The Tories are so unpopular on social media that they’re taking the Putin’esq step of hiring an “army of tweeters,” the Telegraph reports today.

The magnitude of the task laying ahead of these cyber cons has been amusingly demonstrated over the weekend by Ben Bradley’s apology to Jeremy Corbyn.

The statement tweeted out by the Tory MP shortly after 10.30pm on Saturday night has so far been shared by more than 47,000 users:

On the 19th of February I made a defamatory statement about @jeremycorbyn. I have apologised to Mr Corbyn and here is the complete text of my apology. Please retweet. pic.twitter.com/6JZc8O9E82 — Ben Bradley MP (@bbradleymp) February 24, 2018

Scrapbook’s done some research on how that compares to the reach of his party and the results are pretty funny/tragic depending on what your political outlook is.

We found that this one post has received more retweets than every original tweet from the Tory party’s official account in 2018 combined.

At the time of writing on Monday morning, the @Conservatives account had amassed 46,162 retweets over some 300 posts since January 1.

That left them more than 600 retweets shy of Bradley’s apology.

Theresa May is even further behind, having received 29,000 retweets this year.

And, excluding his most famous work, Ben Bradley’s tweets in 2018 have been shared just over 5,000 times.

To appreciate the full magnitude of the response to Bradley’s apology, here’s a Donald Trump fact: It’s been retweeted more times than all but one of the US President’s posts in February.

This tweet below has been shared more than 52,000 times. It’s possible Bradley’s apology will get above that by the end of the month.

“You had Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party try to hide the fact that they gave money to GPS Fusion to create a Dossier which was used by their allies in the Obama Administration to convince a Court misleadingly, by all accounts, to spy on the Trump Team.” Tom Fitton, JW — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2018

Either way, it’s starting to look like those spy smears might have backfired…

MORE: Andrew Neil slams Tory campaign of “lies and disinformation” against Jeremy Corbyn