Showing posts with label Blogosphere. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blogosphere. Show all posts

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Me, this blog, and Dale and Co

I started this blog in 2005 with no great ambitions for it other than to provide an outlet for my political writing which, at that time, was not afforded to me by my 'day job.'

I had left the parliamentary lobby the year before in order to pursue a different line of work and enjoy a better quality of life, and although I did not miss the lobby as such, I did miss being able to sound-off about the political events of the day.

To my surprise, the blog "took off" in a small way and for the first few years of its existence was regularly voted among the top 20 political blogs in the UK in Iain Dale's annual guide.

For a while, I thought it might even fill that much-talked-about left-of-centre "void" in a political blogosphere which, at the time, was dominated by three giant Conservative blogs - Iain Dale's Diary, Guido Fawkes and Conservative Home.

As it turned out, a number of factors militated against that, the biggest of which was that the mainstream media with their hugely superior resources swiftly got in on the blogging phenomenon.

Why bother reading what Paul Linford had to say about the latest Labour leadership crisis when you could read the views of people much closer to the action, such as Benedict Brogan or Paul Waugh?

Like many other 'lone' bloggers at the time, I also found the readers' appetites for constant updates - 'feeding the blog monster' as it became known - impossible to sustain.

And there were internal pressures within my then workplace too, something about which I will say more some day.

I kept the blog going, mainly because it still retained a small core of loyal readers and commenters (thanks, guys), and also to provide an online presence for my weekly column in The Journal, which otherwise only appeared in print.

But I had long since come to the view that the best outlet for my blogging in future would be to join a group blog where the burden of providing a constant stream of entertaining and informative new material could be shared with others.

For a while I contributed to Liberal Conspiracy, but although I am an economic leftist, I have always been a small-c conservative on social issues and it soon became clear to me that my views on such matters as abortion were not appreciated by my fellow group bloggers there.

Fortunately Iain Dale has now offered me another opportunity through his new, non-partisan megablog Dale and Co, and this is where my main political blogging will be done from now on.

My contributions at Dale and Co will be accessible at this page or via this RSS feed

So far I have contributed two pieces on Rupert Murdoch and the phone-hacking scandal - the latest one focusing why yesterday's House of Commons vote to curb his expansion plans was 30 years overdue - and another more reflective historical piece on whether a British Prime Minister will ever again serve two non-consecutive terms.

As for this blog, it will continue, with the strictly limited purposes of providing the following:

  • An online presence for my Saturday column.


  • A central reference point for my output across a variety of print and online platforms, including Dale and Co, Total Politics and The Journalism Hub.


  • An outlet for some occasional personal blogging which will not be of great interest to readers of those other platforms.


  • A readily accessible archive of my blogging output over the past six years, including my 'Political Top 10s' which continue to get pretty high Google rankings.


  • A series of links to sites which interest me and which may interest others of a like mind who drop by here.


  • To those who are interested in that sort of stuff, please continue to visit. To the rest of you, see you over at Dale and Co.

    Tuesday, August 10, 2010

    After five years, a new look

    I always liked the classic Rounders 3 template, which is why I've stuck with it on this blog for the past five years. But I've wanted a three-column template for some time, and now I've finally found one I like I thought it was time to give the blog a new look. It's not a "relaunch," it doesn't mean blogging is going to return to 2006/7/8 levels (it can't, basically) but I hope readers will like it and find some of the links easier to find. I expect I will add the odd refinement here and there over the next couple of weeks or so.

    If anyone would prefer to remember the blog the way it was, an archived version of everything up to March 2009 has been preserved for posterity as part of the British Library's web archive project.

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    Wednesday, September 23, 2009

    Solidarity

    For anyone who might be wondering where I stand on the issue that appears to be dividing the blogosphere at the moment, click here.

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    Friday, June 19, 2009

    The new blog

    Since I took over the editorship of HoldtheFrontPage just over a year ago, my work has drawn me more and more into media reporting.

    We've now launched a news and aggregation blog called The Journalism Hub to highlight some of the wealth of content available on HTFP, as well as on UK journalism blogs and other respected media news sources.

    Athough I will be keeping this blog going as an outlet for my political writing and occassional personal rambles, The Journalism Hub is where I'll be doing most of my blogging from now on.

    If you're a regular visitor here, and particularly if you're interested in the journalism-politics interface, I hope you'll pay us a visit.

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    Thursday, May 14, 2009

    Preserved for posterity

    I don't get as much time as I would like to update this blog these days, but by and large I'm pretty happy with what I've produced here over the past three years or so.

