by Sunny Hundal

Will Straw at Left Foot Forward published an astonishing story the other day. He said:

An employee of the Conservative party has used a fake name and email address to comment on a Left Foot Forward guest post about anti-semitism in Poland.

You won’t be surprised to hear that the comment was typically of the “so what?” kind that sought to play down Michal Kaminski’s background. Just the kind we’ve also been getting a lot of since the controversy erupted.

So, Unity ran a quick scan on our own comments. We’ve found four instances where someone with that IP address also posted comments here – in each case defending the party or its sympathisers.

The comments go as far back as March this year when I revealed that the think-tank Policy Exchange had been forced to apologise to a Muslim group. At the time we experienced a whole bunch of new readers coming here to rubbish my story without any substance to back it up.



So the question is: why are Tory Party apparatchiks astro-turfing leftwing blogs? This isn’t a matter of ‘if’ – we now have definitive evidence they are. I bet other leftie blogs have faced the same.

It seems the embarrassment over Kaminki has forced Tory troops to pull out their dirty tricks.

Last month James Macintyre at the New Statesman revealed how a Conservative Party press officer – Will Littlejohn (son of Richard, incidentally) – tried to smear him by saying in an email he was “implicated in the Damian McBride story”. Any suggestion that James was also part of Damian McBride’s plans is clearly libellous because he obviously wasn’t.

Funny isn’t it: everytime Kaminski is mentioned or Tory hypocrisy on an issue (Lisbon) is highlighted, we get a rush of new commenters turning up to declare how “desperate” the blogger is or how “boring” the story is etc etc. Now we know some of those people have more than a passing interest in the story.

If anyone wants to check their logs for the IP address, Will has the details. I bet there’s plenty more where that came from.

The IP address also throws up some peculiar questions:

– Why is that domain name listed in the South of France rather than CCHQ?

– What’s with the (deliberately?) amateurish looking holder page?