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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Politics
Martin Belam

Political leaflets that made us laugh in the general election

A selection of some of the weirdest election leaflet postings to social media
Some of the stranger election leaflet postings to social media. Composite: The Guardian

Before the internet and social media, printing and distributing election leaflets enjoyed a golden age of lack of scrutiny. The people who saw the leaflets were the people you delivered them to. The worst that could happen if you made a mistake was a letter of complaint to a local newspaper. A particularly bad leaflet might make the national press or Private Eye.

And then suddenly, every single election leaflet was potentially the focus for social media attention and ridicule, and we could all be armchair critics of the efforts in some far-flung constituency. Here are some things you need to bear in mind about your leaflets if you are an election candidate in 2017.

For a start, people will definitely critique your design choices and wording.

You need to think carefully about what your headline might say about you personally.

Sometimes your delivery method will be criticised.

They will question your uniquely local policies, such as those of this Ukip candidate who is standing on a commonsense platform of restoring a local statue of Robin Hood.

They will get behind your strong bee-centric policies.

They will absolutely love you if you include a section headlined “The starry firmament”, as if your leaflet was a 17th-century treatise on astronomy, and it includes proposals for interstellar colony ships and the mining of asteroids.

The public will find creative ways to improve your leaflets.

They might even suggest some helpful alternative design ideas.

And they sometimes find unexpectedly practical uses for them, while discovering that your leaflets are, ultimately, not waterproof.

The electorate will question your choice of outfit for your leaflet.

Fringe candidate literature can be quite exceptional

If you are standing as an independent candidate in an election, it’s important to make your leaflet as eye-catching as possible. The more outlandish the better, actually, if you want to get social media attention.

Remember to check your spelling

There is a thing called Muphry’s law which states that “if you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written”.

And in full knowledge of that, we are still glad we didn’t publish these leaflets.

Or this.

Although surely many parents with toddlers would be 100% behind the “unstainable housing” mentioned in this local election leaflet?

Bad graphs can be a work of art

For years the Liberal Democrats had a reputation for putting misleading graphs on their Focus leaflets. You know the type, proclaiming that “X can’t win here” on top of a bar chart that bears no relation to the actual numbers that appear. There’s been a bumper crop of bizarre graphs from parties up and down the land during this campaign. Here are some top tips for misleading the voters with bar charts.

For a start, show them something that isn’t actually an election result.

If the most recent election results aren’t up to the job, you can always smooth them out with an average.

The ultimate step is to just make up some numbers from what people have apparently told your team on the doorstep.

This effort, putting bar chart numbers on to a picture of an Olympic podium, is a work of art. Surreal, conceptual art, but art nonetheless.

Where your election leaflets go to die

Before social media, it used to be a mystery what happened to your leaflet once you pushed it through the letterbox. Now, you can see exactly where your carefully crafted campaign words end up.

Some election leaflets don’t get a very warm welcome. Well, this one sort of did …

Not all election communications are welcome.

Some leaflets end up exactly where you always suspected they would. The bin.

In the cat litter.

In here too.

Oh gosh.

But election leaflet delivery teams, beware. There are people out there who really, really don’t want your leaflets.

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