    So when I was approached by the British Library to be part of its national web archiving project last year, I admit to having felt a great sense of satisfaction.

    Snapshots of the blog have now been permanently archived at this page, while the blog is also listed in the Library's politics and blogs collections.

    In theory this means my grandchildren in 50 years' time will be able to read the blog to find out what grandad was up to back in the Noughties. Assuming I am lucky enough to have any, of course, and provided the world doesn't end before then.

    When I heard that the blog had been archived, I did give some fairly serious thought to knocking it on the head, and treating what has now been preserved for posterity as a completed body of work.

    But quite apart from the fact that this would have amounted to a rather arbitrary cut-off point, I found myself thinking that if the blog ceased to exist, I would probably have to reinvent it.

    As Iris Murdoch wrote in The Sea, The Sea: "Life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubts on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after."

    And since this blog was never meant to be art, merely a reflection of what has been happening in British politics and in my own life since 2005, I figure it had better "bump on" for a while longer yet....

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    Friday, April 17, 2009

    Smeargate was a car crash waiting to happen


    So much for cartoonist Slob's take on "Smeargate." Do I share his sense of nausea at the Adoration of the Guido that has followed the RedRag scandal and the defenestration of Damian McBride? Well, up to a point I guess.

    Paul Staines is at least right in his analysis of the Lobby, although the initial diagnosis that it had become part of a client media was not Guido's, but Peter Oborne's, in his brilliant book The Triumph of the Political Class.

    I myself watched it happening from close quarters and it became very obvious fairly early in my Lobby career on that you could not expect to receive help and favours from the New Labour machine if you also insisted on telling it like it was for the benefit of the readers who paid your salary.

    I made my bed, and although those contemporaries of mine who took the Campbell spin subsequently saw all sorts of exciting career doors opening to them, I have never once regretted the road I took.

    That said, there is a central hypocrisy at the heart of the Guido version of history that should not be overlooked. In my relatively limited personal dealings with Paul Staines, I have always found him to be an okay bloke - he even bought me a drink once - but when it comes to smear campaigns against rival politicians, his blog is the last word.

    Back in 2007, Guido spent months attempting to convince his blog's many readers that Gordon Brown had been photographed on a rocking horse wearing a nappy, and to utilise the power of search engine optimisation and Google to spread this ridiculous tale across the entire internet. It even made it onto Wikipedia, and when I tried to remove it, some patsy came along and reverted my edit.

    He also gave house-room to a sock puppet called "Stanislav" who suggested, in one particularly disgusting post, that the Prime Minister had been steadily driven mad by the strain of repressing his "homosexuality" over many years - part of a deadly serious attempt by the right to fix the idea of Gordon as a "weirdo" in the public's mind.

    None of this in any way excuses the suggestion that David Cameron is suffering from some embarassing health complaint. But it does put it into perspective, and should serve as a corrective to those tempted to hail Guido as the new conscience of British public life.

    Labour of course should have risen above all this. Instead, it set up LabourList, bringing in Derek Draper as editor despite the fact that his previous spell as a NuLab adviser had ended in embarrassing circumstances for the government. It was, in short, a car crash waiting to happen.

    I disliked the idea of LabourList from the start. I was in fact invited to attend one of the breakfast sessions, and would have gone if I had been in London and at a loose end, but the whole thing seemed to me to be built on two false premises - firstly, the Dale Hypothesis that all left-wing blogs are basically crap, and secondly the Guido Hypothesis that smearing one's political opponents is a legitimate purpose of political blogging.

    In other words, Labour thought they needed a Guido-style "attack blog" to take the fight to the Tories, and they concluded that none of the existing left-of-centre blogs was up to the job.

    Had the party not got the first of these questions so catastrophically wrong, it would have realised that instead of trying to impose its command-and-control approach on the blogosphere, it would have been better off discreetly encouraging some of the excellent, well-established left-of-centre blogs that were already out there.

    In short, instead of listening to Dolly Draper, they should have listened to Sunny Hundal. His post on Liberal Conspiracy is the best defence I have thus far read of the left-of-centre blogosphere and why Labour would have been better tapping into that rather than attempting to out-Fawkes the Tories.

    Then again, New Labour has been ignoring its own natural supporters and trying to mimic the Conservatives ever since it was invented, so we should probably not be that surprised.

    Meanwhile the issue of "spin" has once again become the issue that defines New Labour, the single word that I suspect will be associated with the Blair-Brown government long after everything else it did has been forgotten.

    And those of us who thought Gordon would put a stop to all this nonsense have suffered another, perhaps terminal, disillusionment.

