Bad Karma Chameleon

‘BY now you should have received your postal ballot for the local elections. You may even have lots of them. Vote now and vote often, as the saying goes.

Campaigning for the May 4 local elections in England – when 4,360 council seats will be contested, including all councillors up for re-election in London – is in full swing.

You will have been cajoled in some way by the agonists, all keen to get your vote, or votes, and take over the local town hall. “Today wheelie bins, tomorrow the NHS and Iraq,” goes the rallying cry.

Even if no-one has knocked on your door clutching a clipboard and wearing a long woolly scarf (LibDem), a syrupy grin (Labour, Tory) or a white pointy hat (BNP), you are still being bombarded by political marketing.

And it’s a nasty business. No less a person than Tony Blair is said to have sanctioned the TV film and blog portraying Conservative leader David Cameron as a chameleon. They say you need a thick skin in politics and Dave the chameleon has it in abundance. What’s more, it can change colour, ‘flip-flopping’ through the political spectrum.

Dave is blue when talking to the Tories; he’s red when billing himself as the “heir to Blair”; turns yellow when claiming to be a “Liberal Conservative”; and is green when on his bicycle.

Not that the Tories are bovvered. They may recall Tony’s declaration a few weeks before the 1997 election that ‘positive policies win elections, not negative campaigning’. See swivel-eyed Dave the chameleon swallow a bug and sip champagne in the back of a limo. Then note how Labour trounced the Tories back in 1997.

So does the Labour party have any regrets about this negative campaigning? Apparently not – at least not yet. (Who doesn’t like chameleons? Surely they’re preferable to snakes.)

Appearing alongside a real reptile (that’s the one in the case), Phil Woolas, the local government minister, says he thinks Dave the chameleon is a hit because “it’s funny’.

This take on humour may explain why an MP has yet to write a hit sitcom, let alone penned a gag fit for Hale & Pace.

Jim Murphy, the Cabinet Office minister, also wants us to see the funny side of a computer generated chameleon riding a bike. “We are delivering a serious message in a light-hearted way,’ he says.

What this serious message seems to be, we are unsure. Is it that you should not vote for a chameleon that changes his mind? Or is it that David Icke, the former Green Party activist, was right when he said the world is being run by a cartel of reptilian humanoids known as the Babylonian Brotherhood. This Cameron is just like the reptilian George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Queen Elizabeth II, Henry Kissinger and Kris Kristofferson?

Although, none of their people is vying for the right to sit in council meetings and debate what flowers should feature on the town hall’s window boxes and other vital local stuff…’

Posted: 20th, April 2006 | In: Uncategorized Comment | TrackBack | Permalink