Can you spot the mistakes in this story from the Crawley News?  Answers below…

1. I was not a parliamentary candidate at the last general election

2. I do not purport to be a senior member of my party

3. Sour grapes?  Whatever I wrote was written when I genuinely thought we were going to win in Broadfield South.   Its the last time I trust our canvassing returns!

4. “popular internet blog”?   I didn’t know that 200-odd hits a day (most of them searching for “royal bowel movements” or “Parcelnet” counts as popular.

If you also thought that not mentioning the fact that the newsletter referred to was illegal under election law, deduct a point.  That was probably missed out deliberately.

Also deduct a point if you said that the last bit was a mistake (“But I’m not telling him or his party what to do”).  That was not a mistake but a fib.  Alan actually wrote to Brenda Smith in her capacity as group leader and as one of our MP’s office staff, demanding that she put pressure on me to withdraw what he thought I said.   The e-mails were also copied to a council officer, despite Brenda pointing out the inappropriateness of that the first time.

He also tried to suggest, not understanding the concepts of blog aggregators and RSS feeds, that bloggers4labour should be punished in some way.

I think the term ‘sour grapes’ is more suited to somebody who complained to me demanding the removal of me calling him a name and getting a reply pointing out that he wasn’t actually called anything, then complained to everyone else he could think of,  and got told to go away, and then turned to the papers as a last resort.

At the end of the day, I used a word that may not be polite but that you can hear every day, especially in Broadfield South if you venture further than the church, and even on popular mainstream television programmes, and I used it on a website that is not promoted or advertised anywhere but is primarily for my own amusement and where prog rock and football is probably more common than politics.  And its working – I have been greatly amused by the over-reaction.

However…  I’m sure Alan will be pleased to know that I am considering a change.  In the small print at the bottom where it says that everything here is my own personal opinion and not endorsed by (among others) the Labour party I am considering inserting the word “necessarily”.