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    Wednesday, November 19, 2008

    Bloggers and the Lobby

    After initially taking the view that political bloggers had little to gain, and much to lose in terms of their independence by joining the parliamentary lobby, my thinking has changed on this point over the past couple of years. The gradual convergence of the blogosphere and the mainstream media which I wrote about in the Guide to Political Blogging earlier this year has rendered the old dividing lines obsolete.

    As I have pointed out before, what we must now call the Big Five political blogs are, by virtue of their size, influence, and networks, practically part of the mainstream media already. They are, in no particular order, Iain Dale's Diary, Guido Fawkes, Political Betting, Conservative Home and the most recent newcomer to the elite, Liberal Conspiracy. In my view, all should be in the lobby.

    I wrote in the 2008 Guide: "I always thought the day political blogging really entered the mainstream would be when one of the big four blogs managed to obtain a lobby pass. If they haven’t yet given one to the new co-editor of Con Home, I have a feeling they soon will do."

    This was a reference to Jonathan Isaby, who had just proved my point about convergence by moving from being a Daily Telegraph lobby hack to editing the site which used to be, rather unfairly, known in some circles as Continuity IDS.

    But according to this report in a well-known journalism trade publication yesterday, I was apparently premature in my forecast. In a speech at the London School of Economics, lobby chair Ben Brogan said the issue of whether to admit bloggers to the lobby was in fact causing "a huge headache."

    Asked by a member of the audience whether the Commons authorities would consider the move, Brogan replied: "They've been very reluctant to start issuing passes to new media outlets. There's an ongoing conversation whether the House of Commons authorities start issuing media passes to bloggers. That remains unresolved."

    Now I am all too aware of the limitation on desk space in the Press Gallery, having been involved in the very early planning stages of the refurbishment that eventually took place in summer 2007, but in the era of wireless broadband, bloggers hardly need a permanent desk in the Gallery in order to update their sites. This is essentially an argument about access, not desks.

    Ben's comment doesn't make it entirely clear whether it's the lobby or the Serjeant-at-Arms Office - or both - which is resisting the move. But as a blogger himself - and a very fine one in my view - I would hope that Mr Brogan is quietly making the case for reform.

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    Monday, September 08, 2008

    The state of the MSM blogosphere

    For those who are not lucky enough to be going to the conferences, the 2008 Guide to Political Blogging can be downloaded from the Total Politics site. Here's the piece I wrote on the state of the MSM blogosphere and how, to some extent, the gamekeepers of the "dead tree press" are starting to beat the poachers at their own game.

    ***

    A year ago, Iain Dale asked me to write a piece for the 2007 Guide entitled Journalist Bloggers: Gamekeepers Turned Poachers?. Broadly speaking, my conclusion was that, while blogging and journalism are clearly distinct disciplines, the dichotomy between the two was always something of a false opposition.

    The evidence pointed less to a Manichean divide between “professional” hacks writing for major media organisations and “amateur” bloggers writing from their bedrooms, more to a growing and irresistible convergence.

    If anything, that trend has accelerated over the past 12 months, as more and more “mainstream media” organisations have embraced blogging, with increasing degrees of success.

    The question that Iain might have asked me to answer this year is: Are the Gamekeepers starting to beat the Poachers at their own game? To an extent, the answer to that has to be yes.

    Last year, I identified two mainstream media political editors who, in my view, clearly “got” what blogging was all about and were using the medium as a “Politics Plus” channel to amplify their core political reporting. They were the Daily Mail’s Ben Brogan, and the BBC’s Nick Robinson.

    At the time I wrote that, they were the exception rather than the rule, but since then, all of the major national newspapers have launched political blogs, and some of them, notably The Times’ Red Box and the Telegraph’s Three Line Whip, have quickly become required reading.

    It still does not mean that all journalists are becoming bloggers and all bloggers are becoming journalists. It is more nuanced than that.

    Instead, what we are now finding is that, just as within the political blogosphere there were bloggers who excelled at journalism, so too within the MSM there are political journalists who excel at blogging – though not necessarily always the ones of greatest renown.

    James Forsyth of The Spectator is a case in point. He is not quite the force in print that his boss Fraser Nelson is, but online, on his home territory of the Speccie’s Coffee House group blog, he is invariably compelling reading.

    Similarly, Sam Coates of The Times does not possess the story-getting skills of his political editor Phil Webster nor the elegant writing talents of his colleague Francis Elliot. But the success of Red Box is nevertheless very much down to his ability to write in a more gossipy, satirical style.

