If you get a chance (probably available in the UK til Wednesday), check out Mock the Week for last week – excellent humour re: David Cameron’s new poster campaign – they got about 6 minutes of mileage out of it. The real poster is visible on 760 billboards across the UK… this was Dara’s interpretation of what the poster should have said… Very scathing that it’s all personality, no policies… hmmm, a certain Conservative MP made the same error post-war (Winston Churchill’s 1945 campaign was all about personality, Labour was all about policy!)

“If I were David Cameron, the first thing I would do is sack my advertising agency. The new poster is an utter disaster: it’s so obviously been airbrushed and he looks like a rosy-faced cherub, not a prospective prime minister. They were bonkers to do it, and he was a fool to let them. The very act of airbrushing is a deceit, whichever way you look at it, and for a politician to have that done says: “I’m not happy with the face I have and the face that I’m showing to you, the voters.”

The whole problem with politicians today is that we never believe a word that comes out of their mouths, and we don’t feel they understand us or our priorities. Presenting us with this fake, high-gloss image of perfection suggests that the Conservatives have little understanding of what’s going on in the real world.”

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?]

An exhibition of cartoons on the Leader of the Tory Party, David Cameron.

13 October – 24 December 2009, Political Cartoon Society

This exhibition of 60 original political cartoons charts the fortunes of David Cameron since he became Leader of the Conservative Party in December 2005. Due to his upbringing and education, Cameron is often portrayed as a toff and is portrayed by Martin Rowson of the Guardian as Little Lord Fauntleroy. After Cameron called for greater transparency in the publication of both Commons’ expenses and councils’ expenditure, Steve Bell also of the Guardian now draws him as Dave the Jellyfish. As well as cartoons by Bell and Rowson, there are also cartoons of Cameron by Peter Brookes and Morten Morland of The Times, Dave Brown and Peter Schrank of The Independent, Ingram Pinn of the Financial Times, and Andy Davey of the Sun amongst many other leading cartoonists.