Here’s why Tories shouldn’t do smear campaigns

‘Pick the target, freeze it, personalise it and polarise it.’ This is the best-known of Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals, and even if you haven’t heard of the man or the book, you’ll be familiar enough with the technique. We saw a classic example a couple of weeks ago: the way that off-the-cuff remark on Keynes by Niall Ferguson was seized by his enemies on the left to ‘expose’ him as a wicked homophobe. We saw it again in the recent black-ops campaign conducted by Conservative Central HQ against Ukip.

What CCHQ did, you’ll recall, is get all its spotty interns to go through the social media pages of every prospective Ukip candidate looking for material that could be used against them. That poor young chap photo-graphed apparently doing a Hitler salute (what? With his left hand and at a near-horizontal angle? I don’t think so) was a victim of this.