    Over at Telegraph Towers, Rosa Prince is someone who has been much-mocked on account of the somewhat speculative nature of her stories – most recently the one about Alan Milburn being offered the Treasury in a David Miliband-led government.

    But while this sort of thing is a little out of places in the news columns of a supposedly august broadsheet, it works very well on a blog, which appropriately enough was where the Guardian’s main blogger, Andrew Sparrow, chose to follow-up the Milburn story.

    While the “MSM blogosphere” has been growing in size and stature, the independent blogosphere has appeared to stand relatively still. The only real newcomer of note in the past 12 months has been Liberal Conspiracy, Sunny Hundal’s attempt to corral the ‘sphere’s disparate liberal-left under a single banner.

    Elsewhere Phil Hendren – Dizzy – has carved out a niche for himself as an astute commentator on the interplay between politics and technology, and has had a couple of pieces published in The Times, but few of the rest of us, if we are honest, have enhanced either our reputations or our traffic.

    Thus it is that an elite has been perceptibly forming, comprising the so-called “Big Four” independent blogs – Iain Dale, Guido Fawkes, Conservative Home and Political Betting – and the leading MSM blogs - Coffee House, Red Box, Brogan, Robinson.

    Already, this elite is becoming self-perpetuating. While the MSM blogs link to very few “independent” blogs outside the “Big Four,” they invariably link to eachother, despite the long-standing and deep-seated commercial rivalries between their parent organisations.

    In a sense, it’s unsurprising that the new MSM blogs have stolen a march on the rest. They are better resourced, and because servicing the paper’s group blogs are now part of their authors’ roles, it follows that they have more time for blogging than those of us who are doing it as a hobby.

    Furthermore, because they are based at Westminster, as part of large newspaper lobby teams and an even larger corps of political hacks continually swapping gossip and information, they are also more likely to be better informed.

    But where in my view the MSM bloggers fall down is in their failure thus far to create the kind of online communities that the “Big Four” have specialised in. That “conversation” with readers, sometimes at an intensely personal level, is still, for me, the essence of what makes a blog different from a newspaper website.

    Had James Forsyth or Ben Brogan, for all their journalistic nous, written a long blog post about their godmother’s funeral, the reaction among most of their readers would have been bemusement. When Iain Dale did it, it generated scores of responses.

    The recent career of the former Daily Telegraph political diarist Jonathan Isaby provides as good a commentary as anything on the state of both the political blogosphere as a whole and the MSM blogosphere in particular.

    Earlier this summer, Isaby quit the Telegraph to co-edit the Tory uber-blog Conservative Home, lamenting the decreasing amount of time available for newspaper journalists operating in this multimedia world to carry out original research and source exclusive stories.

    In one sense, it illustrates the extent to which technological developments have altered the political reporter’s traditional role. In another, it is illustrative of a world in which leading bloggers like Iain Dale are writing columns for national newspapers and leading national political journalists like Isaby are editing blogs.

    I always thought the day political blogging really entered the mainstream would be when one of the big four blogs managed to obtain a lobby pass. If they haven’t yet given one to the new co-editor of Con Home, I have a feeling they soon will do.

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    Thursday, September 04, 2008

    The 51st Blog

    Iain Dale has today finally published the results of his annual blog popularity poll ahead of the publication of the full 2008 Guide to Political Blogging tomorrow.

    Many thanks for all those who voted for me, but as anticipated I have fallen some way down the list from 10th in 2006 and 18th last year to 51st this time.

    Finishing so tantalisingly close to the Top 50 has made me slightly regret not voting for myself, but I can have no real complaints.

    This blog has moved much more in the direction of becoming a personal diary over the past year, and although I knew all along that this would cost me traffic, it has been entirely deliberate on my part.

    In the longer-run, the blog is not in the business of becoming a money-making venture, nor a one-man instant punditry factory. It is, and can only ever be, no more than a reflection of whatever enthuses me enough to write about it.

    At one time, that was primarily politics. Nowadays it's much more a mixture of politics, music, telly, journalism, and whatever's going on in my home and family life.

    Ultimately, the blog will stand or fall on the quality of its writing, and in this regard I do have some plans for how the blog may develop over the next 12 months.

    But what it won't be doing is going back to providing near-instant commentary on breaking political news, as it once did. There are others who are now far better resourced to do that sort of thing - including a growing number of people in the MSM who are actually paid to do so.

    As to the rest of the list, I think the evident right-wing bias does bear out some of the fears expressed by the likes of Sunny Hundal and Tim Ireland that it would not be entirely representative, although to be fair to Iain Dale, he has never claimed it would be.

