BLOGGING should be fun. It shouldn’t be too earnest. Bloggers should be able to poke fun at themselves as well as at other people.

Just last week, Iain Dale paid me a compliment by suggesting that the success (so far) of this blog was down to the fact that I’m one of the few leftie bloggers with a sense of humour. 

Yet today, in his famous Daley Dozen list of top blogposts, he lists at number 5: “Whipped Senseless thinks Tom Harris has lost the plot.”

“Whipped Senseless” turns out to be a site called “Tory Politico” which, under the headline “Has Tom Harris lost the plot?” says:

This morning, as I was going through my morning ritual of checking by list of blog feeds, I was shocked and bewildered by a post from Tom Harris, a post only a delusional Labour MP would publish in the current climate.

Under the heading “Pollwatch: Labour beating Tories out of the park in ‘room for improvement’ measure,” Tom wrote the following:

THE LATEST ComRes poll just goes to prove that the Tories have really boxed themselves in as far as further advances are concerned. Classic amateur’s mistake.

Labour, meanwhile, has allowed itself plenty room for manoeuvre by managing to reach a popularity level of 26 to the Tories 45 per cent.

“Cameron will be shi***ng himself tonight,” someone said tonight. I didn’t catch his name.

Tom could be just exhibiting a little gallows humour, but if not how exactly has David Cameron and the Conservatives “boxed themselves in.”

Was Tom saying the same think back in 1994 when Labour was consistently polling between 44 and 61 per cent, while the Conservatives under Major were down in the doldrums only getting between 21 and 33 per cent.

This is clearly the rantings of a man who cannot accept the fact that his party is going to loose the coming election, and loose lose big.

Where to begin, where to begin…?

The writer was, of course, referring to this post which I wrote about the latest ComRes poll.

Even a few (only a few, thankfully) commenters seem to believe I was seriously trying to put a positive spin on a godawful poll for the Labour Party. But it seems there are plenty on the political right who seem to have a hard time with the whole humour thing.

And having a laugh is a challenge for the right in the United States too, according to the Huffington Post.

It all started with an oddball Florida congressman named Bill Posey who has apparently bought into the Obama birthplace conspiracy (just a notch down from the 9/11 conspiracists but they eat in the same restaurants). Basically they believe that President Obama is holding the office illegally because he wasn’t born in the United States. Even though he was. 

Congressman Posey has introduced a Bill obliging all future presidential candidates to provide a copy of their birth certificate to prove that they were indeed born in America. 

Satirist Stephen Colbert, on his Colbert Report TV show suggested that Congressman Posey is in fact a human/alligator hybrid. Posey’s response?

There is no reason to say that I’m the illegitimate grandson of an alligator.

Really? Isn’t there? You’re being very defensive there, Congressman…

So, Mr Whipped Senseless, whoever you are, please rest assured that my post from last night was, indeed, an attempt at humour. If you want more of an explanation than that, I was attempting to subvert the assumptions of the reader by taking to extremes the expectation on a Labour MP to be optimistic in the face of less-than-encouraging poll results.

It was a gag. Sorry you didn’t get it.