Are Tories Deliberately Posting Terrible Social Media?

It’s difficult to decide what the most ridiculous aspect of the Conservative party’s now-deleted twitter ad actually was. It could have been the presence of the England football team, or a Canadian car and US jet, which suggested several ways the party was ignorant about which country they are actually governing.

Or perhaps it was the ugliness of the rudimentary collage, with thick white borders around cut-out images. Maybe it was its bathetic claim that Britain was the “second most powerful country in the world”. In the end it was the presence of the King that killed it due to a breach of the protocol that royals remain apolitical. “It is understood,” the Guardian noted, diplomatically, “the post had been noted by senior palace officials before it was deleted.” 

This would have been less striking had it not been the second such faux pas in as many weeks. The first was a party campaign video, complete with a growling American voiceover, which seemed to portray Sadiq Khan’s London as Batman’s Gotham City, filled with desperate people hiding from “squads of Ulez enforcers”. That was also swiftly deleted after someone noticed that stampede footage of ‘London’ was actually New York. It was soon reposted with the offending clip removed.

The ads might not have been good, but that didn’t stop them being widely shared on social media with a flurry of mocking commentary, and they also received write-ups in old-fashioned media. Which begs the question: did Conservative strategists make them deliberately bad knowing how much attention that would generate? 

“The beauty of doing really bad stuff is you reach beyond the political hardcore,” says Andrew Chadwick, professor of political communication at Loughborough University and the