So how good exactly was Nick Clegg’s tuition fees apology video turned single?

Not only did the charity single version of the Liberal Democrat leader’s autotuned apology make the Top 40 download chart, but the video was viewed more than 1.7 million times.

The views have helped make the song the biggest viral mash-up hit of the year – and proved an unlikely boon for the Deputy Prime Minister and his struggling party.

The autotuned song entered the Download music chart at 116 before climbing more than 70 places in less than 24 hours.  And if you haven’t yet, and it is for charity, you can download the single from iTunes here.

The song picked up a mass of online, press and TV coverage and you can see the highlights of that here:

The success has provided not only a boon for Clegg, but for humorous site The Poke as well, which saw its traffic spike as the autotune story played out.

James Herring, of PR firm Taylor Herring which worked with the The Poke on the autotuned story (and has done since The Poke launched two years ago), says that Clegg was such an easy target that the opportunity was simply too good to miss.

“We worked through the night to create the mash up which was released 15 hours after the initial speech was made, the video going live the following day on Thursday morning.   By Friday lunchtime Clegg had given us permission to release the song as a single which was hugely exciting but somewhat daunting given that none of us had any idea how to go about this process.

“To cut a long story short, we finally found a senior manager at iTunes in the US who had seen all the media coverage who agreed to fast track the release. “The huge success of the campaign has taken everyone by surprise – it’s one thing to get a million views on YouTube, but quite another to have landed a place in the top 40 download chart 24 hours after the video release!”