Conservatives astroturf anonymous blog comments from the South of France

Bonjour! Greetings from Trèbes in the South of France, a small hamlet near the historic Roman settlement of Carcassonne. Located on the main route between Toulouse and the Mediterranean coast, it’s a perfect venue for a relaxing break … or to register a web domain from which to astroturf anonymous comments on opponents’ blogs. No, seriously.

In February the Tories had their fingers burnt when they were caught editing Wikipedia to concur with erroneous claims made by David Cameron in parliament. Not only have they been called out again with similar antics by posting anonymous comments on Left Foot Forward but they’ve been doing so using a highly suspicious third-party domain name.

Not content with conservatives.com and conservativeparty.org.uk (all clearly registered to CCHQ), the party recently registered conservative-party.org.uk from which blog comments were posted. This might be brushed of with relative ease (as Tory Bear learned yesterday, hoovering up relevant domain names might not be such a bad idea) were it not for the fact that:

• The domain is not registered to CCHQ but to some random bloke in the South of France
• The domain itself hosts a deliberately amateurish About The Conservative Party homepage featuring a picture of a pile of money and a YouTube video of Dan Hannan. This attempts to further distinguish itself from “the official Conservative Party site” by providing a link:

This begs the questions:

1. Why register the domain in the South of France rather than to CCHQ?
2. Why create an amateurish looking website rather than redirecting to your main site?
3. Why then point subdomains of conservative-party.org.uk to a set of IP addresses owned by the Conservative Party?
4. Why were these then used to astroturf anonymous comments on opponents’ blogs?

Over to you, Eric.