    Right-wing blogs predictably dominate. Of the Top 10, only Political Betting at No 5 could genuinely claim to be non-aligned, and even the two highest-placed media blogs, Coffee House (7) and Ben Brogan (10) are right-leaning. The highest left-of-centre blog, Tom Harris, comes in at 13.

    In addition several of the blogs up there are acquired tastes whose appeal does not generally spread beyond the right - for instance Burning Our Money, John Redwood, EU Referendum and Daniel Hannan, all of which make the Top 20.

    A scientifically balanced sample would surely have placed the indispensible Political Betting higher than No 5 and probably at least one or two left-of-centre blogs in the Top 10

    The thing that most interested me about the survey was the fact that of the left-of-centre blogs that did best, four were all newcomers - namely Tom Harris, Hopi Sen, Liberal Conspiracy and Sadie's Tavern.

    While they all headed straight into the Top 40, longer-established names such as Recess Monkey, Tom Watson, Labour Home, Bob Piper and myself all found ourselves dropping down the list - to say nothing of Rupa Huq, Kerron Cross and Mars Hill who dropped out of the Top 100 altogether.

    There must be something in that. People are clearly looking for something fresh from the left blogosphere, and this year at least, the older, more established blogs weren't able to provide that - a bit like the government really.

    Maybe next year we will display greater resilience and teach these arrivistes a thing or two.

    I was also surprised that some "big media" blogs didn't do better given the mainstream media's increasing attempts to appropriate the blogging medium over the past 12 months.

    Spectator Coffee House and Ben Brogan both deservedly make the Top 10, but the Telegraph's Three Line Whip places no higher than 19th, the BBC's Nick Robinson slumps from 8th to 28th, and The Times' excellent Red Box blog comes in at 98th, which is just plain silly.

    You can read my more detailed thoughts on the state of the MSM blogosphere in the Guide itself, published tomorrow.

    But without further ado, here is the full, colour-coded list of blogs that were rated better than this one.

    1. (2) Guido Fawkes
    2. (1) Iain Dale
    3. (4) Conservative Home
    4. (3) Dizzy Thinks
    5. (-) Political Betting
    6. (-) Devil's Kitchen
    7. (9) Spectator Coffee House
    8. (12) Burning our Money
    9. (42) John Redwood
    10. (14) Ben Brogan
    11. (20) EU Referendum
    12. (15) Tim Worstall
    13. (-) Tom Harris MP
    14. (13) Archbishop Cranmer
    15. (54) LibDem Voice
    16. (16) Mr Eugenides
    17. (-) Hopi Sen
    18. (85) Daniel Hannan MEP
    19. (-) Three Line Whip
    20. (70) Stumbling & Mumbling
    21. (35) Donal Blaney
    22. (128) Boulton & Co
    23. (-) Liberal Conspiracy
    24. (8) Nick Robinson
    25. (-) People's Republic of Mortimer
    26. (11) Recess Monkey
    27. (56) Adam Smith Institute
    28. (27) Comment Central
    29. (72) Luke Akehurst
    30. (47) Waendel Journal
    31. (38) LabourHome
    32. (30) Ministry of Truth
    33. (22) Tom Watson MP
    34. (33) Nadine Dorries
    35. (46) Dave's Part
    36. (-) Letters from a Tory
    37. (17) Norfolk Blogger
    38. (-) Shane Greer
    39. (-) Sadie's Tavern
    40. (45) Samizdata
    41. (32) Slugger O'Toole
    42. (111) A Very British Dude
    43. (21) Harry's Place
    44. (-) SNP Tactical Voting
    45. (61) Quaequam Blog
    46. (104) UK Polling Report
    47. (182) Socialist Unity
    48. (59) Daily Referendum
    49. (53) Liberal England
    50. (172) Lynne Featherstone MP


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    Monday, September 01, 2008

    The "Where were you when.....?" meme

    A week or so ago Bob Piper tagged me with the meme asking what were you doing when Princess Diana died, Thatcher resigned, the planes flew into the twin towers, Lineker scored, and Kennedy was assassinated.

    Long-standing readers of this blog will know where to find at least three of the answers, but here for the record are my responses, although I'm not going to tag anyone else as this one has been round the block a bit already.

    1. Diana's death.

    Visiting my mum's. "I'd gone there for the weekend to help her with the garden, but the news from Paris put paid to that. By 11am the following morning I was at my desk in the Commons helping my paper, the Newcastle Journal, put together its Diana coverage. I ended up writing a piece about how the marriage turned sour, though I'm not sure what qualified me, as political editor, to do that one."

