:

If you avoid making one heap of all our cash
And so not risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And so not lose our future on your gamble rash
And not nationalise every banker’s loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To accept them gone, the bankrupt firms broke,
And so not U-turn when that’s what’s easy for you
Nor spend our cash to nag adults not to smoke:

If you can govern and keep some virtue,
And speak plain English - not Double Dutch,
if you can avoid surrender to the EU,
And spend our taxes wisely, but not too much;
If you can avoid using complex accounts to extra debt hide
And save our country from Heathrow and ever sprawling town,
Yours is Downing Street and everything that’s inside,
And - which is more - you’ll be a darn site better Prime Minister than Gordon Brown!

Obama meets Cameron today, despite not really needing to given the packed G20 schedule.

No longer a “lightweight” then, Mr O?