Scene: A busy local party office in a seaside town, weeks away from a national election. Printers are whirring, volunteers are stuffing envelopes and stringing bunting. In the inner office, a meeting is taking place between the party candidate and an advisor.
Candidate: Who the effing eff is this Jack Monroe person? Do I know him?
Advisor: No, well, he's a she. Apparently. She's been hanging around the office the last week or so. She's pretty annoying, doesn't do anything much, but likes to brag about being some sort of poverty campaigner. I dunno... she might just be a crank.
Candidate: What has she done on poverty? Anything we can tap into? There's a huge crisis of poverty here on this patch, as we both well know.
Advisor: Hmmmm, hard to say. She's sort of internet famous for cooking really terrible food which she claims helps people on tight budgets. But she's been thoroughly debunked and now she's cancelled, in a nutshell.
Candidate: Are we absolutely sure she's not an opposition plant? There've been worse dirty tricks....
Advisor: I reckon she's too thick and too obvious to be a spy. Her father is a local wanker who likes to trot out his cannon for civic occasions and he was photographed with your opposition candidate this weekend. She's says he was a para but he definitely wasn't. (Both snigger.)
But it's doubtful she's clever enough to be playing both sides. More irritant than infiltrator.
Candidate: And what has she been doing for us exactly? I don't remember seeing her out on the campaign anywhere. She's not been one of our committed foot soldiers who's been building the campaign here for months and months.
Advisor: Yeah, no, she just turned up out of the blue [editor's note -- this is a turn of phrase, not a sign of a secret mole] about ten days ago. She doesn't have any identifiable skills so we just asked her to make tea on the first day. On the second day, she brought some weird homebrews in that looked like piss and tasted worse. So we put her on photocopying. She mainly takes pics of the office and dances around in a GMB hat.
Candidate: Wait, that's my GMB hat! The red one? I've been looking for that!
Advisor: Shall I ask her for it back?
Candidate: No. (sighs)
I see she's been doing some damage on Twitter. She's been fighting with local opposition activists, going on about my parachute jump. This is really not helpful. I don't need people like this drumming up imaginary conflicts on my behalf. We have real issues to tackle and we're already trying to disrupt a safe seat.
We need to get rid of her.
Advisor: How? She's persistant. Like a fuckin' barnacle.
Candidate: Can we get her dad to call her off?
Advisor: Doubtful.
Candidate: Can we tell her to stop tweeting about us?
Advisor: We can. But truthfully, although she has a mysteriously large following on Twitter, she keeps her account locked so nobody here locally who's following us is likely to see her tweets anyway.
Candidate: OK, excellent, that's reassuring.
From now on, we have a strict door policy, right? We keep the office door locked and make everyone ring the bell. If she turns up, we switch off all the lights and pretend nobody's in. She'll give up eventually.
Advisor: Right you are, boss. Also, just so you know, there's people on Tattle who think she's got a crush on you. Just thought you'd want to know this weirdo has form for contacting people's spouses and alerting them to her flirting (makes quote marks gesture).
Candidate: Christ, that's all I need. My wife will love that. (Puts head in hands.)
*end scene*
