LATEST: The Guerrilla Anti-Brexit Campaign Trolling Politicians With Their Own Words Is ‘Going Legit’
The first strike in an apparent campaign to humiliate politicians with their own words has begun, after an old David Cameron tweet plastered on a billboard in north-east London.
The giant display features a message from the then-prime minster, posted in 2015, which said the UK faced “stability and strong government with me, or chaos with Ed Miliband”.
As anyone with a pulse will be aware, things did not quite go as planned for old Dave in the months following – shortly after the EU referendum (which he called), he resigned. He was then seen in an over-priced shed.
The billboard has been promoted by a Twitter account called Led By Donkeys, but there is no further information on the identities of those involved.
On Thursday morning, the Led By Donkeys Twitter account revealed another poster had appeared, this time featuring the David Davis classic: “There will be no downside to Brexit, only a considerable upside.”
The use of a tweet to frame the quote is a little disingenuous as Davis made the remark in the Commons, not on Twitter, but given the MP’s later remarks on Brexit, we’ll let this minor niggle slide.
Davis told HuffPost UK: “Not for the first time some of the Remain campaign think it’s proper to use a completely out of context and misleading quotation. Anybody who has read the original will see what was said was not implied by this.”
More importantly, he said that the full context of his remark in the Commons in 2016 was that he said that there would be no downsides if the UK took control of its borders and laws while maintaining current security arrangements and had the best possible open access to EU trade.
“If we can achieve all that, there will be no downside to Brexit at all, and considerable upsides,” he had told MPs.
It’s not immediately clear if the campaign is a guerrilla operation or if those behind the posters have paid for the advertising space.
And if you want to get involved, the account is inviting suggestions for what their next poster should be and where it should be placed.
Suggestions so far include...
- Pro-Brexiteer David Davis in 2015 saying: “If a democracy cannot change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy.
- Boris Johnson’s infamous and sparsely-detailed appraisal of post-Brexit business.
- And Dominic Raab’s astounding lack of knowledge about the Dover-Calais crossing.
HuffPost UK has reached out for comment from the as-yet unidentified people behind the Twitter account.