Armchair election: Cameron’s shock troops turn nasty on Nick

Remember the Swift Boat Veterans who helped destroy John Kerry’s presidential bid? They were a group of guys who rubbished his war record turning his time in ‘nam against him even though he was running against George W Bush who wriggled out of going altogether. The great thing about the veterans is that they were at arms length and George Bush had deniability over their output.

Well look at this from ConservativeHome. It’s a pretty effective attack video rubbishing Nick Clegg’s record’s on expenses and it is being tweeted out by sympathisers.

The content is pretty rich really especially from the party of the duck houses and moat-cleaners. The shadow cabinet are no angels on expenses. ConservativeHome is hugely influential and it is filled with people from the Tebbit Tendency who want to go negative on the Liberal Democrats. But it is not an official mouthpiece so it is conveniently arms length.

David Cameron is too busy not looking nasty to sanction such a thing. But nowadays he doesn’t have to.

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Jim Pickard joined the lobby team in January 2008. He has been at the Financial Times since 1999 as a regional correspondent, assistant UK news editor and property correspondent.

Kiran Stacey is an FT political correspondent, having joined the lobby in 2011. He started at the FT as a graduate trainee in 2008, working on desks including UK companies and US equity markets before taking over the FT's Energy Source blog.

Contributors

Elizabeth Rigby, the FT's chief political correspondent, joined the lobby team in September 2010. Elizabeth has worked at the FT for more than a decade and was most recently its consumer industries editor.

Helen Warrell is the FT's UK reporter, covering home affairs, crime and policing. She joined the FT in 2008 and has spent time as a reporter in the Brussels bureau and more recently, editing the paper's Asia coverage on the world news desk.

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