This blog was started in May 2005 and for a few years was the main outlet for my political writing. I had spent nine years working in the House of Commons as a lobby correspondent from 1995 to 2004 and the blog really began as a way of keeping in touch with what was happening politically at a time when the main focus of my day-to-day work lay elsewhere.
As the new phenomenon of political blogging took hold in the mid-noughties, it seemed for a time to capture the zeitgeist. The blog was named in the Top 50 Political Blogs in the country in Iain Dale's Guide for the first three years of its existence, but I don't know where it came in the fourth or in subsequent years, partly because by then I had stopped caring about lists, league-tables and visitor-numbers.
The main focus of the blog was national politics with a slight emphasis on Labour Party matters, but it also regularly included stuff about other enthusiasms of mine such as football, journalism, history, music and Christianity.
In latter years the level of blogging inevitably declined as my main energies became more and more absorbed by my day job as editor of the journalism website HoldtheFrontPage, but it continued to be the online presence for my weekly column in The Journal, Newcastle until this finally came to an end after 18 years in the autumn of 2015.
The blog has now been dormant for some time and I don't know whether I will ever add to it in future, but it will remain online as an archive of my work during the decade after I left the Lobby.
While some posts have probably not stood the test of time, it does, I hope, provide something of a snapshot of the politics of the era - the demise of late-era Blair, the misplaced optimism - among Labour supporters, at least - that surrounded Gordon Brown's accession to the premiership, and David Cameron's attempts to refashion the Conservatives as a party of government during their wilderness years.
What they used to say about the Paul Linford blog....
"Always the place to come for informed, and rarely partisan, commentary."
Toque
"Like drinking a rather fine wine."
Iain Dale
"The best blog for Labour matters."
Mike Smithson
