NOT The Mayor of Baltimore

On Wednesday 26th August 2009 I was chuckling over the silly things Conservative MP Chris Grayling had said about Britain becoming like the TV show, The Wire. It occurred to me to wonder whether the opposite proposition might be amusing. So I imagined a US politician complaining that the US is becoming more like a fictional UK TV show.

This train of thought led me to many minutes of tittering to myself. Clinton complains that Wyoming is becoming like Last of the Summer Wine! Obama bemoans the similarity of Santa Monica to Strictly Come Dancing!

Then I decided that it would only take a few minutes to clone the Mayor of Baltimore's website and have her suggest that Grayling's comments really were just as silly as her comparing Baltimore to the UK crime drama Midsomer Murders.

I have to ask, are you still with me on this? Is the humour evident? It was very - VERY - important to me that I was not to be accused of smearing anyone - and that meant that it had to be an obvious fake by the end of text. This it what I wrote:

Fellow citizens

This week I was alerted to a speech made by a Member of the British Parliament, a Mr Chris Grayling, who suggested his country should fear becoming like our city of Baltimore as portrayed in the HBO series, The Wire. We all watched The Wire and while it was sometimes a heart-breaking reflection of reality, it was in the main, merely entertaining fiction.

The television show failed to reflect the best we have in this city, our sense of community, our hospitality and our proud history and culture. To present a television show as the real Baltimore is to perpetuate a fiction that dishonours our city. It is as pointless as boasting that Baltimore has a per capita homicide rate a fraction of that in the popular UK television show Midsomer Murders.

The Baltimore Police Department is working hard to protect the people of this city and it should be remembered that The Wire was just a television show. As this video shows, there is so much more to Baltimore than The Wire.

Mayor Sheila Dixon
City of Baltimore

The intention was this: People were to read it as serious and then get the joke when the saw Midsomer Murders. Just in case, it linked to some Midsomer fan site I found when looking for the TV show's death rate. I didn't think anyone would believe the Mayor of Baltimore would do that. However, I thought the joke could use a pay-off and so knocked together the video of Midsomer Murders against the theme tune to The Wire, text overlays with the relative death stats and the punchline, "Baltimore: MUCH safer than Midsomer". I thought about putting my Recess Monkey logo at the end but the site has been down for a while so it seemed a bit pointless. Instead, again thinking that no-one on this blue planet would by this point believe it was kosher, I overlaid the Vist Baltimore logo.

I emailed a half a dozen friends or so, all of whom got the joke or were too busy to look at it. Some of them forwarded it on. Having been proven to be funny, I twittered it to my small band of twitter followers. About that time it also seemed a good idea to let some Baltimore people in on the joke, So I quickly cobbled together a very amateur looking twitter page for the Mayor of Baltimore. In fact, the Mayor of Balimore and Balitmore before I spelled it right. I then followed some other twitterers simply by searching Twitter for "Baltimore".

So what else did I do to make sure this wasn't seen as the true views of the Mayor of Baltimore or an attempt to deceive anyone or to smear Chris Grayling? I registered the mayorofbaltimore.org domain in my own name. I squirrelled in the English spelling of "dishonoured" as a clue. I put at the bottom of the page, "Copyright R Monkee Esq" and linked it to my currently decrepit Recess Monkey website. I put the following message on Recess Monkey for anyone who cared to follow the link:

Sorry, RecessMonkey is on holiday in Maryland. Right mouse button click view source (but not on this website) R Monkee Esq.

Furthermore, in case any geeky people looked (and I had the blogger Dizzy Thinks in mind), I put the following message at the top of the page for anyone who chose to right-click and select view source:

OK, so I'm just having a bit of fun at Chris Grayling's expense. Sitting in the office on a hot August afternoon, I was fantasising that I was Mayor of Baltimore and how annoyed I would be. I hope you very quickly picked up that this was a spoof. Didn't mean to break any laws or ethical mores - please don't extradite me if I have unwittingly done so. Hope you appreciate the humour, Alex Hilton, alexhilton@gmail.com - 07985 384 859

Yes, that's my name, my personal email address and my mobile number. So I hope I took every effort to make sure that this joke was neither an attempt to deceive, nor an attempt to smear anyone.

Just in case, below the "statement" from the Mayor, I inserted the contact details of someone on the Mayor's PR team. I put it there so that in the event of a real journalist being taken in by the joke, they would easily be able to phone the Mayor's office and discover that it was a fake.

So what was I expecting? I hoped my efforts to amuse would get emailed around a bit among British politicos. I thought possibly a few bloggers might link to the site to let their readers in on the joke. I hoped it would be a funny enough joke for that to happen. I did not imagine for a moment that any mainstream media would pick it up as a story.

I was wrong, it got picked up by The Spectator, The Guardian, The Independent, the Baltimore Sun and the Baltimore City Paper, as well as being taken seriously by the blogs Labourlist and Liberal Conspiracy. The story also made the BBC's online news quiz.

First thing on Thursday I started trying to diffuse the unintended hoax. I telephoned contacts on The Guardian and The Independent. I also sent a note to the Baltimore Sun and to Mayor Dixon's office". I felt concerned for the journalists who would have to face their collagues with this professional embarassment. For this reason, it didn't seem right to go on Sky News when asked, it would seem like gloating. I also was contacted by Fox News, though again, didn't choose to appear in their package. In all honesty, I may have considered The Daily Show had there been a bid.

Mostly, the reaction I have had is positive. Some people are congratulating me on the joke. Others, quite out of keeping with my own views, are congratulating me for fooling mainstream journalists. There is a body of marginal, right wing, figures who are seeking to portray this as a deliberate smear of Chris Grayling by a Labour insider. I have had three people on the left contact me to say that I have done some harm to the Labour Party and have let them down. I have, strangely, received a lot of support from people in Baltimore. Not, however, from the Mayor's office who quickly threatened and then retracted their threat to take me to court. I heard that the Mayor's Press Officer was woken by the BBC at 4am (so at least someone tried to stand up the story first) and so it's understandable if the sleep-deprived official over-reacted a little.

Some of those with a sense of humour perhaps incompatible with mine have suggested that this joke was ill-fitting my role as Labour's Parliamentary Candidate for Chelsea & Fulham at the next election. I happen to believe they are wrong. I happen to believe that the inhumanity expressed by many politicians is a ploy to convince regular people that politics is only for a particular sort of person. I believe it's a great flaw of democracy that it seeks spuriously to exclude large swathes of people from office. I have been slightly controversial and independent minded for as long as I have been in politics. I do want to be elected to Parliament and when I get there, I want to kick the doors in so that everyone else can have a hand in running their country too. So I have not suppressed my sense of humour, despite the advice I have had over the years. Neither have I suppressed my independence of thought, again against advice, because they are both part of the humanity missing from politics.

So it comes to this, as a Parliamentary Candidate, have I made an error of judgement with this joke? I don't think so because it is entirely in keeping with my political philosophy. In terms of the Labour Party, no-one from HQ has suggested that either my politics or my attitude are incompatible with ambition for office

And if any part of this bit of fluff made you smile, or made you critically analyse a politician's hyperbole, then it achieved its aims