Selling global warming to eskimos

I'm always interested in how people try and persuade me to do things - adverts, door to door salesmen, those Irish men who phone up to ask me if I'm happy with my mobile plan. I find the process of selling icky but compelling.

A couple of New Labour council people just came to the door with their pitch for the local council elections. One was young, pasty and eager, with stubble. He looked like he'd been raised in a warm dark cupboard, like a mushroom. Let's call him Earnest.

Earnest did all the talking. I assume he'd been given all the youf voters to pitch at.

His older partner hovered in the background and seemed stiff and nervous. He wore an overcoat that looked like it belonged on a private detective. When he finally introduced himself I felt an urge to shake his hand to make him feel more included. Compassion strikes at odd times.

They were perfectly nice, but they made me think that the idea of a slick New Labour spin machine is nonsense. And "The Thick of It" seems all too accurate (if still not actually very funny).

For a start, Earnest spelled my name wrong as he took my email adress down. Fair enough, it's not an easy name to spell. Except he already had it printed on the form in front of him. If a person can't cross-reference within one sheet of paper, I'm not sure they're the best person to co-ordinate initiatives across a community (or whatever councillors claim to do).

Then he tried to coax me into a bit of a public hate session for George Galloway - my MP, as Big Brother watching friends are fond of reminding me, with big shit-eating grins on their faces. That was a fairly good bit of demographicing on Earnest's part, though. I do think Galloway is rubbish and I certainly didn't vote for him.

But I could just smell the crisp-and-orange-squash whiff of focus groups hovering around that bit. When someone tries to sell to me in such a smarmy way ("You're in your twenties, you clearly read Heat, we totally do too, so what about that twat Galloway? Vote for us intead, you know you love it!") I lose interest.

Actually, I don't always. If they were selling something I wanted to buy, and using focus groups to find out what was actually important to me, I wouldn't mind being so clearly marketed to. Perhaps I wouldn't even notice it, I'd just assume they were talking about important issues - because, naturally, the issues that excite me are the important ones.

However, when it came to their main pitch, they certainly did not pick the right route into my ballot pants. There I was on the doorstep with the Guardian in my hand and my unbrushed bluestocking hair...and they started in about increased police presence, cracking down on crime, sorting out drug dealers etc etc, I wanted to take them gently by the hand and explain that I'm a bleeding-heart liberal and I feel far too much middle class guilt to condone anything so draconian as punishing criminals.

Seriously though, I think they need to adjust their patter just a little bit. I suppose there are a lot of OAPS and mums on the estate and they were probably on a roll with the anti-crime thing, it'd probably been going down well in all the previous flats.

Once they'd left I looked at the leaflet they gave me. They'd spelled "it's" wrong. As in "Labour Tower Hamlets Freeze It's Council Tax".

I've now moved from mild surprise at their poor marketing skills to "let's go on a gun crazy councillor-culling murder spree, grammar-slaying motherfuckers!"

I suspect my job is starting to affect my priorities. Perhaps people who work in publishing should be denied the vote?