OK, so you all know about Grant Shapps, spamblogger with a nasty prosperity-gospel twist (check out his dailyincome.com) and Tory Chairman. Here’s another bit of Tory Internet weirdness, completely by chance. So I wanted to look up Maria Miller, our new Secretary of State for Culture, Media, and Sport, plus a lot of stuff Tories don’t care about but I do, like women, equality, and incidentally the national telecoms infrastructure. But rather than theyworkforyou.com I typed theyworkforyou.org – Homer nods, and Homer Simpson nods quite a lot.
Bizarrely, that address resolved to this link, to an Excite (yes, they still exist! party like it’s 1999!) search for Nick Gibb MP, tagged with my IP address. It doesn’t seem to do anything smart, doesn’t leave an interesting cookie, doesn’t even load a search. The domain name resolves to 69.6.27.100, in 69.6.27.0/24, registered via an ISP called WholesaleBandwidth.com to something called OptInRealBig.com in Westminster, Colorado, which sounds about as spammy as it could possibly be and is inevitably registered with a spammy hide-my-details registrar.
There’s a fake win-this-iPad website on that IP, tricked out to look vaguely like Wikipedia (stay classy). When you tell it to bugger off, it redirects to myoffers.co.uk, which Nominet places at 46 Gillingham Street, London, SW1V 1HU, United Kingdom. (Although, their DNS is available over IPv6, so they can’t be all bad.) Interactive Prospect Targeting and WebBrands.co.uk live there, and in fact IPT’s web site owns up to myoffers.co.uk.
Anyway, here’s Gibb’s wikipedia entry, and here’s the real TheyWorkForYou on Gibb. Pal of Hague’s and Howard’s, doesn’t like IDS, was arse-licker to Cecil Parkinson and his various families, and his younger brother Robbie was “Chief of Staff to Francis Maude” (now there’s the final indignity for a once-honoured title – it’s not Frederick Morgan planning D-Day, is it?) before being the editor of the BBC’s Daily Politics.