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David Cameron: Airbrushed

David Cameron’s airbrushed poster campaign has backfired – setting off an internet craze of hilarious spoof versions.

On the mydavidcameron.com site jokers can adapt the “we can’t go on like this” adverts to poke fun at the 15ft-high picture of the Tory leader.

One shows his smoothed-over face with the words: “We can’t go on like this. I’ll cut my taxes, but not yours.”

Another replaces the picture with Harry Enfield’s “Tim Nice But Dim” saying: “My chums from school and I are going to absolutely, thoroughly, bloody-well sort the country out.” The airbrushed Mr Cameron is also portrayed as saying: “I love the BBC so much, I want to cut it up into little pieces and give it to all my friends.”

The spoof posters website, unfunded and not linked to a political party, was set up by designer Clifford Singer, who said. “We’ve been inundated.”

The site had 35,000 visits in the first week and received 200 poster ideas.

Meanwhile, a focus group report on the campaign poster said: “The general message was that it had backfired as it fed into the concerns people have about David Cameron and the Tories – that something doesn’t quite add up.”

The airbrushing was seen as “sly, cunning and slick” and Cameron as a “narcissist”. A Labour source said: “It has massively backfired. The outbreak of online mock-ups confirms this.”

Read full story and see my earlier entry.

[So Labour is not going to have similar problems with any of their posters, right?]

By Second World War Posters

Mass Communications Academic, @MMUBS. British Home Front Propaganda posters as researched for a PhD completed 2004. In 1997, unwittingly wrote the first history of the Keep Calm and Carry On poster, which she now follows with interest.

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