Pink hair and red herrings: viral quiz invites you to guess politicians’ stripes from their photos

Is a bristly grey moustache a telltale sign of a Reform candidate? Is pink hair a giveaway for the Greens? Perhaps a sharp suit is the best telltale for the Tories – or spectacles and a rucksack for Labour ? Players of a viral politics game have been finding out that it’s never that simple to judge the colour of a candidate’s rosette just by how they look. The game, invented by Sam Hamill-Stewart, challenges players to look at pictures of local election candidates and guess their party affiliation. The game, Guess the Party , was being shared across Westminster and among party activists on Thursday – and statistics show how hard it is to guess the party a candidate is standing for. More than 3.9m guesses had been taken by the time polls closed on Thursday night – by about 134,000 people. Before he launched the game, Hamill-Stewat removed some profiles that had a party logo in the background, sourcing the pictures from Democracy Club . A red tie can be a giveaway for Labour, but it can also be a red herring. According to the game’s statistics, Green candidates are the easiest to identify, guessed correctly by 37.5% of players, followed by Reform, on 35.4%. But Liberal Democrats were the trickiest – correctly guessed by just 15.2% of players. Some candidates had particularly high rates of correct guesses. …