You won’t believe how the Tories screwed up ‘Tory Momentum’ launch

You really couldn’t make this up. Seriously.

After getting their social media behinds kicked by Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters during the General Election campaign, the Tories decided – as Tories do – that they needed their own ‘grass-roots’ social media presence.

So, being Tories, they decided to buy one, by setting up a ‘professional’, official Twitter account to do what their fevered minds imagine is ‘inspiring the young chaps and chapesses’.

The account they set up was @activate_uk_net, to ape their tortured website address. Trying to be cool, they launched it with what many are terming the weirdest and least effective meme in internet history. Nobody understands what it’s trying to say or do:

But a certain alt-right publication – as it subsequently trumpeted – told them their Twitter handle had too many underscores. So they changed it:

But there’s one problem with changing your Twitter handle that the people managing the account seem to have forgotten: if you change your Twitter handle, the old one becomes available again.

And in what seemed like only seconds, while the Tories were still slapping each other on the back about their snappy new handle, some anonymous, enterprising lefties snapped up the newly-vacated @activate_uk_net. For a parody account:

Now, the Tories say they like a bit of enterprise – but we suspect they won’t be too thrilled about this bit, as it’s resulted in a parody account that’s actually closer to their website address than their own Twitter account.

Shame.

Now of course, the main challenge facing the person/people running the parody account is clear: how do you parody something as dire as the real thing is in this particular case?

Here are a couple of tweets by the, er, ‘genuine’ Tory account:

‘Our recently formed movement?’ That the Tories think you can just ‘form’ a movement – ‘build it and they will come’? – says all you need to know about Tories being out of touch with everyday reality. As for ‘independent’ and ‘grassroots’, those are so excruciating that a friend of the SKWAWKBOX is currently suffering from what he described as ‘cringe-whiplash’.

Could you possibly parody something so excruciatingly a parody of itself? The ‘squatters’ who’ve taken over @activate_uk_net are making a damned fine attempt. Here are a few of their first tweets. Caution: you may wish to use the toilet before reading further:

The Tories – so incompetent they can’t even set up a Twitter account without handing themselves on a platter to have the you-know-what ripped out of them.

It’s hard – really, really hard – to escape the conclusion that the parody ‘Activate’ is far likelier to start a movement than the real one.

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