    More HERE.

    2. 9/11

    In my old room in the Press Gallery (now the property of the Daily Mirror, I gather.) "We switched over to Sky News and watched as the plumes of smoke rose from the first tower, convinced we were watching the aftermath of a terrible accident. Then the second plane appeared. "Look, there's another one!" exclaimed a regional newspaper colleague. Almost as he said it, the other plane smashed into the second tower. For a moment, there was silence in the room, then someone said slowly "That was deliberate," and we all hit the phones to our head offices."

    More HERE.

    3. When Lineker Scored

    The Rifleman's Arms, Bridge Street, Belper. "Germany scored a freak goal, an Andy Brehme free-kick that struck Paul Parker and looped over Peter Shilton's head, and we began to resign ourselves to the loss of our improbable World Cup dream. And then...and then...in the 81st minute, Gary Lineker got hold of a long through-ball, held-off the German defence and squeezed the ball into the far corner. The pub went wild. More wild than any place I have ever been in my life."

    More HERE.

    4. Thatcher's resignation

    I was surprised to find I have never blogged on this, but the bizarre truth is that I was stuck on a train on my way to a job interview, so although I was the political reporter of the Derby Evening Telegraph at the time, I never actually covered the story for them! I remember two people getting on the train - possibly at Leicester - and saying that she had resigned. Unlike many lefties I felt no elation at her departure - I had wanted to see Michael Heseltine win as I thought it would mean much more enlightened government, but his chances disappeared the moment she quit.

    5. Kennedy's Assassination

    I was just over a year old, and don't remember it. I guess I must have been at our old house in Kenton, North London, where I spent the first eight years of my life.

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    Wednesday, August 13, 2008

    A quiet departure

    Autumn is meant to be the time for those, but Brockley Kate has chosen high summer to hang up her laptop. A shame, as she was one of the better writers in the 'sphere, but blogging should never become a chore, and if it's not fun any more, she's right to walk away.

    I actually voted for Kate in the Witanagemot Club Awards as the blogger I'd most like to have a pint with, solely on the strength of this post last October which revealed that we share a mutual passion for the Lakes.

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    Tuesday, August 05, 2008

    The blogger you would third-most like to have a pint with

    The first set of prizes in the political blogging awards season have been handed out courtesy of the Witanegemot Club, and I am pleased to say this blog was among the winners.

    I've never wanted the blog to be pigeonholed, so I was gratified as well as slightly amused to see it placed first in the "Best Centre Ground Blog" category (ahead of Mike Smithson's Political Betting) and second in the "Best Labour Party-supporting Blog" category (behind Bob Piper.)

    Best of all, though, was my equal third place in the "Blogger You Would Most Like to Share a Pint With" category, alongside Tim Worstall and behind Devil's Kitchen and Guido Fawkes.

    Cheers, guys! The Wadsworth 6Xs are on me.

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    Wednesday, July 23, 2008

    Vote for your Top 10 political blogs

    It's that time of the year again. Iain Dale is compiling his 2008/9 Guide to Political Blogging and is once again asking for your help in putting together his annual popularity poll.

    This blog was placed 10th in the 2006 poll and 18th last year. I would love to do as well again, but seriously don't expect to, as I have had considerably less time to spend on blogging over the past 12 months or so and the frequency (though hopefully not the quality) of postings has suffered as a result. Obviously I'm not going to stop anyone voting for me though - email your Top 10 to toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com.

    One or two well-known left bloggers are refusing to take part in the poll on the grounds that Iain Dale has consistently made a point of slagging off the left blogosphere, and also that by competing, we are feeding into Iain's image of himself as the "granddaddy of political blogging."

    Although I should declare an interest both as a columnist for Total Politics and an (unpaid) contributor to the Guide - I'll be writing about the state of the MSM blogosphere - I disagree on both counts.

    On the first point, refusing to take part in an election because a Tory blogger disses your blog is a bit like refusing to vote Labour because the Tory Party says they are shite. Unfortunately for those who would like to see the blogosphere as some sort of neutral platform for the exchange of ideas, political partisanship goes with the territory.

    Iain's claim that the entire left blogosphere is rubbish is, in any case, a banquet of bollocks and I don't know why he goes on making it, especially when it contradicts the complimentary things he has said about this and other centre-left blogs in the past. But opting out of the only blog popularity poll currently in town is not the eway to counter that wrong impression.

