More Embarrassment for Tories as young Conservative justifies Tory lies as "PR"

Ok, what I'm about to tell you is hardly in the same league as Tory Bear describing Gordon Brown as looking "like paedo" but then that is pretty grim.

It's almost going back to the days of the Federation of Conservative Students who were a blight on my student days. I remember they had a faction called Students Against Sodomy at Aberdeen University. Eventually FCS became too much of an embarrassment even for Norman Tebbit, who disbanded them.

The thing is that these days those types have blogs from which they can pour out their poisonous bile. I wonder if David Cameron will dissociate himself from the remarks made by Tory Bear and others on Twitter and across the blogosphere.

You can't really regulate the political blogosphere - it won't work and it would be a very stupid party that actually tried to control what its bloggers write, but there are limits to what can be considered acceptable and Tory Bear has, I think, gone over the line. The irony is that Conservative Central Office has issued a diktat to Tory candidates that all social network and blog postings must be vetted first as Andrew reported. You have that level of control freakery for them, but still effectively condone the bile emanating from certain parts of the Tory blogosphere.

Having said that, the Chair of Conservative Future Scotland has managed to embarrass the party on two counts as Callum Leslie from Liberal Youth Scotland outlines here.

Apparently, according to Duncan Stewart, it's fine to bring in people to act as local students for a Cameron press conference because it's just PR, even if call me Dave is using the event to talk about greater openness in politics.

More damningly, he said that he reckoned that no genuine University of East London student would have wanted to hear David Cameron.

As Callum says, it just shows that the Tories have nothing to offer young people while Liberal Youth "offer real hope for the generation". Young people can see how Tavish Scott and the Scottish Liberal Democrats are working for them at Holyrood and Nick Clegg and his colleagues have seen that they are suffering most from the effects of the recession.