Can’t help feel Dawn just damaged her chances of re-election with this. The LibDems will be all over it and with Sarah Teather, a tenacious MP, fighting for the same seat as Dawn it’s not looking good.

Best theory I have is that the original (and excruciating) “collaborative effort” was printed onto white paper and signed by Barack Obama. That endorsement was then reprinted onto House of Commons notepaper (and the signature transplanted for web display purposes) in the same spirit of self-importance.

The alternative is to have Dawn Butler waving her self-penned endorsement around on House of Commons headed notepaper during Obama’s visit, surely with all sorts of senior/knowledgeable Westminster bods in attendance, and *none* of them noticing its inappropriate use.

It should also be noted for the record that Iain Dale will often be introduced or referred to in print or on the telly with a description he has penned himself (e.g. “one of Britain’s leading political commentators”, or “a widely respected journalist”). When it is pointed out that this description is not in keeping with reality or his own statements elsewhere, Iain will typically claim that he has no control over what the BBC call him etc. when he bloody well does and he knows it. He is in no position to hoot and holler over Butler penning a “trite and self serving paragraph” and then getting someone else to endorse it, as he’s guilty of the same damn thing, often to an equally excruciating degree.

The phrase “I can see why she is one of only two black women in parliament” is not only clumsy, it seems to be damning all black women by faintly praising Butler. It’s impossible to believe that Obama could have written or knowingly endorsed such a phrase.

No matter how carefully you extract the signature, you always get a small element of the original background from which it was taken, bleeding through onto the new image when you paste the signature on, and tonal inconsistencies here are what you’d expect to see from a cut and paste job.

If I may be a pedant here, if one is good with Photoshop, you will not “always get a small element of the original background from which it was taken”; compositing can be absolutely seamless.

If you are good with Photoshop.

I don’t imagine, however, that advanced Photoshop compositing is a general skill amongst Parliamentary bag-carriers (who are, generally speaking, only marginally more able to use Word than most MPs) and so I am happy to accept your general point.

I hate bad compositing. It irritates me. So good work, O Unity: good work indeed…

DK

Still looks as if the signature was tipped in, though.

The hypothesis that first comes to mind is that there are a great many other stunts that *aren’t* spotted; and that it’s possible to cloud the issue either way with enough noise (cf the nutters who claimed that Obama’s birth certificate was shopped).