A Very Special Message
Now that the election has been well and truly called, even the brilliance of John O'Farrell no longer suffices to rally the faithful. I have just received the following very special message from a very special person, who like John O'Farrell has designated me a Labour supporter and potential volunteer. In the spirit of New Labour's well-known talent for giving documents a helping hand, I present the message herewith, complete and unexpurgated. The parts in italics are victims of "sexing-down" by the intelligence services, which duty has compelled me to restore.
If you have been keeping up with the news, you may already know that I went to the Palace a few minutes ago to ask the Queen to dissolve Parliament. By arrangement with my friend God, I postponed the announcement twenty-four hours as a mark of respect to the late Pope and a precautionary measure to ensure adequate media coverage.
I wanted to get this message out to you straight away about what's at stake at the election and how you can help. This will be a tough campaign and we will have to fight for every seat and every vote, since there are so few people nowadays who can tell the difference between one business-friendly firmness on immigration and another.
We're going to need the help of every New Labour supporter - to distribute the leaflets, to talk to voters on the doorsteps and get on those phones. Our salaried telecommunicative campaigning resources have been outsourced to Calcutta, but if we can find a few thousand more people to cold-call potential voters and hear the happy laughter on the other end of the line, so much the better for everyone.
If you've never volunteered to help New Labour's campaign before, please make this your first time. If you're an old hand, we need you now more than ever.
Labour.org.uk/volunteer
For what's at stake on May 5 is the future direction of our country - whether it goes forward or back. Those are, of course, the only possible options. Labour hasn't, by any means, achieved all we want yet. For example, there are still people walking the streets who think Peter Goldsmith lied about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. And until we can get an appropriate bill through the Lords, you may not agree with every decision I have made. But there's been real progress in several communities up and down the land. Thanks to our terrorist prevention measures, our identity card scheme, our privatisations, our refusal to harm innocent corporations just because they kill people, our flexible attitude to international law and my personal inspiration for the congestion charge in London, our country is fairer, more modern and successful than it was eight years ago.
And May 5 will decide whether we can build on - and accelerate - the progress made in spreading opportunity and prosperity ever thicker on the ever richer. Or whether the Tories can succeed in taking Britain back to the failed and risky policies of cuts, charges and economic mismanagement which we in the Labour party have adapted so successfully to our own ends.
Over the next five weeks, I will be out and about across the country spelling out that choice in words of one syllable with very few verbs. And so will all my colleagues.
If you have no awkward questions, I hope to see you on the campaign trail. But if you have a question for me, you can visit the website labour.org.uk and let me know.
In the spirit of New Labour's policies of caring efficientiation, you will receive some sort of answer within a specified time limit. I can't promise to answer them all, especially if they fail to begin, "Does the Prime Minister not agree...". But I'll answer as many as I can throughout the campaign. It's less than five weeks now to polling day. Five weeks in which the future of our country is in our hands, rather than in the hands of politicians, who occasionally make mistakes.
We have a good story to tell. Let's go out and tell it. Sex it up if you have to, but keep it simple and don't be any more inconsistent than you think you can get away with.
Yours as sincerely as I can manage without fatal systemic shock,
Tony Blair
(now and forever, amen)
If you have been keeping up with the news, you may already know that I went to the Palace a few minutes ago to ask the Queen to dissolve Parliament. By arrangement with my friend God, I postponed the announcement twenty-four hours as a mark of respect to the late Pope and a precautionary measure to ensure adequate media coverage.
I wanted to get this message out to you straight away about what's at stake at the election and how you can help. This will be a tough campaign and we will have to fight for every seat and every vote, since there are so few people nowadays who can tell the difference between one business-friendly firmness on immigration and another.
We're going to need the help of every New Labour supporter - to distribute the leaflets, to talk to voters on the doorsteps and get on those phones. Our salaried telecommunicative campaigning resources have been outsourced to Calcutta, but if we can find a few thousand more people to cold-call potential voters and hear the happy laughter on the other end of the line, so much the better for everyone.
If you've never volunteered to help New Labour's campaign before, please make this your first time. If you're an old hand, we need you now more than ever.
Labour.org.uk/volunteer
For what's at stake on May 5 is the future direction of our country - whether it goes forward or back. Those are, of course, the only possible options. Labour hasn't, by any means, achieved all we want yet. For example, there are still people walking the streets who think Peter Goldsmith lied about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. And until we can get an appropriate bill through the Lords, you may not agree with every decision I have made. But there's been real progress in several communities up and down the land. Thanks to our terrorist prevention measures, our identity card scheme, our privatisations, our refusal to harm innocent corporations just because they kill people, our flexible attitude to international law and my personal inspiration for the congestion charge in London, our country is fairer, more modern and successful than it was eight years ago.
And May 5 will decide whether we can build on - and accelerate - the progress made in spreading opportunity and prosperity ever thicker on the ever richer. Or whether the Tories can succeed in taking Britain back to the failed and risky policies of cuts, charges and economic mismanagement which we in the Labour party have adapted so successfully to our own ends.
Over the next five weeks, I will be out and about across the country spelling out that choice in words of one syllable with very few verbs. And so will all my colleagues.
If you have no awkward questions, I hope to see you on the campaign trail. But if you have a question for me, you can visit the website labour.org.uk and let me know.
In the spirit of New Labour's policies of caring efficientiation, you will receive some sort of answer within a specified time limit. I can't promise to answer them all, especially if they fail to begin, "Does the Prime Minister not agree...". But I'll answer as many as I can throughout the campaign. It's less than five weeks now to polling day. Five weeks in which the future of our country is in our hands, rather than in the hands of politicians, who occasionally make mistakes.
We have a good story to tell. Let's go out and tell it. Sex it up if you have to, but keep it simple and don't be any more inconsistent than you think you can get away with.
Yours as sincerely as I can manage without fatal systemic shock,
Tony Blair
(now and forever, amen)
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