The Conservatives are a wily lot. They made such a fuss over Gordon Brown’s elevation of Sir Alan Sugar from reality television star to enterprise tsar last month. It was pure smokescreen, nothing but a calculated ploy to deflect attention from their own attempt at populist appeal: the party’s infiltration of Channel 4’s Big Brother.

How else to explain Freddie “Halfwit” Fisher, so dubbed after changing his name by deed poll in one of Big Brother’s tasks, but as a cunning viral marketing campaign by the Conservative party to attract the yoof vote? This surely must be the outcome of last-year’s rumoured discussions between David “Dave” Cameron and reality-TV supremo Simon Cowell.