    Secondly, Iain is only the granddaddy of the blogosphere for two reasons - (1) Because Tim Worstall decided he didn't want to be any more, and (2) Because he is the only blogger who has the time and resources to compile the Guide. These aren't good enough reasons not to take part, in my view.

    So what of my nominations? There are four leftish blogs in my top 10, three that are centre-ground and three that are right-leaning - a fairly balanced list!

    1 Political Betting. Mike Smithson's one-man punditry factory is still the must-read among political blogs.

    2 Liberal England. Well-written, funny and wistful, it's about time Jonathan Calder (Lord Bonkers) achieved wider recognition.

    3 Benedict Brogan. One of only two newspaper lobby men (Sam Coates is the other) who really "gets" blogging and uses the medium to maximum effect.

    4 Liberal Conspiracy. The best attempt thus far to corral together the disparate voices of the left blogosphere - far more so than Comment is Free.

    5 Iain Dale's Diary. Still a right riveting read most days despite the (sometimes overdone) anti-Brown propaganda.

    6 Hopi Sen. The best new blog to emerge over the past year from Labour's uber-Blairite former North-East press officer.

    7 The Daily Pundit. First to predict David Davis's resignation - in 2006. What more can be said?

    8 Coffee House. Fraser Nelson usually gets the credit, but in my view James Forsyth is the real reason for this group blog's success.

    9 Rupa Huq. Didn't quite take the blogosphere by storm in the way some predicted, but still interesting and insightful.

    10 Skipper. Consistently sharp political analysis, though from an increasingly Blairite perspective, from the much underrated Dr Bill Jones.

    My list contains a couple of notable omissions in the shape of Dizzy Thinks and Bloggerheads. Both are still excellent blogs in my view, but they have spent too much time attacking eachother over the past year for my liking.

    I also left out Guido Fawkes, even though I visit his blog most days. It's still a must-read most of the time, but he has published too many nasty smears about Gordon Brown over the past 12 months to be in my Top 10, not least trying to prove that there was something corrupt in his close relationship with a think-tank set up in memory of his great friend and mentor John Smith, and repeatedly rehashing Mandelson's Gay Gordon smear that was discredited sometime in and around 1994.

    I think that's probably enough controversy for now...

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    Monday, July 14, 2008

    The Anglos

    It's that time of the year again - the blogging awards season. First up are the Anglos - better known as the Witanegemot Club Awards, my favourite set of awards as no-one takes the results terribly seriously. There is even a category for the blogger you would most like to go for a pint with.

    Cast your vote HERE.

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    Thursday, July 03, 2008

    Recherchez la Femme

    Forceful and Moderate was one of my very favourite blogs a couple of years back. It then went into abeyance while it's prime mover and creative driving force, Femme de Resistance, completed her Phd.

    Now at long last she's back, with a redesigned blog and a follow-up to my story about another recent comeback - that of ex-Tory MP Walter Sweeney.

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    Monday, June 23, 2008

    Total Politics goes live

    The Total Politics website is now live and my "Where are they now?" contribution can be found HERE.

    As previously mentioned, this is the first of a regular series focusing on shooting stars of the political firmament - those who enjoyed a brief fifteen minutes of fame or notoriety before returning to obscurity. In issue No 1, I focus on Walter Sweeney, a former Tory MP best known for a delightful story involving a crunch Commons vote, a 22-stone government whip, and a toilet.

    On the subject of Total Politics, I was interested to read this interview with the magazine's publisher, Iain Dale in yesterday's Observer, in particular this paragraph.

    "I think blogs as a phenomenon are on a plateau at the moment," he says. "Readership is growing but I don't see any great innovation. I see the mainstream media organisations embracing blogging and doing it quite well, eclipsing them in some areas. I'm really disappointed there have not been five or six other people that have built a mass readership. There are only four blogs [Dale's own, plus PoliticalBetting, ConservativeHome and Guido Fawkes] that have done that, and there's a huge gap between the four of us and the next 10."

    I don't for a minute doubt Iain's sincerity in saying this - he has often gone out of his way to promote other, smaller blogs that he thinks worthy of note, including this one - but it's a fact of economic life that once someone - or a group of people - establishes a market dominance, it becomes much harder for anyone else to break in.

    In a way, what has happened with UK political blogging is a bit like what has happened with UK supermarkets. There, too, you have a "big four" in Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's and Morrisons, with the smaller players a long way behind.

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    Thursday, May 01, 2008

    Big bloggers call it for Boris

    Right from the outset of the London Mayoral contest, I have had great difficulty believing in any other outcome than a victory for Ken Livingstone. To my mind, London is a Labour city, and despite his many personal foibles, Ken's overall political record as London Mayor is a strong one.

