It seems that Iain Dale has clearly forgotten Denis Healey’s First Law of Holes – when in one, stopping digging – and has taken a stab at a defending the Tory Party’s attempts to get young people to connect with their inner tosser.

What those of us over thirty have to remember is that this is not aimed at us. It’s aimed at what David Davis last year called the iPod Generatioon – Insecure, Pressured, Overtaxed and Debt-ridden. So before we have a knee jerk reaction [fnarr] against the words used in this innovative campaign let’s just remember who its target is.

Iain, my eldest son is fourteen years old – too young to be overtaxed and debt-ridden, certainly, but within what one might consider the ‘iPod Generation’ and with GCSEs on the near horizon, certain pressured and insecure at times.

In other words, a member of the generation that this is supposed to appeal to.

So, naturally, when I got home from work last night I took the liberty of showing him your vision of what it means to connect with people via the internet, to obtain his opinion as to whether it really was just the kind of thing that would engage his attention…

…

…around 10-15 minutes later, when he’d managed to catch his breath and stop laughing, he finally succeeded in rendering his considered opinion.

“It’s a pile of patronising shit!”

The problem with the site is not that its critics are too old to understand what really appeals to young people but that the site is crap.

A blinged-up, chaved-up Ooompa Loompa is not, in the eyes of young people, a means by which one can teach social responsibility but a suitable candidate for a happy slapping and your entire internet stategy a complete joke from start to finish going right the way to Gideon’s recent speech on ‘Politics and Media in the Internet Age’ in which he begins by stating:

I want to talk to you tonight about Nick and his world.

Nick is a 25 year-old teacher. He doesn’t really watch much TV, except for episodes of Scrubs he downloads using LimeWire and then watches on his PSP. He met his girlfriend, Susie, through MySpace. She lives in Canada but they talk every day using Skype. They both love music but neither of them listen to the radio. They download the latest tunes from BitTorrent and send each other funny videos they find on YouTube.

Look, let me illustrate the problem by annotating Gideon’s comments for you.

I want to talk to you tonight about Nick and his world.

Nick is a 25 year-old teacher. He doesn’t really watch much TV, except for episodes of Scrubs [he has no taste in comedy otherwise he’d be downloading The Simpsons, The Daily Show or Curb Your Enthusiasm] he downloads [illegally] using LimeWire [wrong system, he’d use BitTorrent for video] and then watches on his PSP [with its tiny little screen, as opposed to watching Scrubs on his 19″ LCD monitor, laptop with its 15″ screen or burning it to DVD to watch it on his 42″ Plasma Screen TV]. He met his girlfriend, Susie, through MySpace [He’s a socially inadequate loser]. She lives in Canada [far enough away not to have figured out yet just how a big a loser he is] but they talk every day using Skype. They both love music but neither of them listen to the radio [really, one might think they’d use internet radio]. They download the latest tunes from BitTorrent [illegally, again] and send each other [links to] funny videos they find on YouTube [so they’re into videos of cats falling into ponds and idiots falling out of shopping trolleys and trying to make their own home made versions of Jackass. Most of YouTube is no more than ‘You’ve Been Framed’ on steroids and you don’t even get paid £250 for videoing someone making a complete arse of themselves].

And my point is?

Simply that Gideon hasn’t got a fucking clue what he’s talking about and his researchers are shite as well.

Look, Iain. I’m a firm believer in giving people fair warning so I should point out that shortly after posting yesterday’s missive on your party’s invitation to find my inner tosser – no thanks, btw, it make the keyboard sticky – I toddled off (figuratively speaking) to my domain registrar and picked up the domain name ‘twat-it.co.uk’. You can guess what’s coming next…
In any case, if anyone’s the expert on the internet and tossers it’ll be your own Party Chairman. Don’t suppose he’s got a few copies of “Anally Yours”, “When The Boyz are Away the Girls will Play”, “An Ass Lovers Dream”, “100% Anal # 2″, “Giving Ass”, “100% Interracial #3″ or “Asian Divas #5″ going spare?