A TORY candidate has entertainingly demonstrated the dangers of blogging in the early hours of the morning. 

Richard Graham, the Tories’ hope for the Gloucester seat, has described his Labour opponent, Parmjit Dhanda MP, as… well, there’s no nice way of saying this, so I’ll try rhyming slang: as a “Crispin Blunt”.

I saw a print out of the original article earlier this afternoon. But it has, needless to say, been tidied up somewhat and it now reads thus:

For anyone aspiring to be an MP it’s been pretty depressing to see how ridiculed politicians have become. ‘You’re all the same’ is the cry on the doorstep – but of course they/we are not, even if the Telegraph has unearthed an awful lof of bad apples. It was reassuring both yesterday and today to meet people who realised that and just want to see some honesty and hard work from their councillor.

In case you didn’t realise, it was the last word in that paragraph that originally concluded with a word that rhymes with “stunt”. But instead of admitting the schoolboy prank, Graham pretended that what he meant to say was “councillor”.

Now, setting aside what this says about his attitude towards local representatives on the council, does Graham really think the good citizens of Gloucester are stupid? ”Their councillor”? That doesn’t even make sense. The last time I looked, the expenses scandal was engulfing Westminster, not Gloucester Town Hall. He even starts out with the words “For anyone aspiring to be an MP…” and then changes (in the new, revised version) to “councillor”.

Given that Graham was trying to smear Parmjit at the time, this embarrassing lapse of judgment and common sense, not to mention intelligence, couldn’t have happened to a nicer bloke.

What a merchant banker.