    Furthermore, he is up against a principal opponent in Boris Johnson who, for all his wit and charm, is regarded as a buffoon by many voters and whose track record of offending minorities hardly seems to fit him for the mayoral role.

    Yet, as someone who has followed this contest from a distinct distance, it's impossible to ignore the growing consensus among those bloggers who have followed it much more closely.

    Both Mike Smithson, of Political Betting and Guido Fawkes have already called the election for Boris, Mike arguing that the core Tory vote is much more solid for Johnson than the Labour vote for Livingstone.

    Smithson rarely if ever gets these things wrong, but admittedly Guido's record is mixed. He wrongly called the Labour deputy leadership election for Alan Johnson last year, but correctly called both Lib Dem leadership contests in 2006 and 2007.

    My head tells me they must both be right, but my heart still tells me they are wrong. We'll know the answer soon enough.

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    Tuesday, April 08, 2008

    A few lines on Politics Home

    As most with a passing interest in political bloggery will know by now, Politics Home launched this week with the aim of creating a "Bloomberg" for politics. The leading personalities involved on the editorial side are Nick Assinder, Andrew Rawnsley and Martin Bright who are all fine journos and good chaps to boot, so I wish them well.

    Meanwhile Freddie Sayers from the site has kindly emailed me with the results of their most recent Phi100 panel, an online focus group of cross-party MPs, senior political editors, commentators and campaign strategists.

    The panel were asked: "How much do the following issues in the private lives of politicians influence the view voters have on them?" The results are listed below, with the percentage who thought it did have a negative influence on voters' perceptions of them in brackets.

    1. Has a problem with alcohol (88.3% believe it has an influence)

    2. Claims above average amounts from the taxpayer for meals and travel (77.4%)

    3. Talks about green issues but is shown to use air travel much more than average (71.8%)

    4. Has left his wife for another woman (55.8%)

    5. Sends their children to private schools (51.1%)

    6. Used cocaine when they were at university (48.8%)

    7. Violates traffic laws (36.1%)

    Politics Home is drawing the headline conclusion from this that "Cocaine is near the bottom of the seven deadly political sins." Fair enough - but I wonder if this is an issue on which the Westminster cognoscenti are ever so slightly divorced from the public at large?

    For my part - and I'm speaking as a private individual here rather than attempting to second-guess the electorate - I would regard the use of cocaine at any stage of someone's life as leaving a very serious question mark over their fitness for public office.

    For one thing, it indicates a lack of respect for the law of the land, which however much we might disagree with it, is something we are called on to follow. For another, it indicates to me a quite staggering degree of emotional immaturity.

    Coke is bascially a drug used by social inadequates to maintain a self-confident facade and to make themselves "interesting." Of course most users end up talking complete bollocks but in a roomful of other cokeheads, that is unlikely to be noticed.

    So I think the PHI panel are wrong on this one - but that is not to say I don't think Politics Home is potentially a great site.

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    Thursday, April 03, 2008

    The politics of blog envy

    I am not going to take sides in the current willy waving contest serious and important debate about blog stats over at Devil's Kitchen - basically because I am not enough of an expert in these things to know whose definition of unique visitors is actually correct.

    But one thing I would like to say on the matter - and I have already said it on his blog - is that I am glad Tim Ireland has taken this opportunity to refute the oft-made accusation that his campaigns against Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes are driven by envy of their "success." They are not.

    I have had some dealings with Tim down the years and I am as convinced as I can be that, whether or not you agree with him, his motivation is the greater good of the British blogosphere rather than the greater glory of Tim Ireland.

    Mat Bowles, who himself ran one of the best medium-sized blogs before opting out of the stats race, has put it rather well on the DK thread and I can't improve on his summary.

    I have said before that the blogosphere owes Iain and Guido a great deal for "popularising" the medium and forcing not just the MSM but also the government to sit up and take notice of us. But it also owes Tim a great deal for demonstrating its potential power as a campaigning tool - witness this example from only last week.

    Oh, and for the record, my own willy is currently about a fifth of the size of Iain's (by Tim's conservative assessment) and around half the size of Tim's - but I'm not bothered about that any more than he is.

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    Thursday, March 13, 2008

    Battle of the bloggers

    Tonight's Question Time Extra on News 24 will see Tory blogfather Iain Dale going head to head with Labour Home's Alex Hilton, the man who once claimed that the raison d'etre of the Conservative Party was "lining up the entire British working class and buggering them one by one."

    Should be compulsive viewing.

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