What does the decade of Guido tell us about online political writing?

I started writing about politics online in 2008. At the time the "blogosphere" (as we decreasingly refer to it these days) was in the ascendency. There were serious pieces written and debates had about whether "blogs" would ultimately supplant the mainstream media*.

The ecology of the blogosphere at the time was already starting to take on the sort of "long tail" shape that has since become much more pronounced. There were a number of blogs that were highly prominent. Iain Dale was arguably the most famous of these. The erstwhile Tory parliamentary candidate and publisher had carved out a niche for himself with "Iain Dale's Diary" where he readably and prolifically held forth on his political views and sometimes other more frivolous topics such as his favourite music. Because Iain was (and is) so well connected, having been involved in Tory politics and more widely for years he was often able to get stories and information about breaking news before us mere mortals and hence was genuinely able to compete with major media outlets as well as set the agenda himself. Of course Iain has since gone on to bigger and better things hosting the drive time show on the now national LBC radio. He does still occasionally blog but nothing like he used to.

There were various prominent "self starter" online writers around this time that I used to enjoy reading such as Recess Monkey, Dizzy Thinks, Letters From A Tory, A Blog from the Backroom and others many of whom have either fallen by the wayside or update their blogs much less frequently than they used to.

Perhaps the most intriguing of the lot though back in 2008 was the website "Order Order" run by the at that point enigmatic Paul Staines. The site itself dealt in scandal and attacks which seemed largely indiscriminate. If you were a politician (or even an apologist for them in Guido's eyes) you were a target. Stylistically the pieces on the site were similar to opinion pieces in a tabloid newspaper. Think "The Sun Says" but slightly longer form and with red writing to add emphasis where necessary.

Guido was intriguing though because unlike most of his contemporaries he seemed able to regularly break stories. "Conspirators" were sometimes the source of these (continuing the Gunpowder Plot linked theme) but like Dale, Staines seemed to be very well connected.

I first came across Order Order following Staines' somewhat disastrous Newsnight appearance in March 2007 where Michael White got the better of him. It wasn't helped by the fact that Staines had insisted on being in shadow and not be referred to by his real name in order to protect his anonymity. Of course White revealed his real name almost immediately during the interview rendering the shadowing pointless.

But despite the car crash nature of this I wanted to know more and became a regular reader of Order Order.

I'll be honest, it's not my style. In fact it's almost as far away from my style as it's possible to be. There are smears, attacks, sarcasm (OK that is a bit like me), mocked up photos to illustrate points (very tabloid), nicknames for the most hated politicians and so on and so on.

In the end though it comes down to what you count most for online writing. Some favour well constructed arguments. Some value rigorous evidence. And while Order Order has its fair share of these, what Staines treasures above all else is viewing figures. And who is to say Staines is wrong in this? In 2008 his was right up there among the most read blogs in the country. In 2014 it is still right up there. He has been able to leverage these figures to ultimately get a column in a national newspaper (The Daily Star Sunday initially and now The Sun on Sunday). Very few bloggers can say that. He is also almost unique among political bloggers in the UK in that he has actually been able to earn a living from his online writing. In fact he has been able to employ several other writers and bring them into the Guido stable. Most notably former "Tory Bear" blogger Harry Cole who Staines once described in a comment on my own blog as "the unchallenged reigning playboy of the blogosphere".

I have met Paul Staines on a couple of occasions. We were on a British Computer Society panel in the run up to the 2010 election and together on a judging panel for some political awards following that same election and had a lunch together with a few others. I have also debated with him on the radio down the line a couple of times. He remains the only person to have turned me down to be a guest on my podcast by just saying he didn't think it was worth his time (which in some ways was commendably honest of him). All the other declines I have had have been much more polite than that. It made it clear to me that he can be very brusque and doesn't mind offending people. Indeed looking at the output of Order Order he obviously thrives on it.

He has a number of political scalps to his name. Most notably former Gordon Brown spinner Damian McBride following the whole "Red Rag" debacle in 2009. This episode demonstrated that Guido has real power and was not to be trifled with.

It would also be remiss of me not to point out that on many occasions Staines (and Cole) have very kindly linked to my work. There are some times when things I write about (usually civil liberties or drugs policy) accords with the libertarian Guido philosophy.

So that's a potted history from my perspective. Now Order Order is 10 years old. But where does that leave us with respect to the question posed in the title of this post? What does the decade of Guido tell us about online political writing?

Well I think one thing it tells us, as if we didn't need telling already is that tabloid newspapers do not exist by accident. When political writing began online the barriers to entry were (and still are) effectively zero. There was no need for the blogosphere to mirror what happened in the world of newspapers. And yet through many, many thousands of experiments in self-starter one-person-band blogs (at least in their initial form) we have seen the one that has risen to the top in terms of readers and income is the one that probably most closely resembles a tabloid**.

No matter how much people like me might argue that there is an audience out there for more nuanced and subtle forms of writing, it is clear that the most success and power has been bestowed on a blog that would probably be offended if either of those adjectives were widely applied to it. The truth is there is an audience out there for my sort of writing but it is nowhere near as big as the audience for a bit of good old fashioned attack journalism.

Perhaps the most important lesson to learn from Guido's success though is that you have to be prolific. Staines must have devoted a massive amount of his time to Order Order in the first few years. There were regular posts on most days (usually several). To be able to produce that much content that is interesting and attracts an audience is not easy. Iain Dale once referred to it as "feeding the beast" and he is right. Another way of putting it might be "you're only as good as your last piece and there needs to be another one along in a minute or you're dead".

See I'm not as snappy as these top bloggers am I?


As an addendum to this piece I wanted to point out one other thing. Every now and then, Paul Staines goes off piste and writes a longer form piece on Order Order which does go in depth in analysing issues. It is usually related to the financial markets or fiscal policy where he has particular expertise having worked in the City previously. They are often very readable and would not be out of place in The Economist or a similar publication. But I know from having discussed with him that they get many fewer viewings than his usual tabloid fayre hence he keeps them few and infrequent so as not to distort his brand too much.


* Of course as time has gone on the blogosphere has increasingly become subsumed into the mainstream with brands like The Guardian, The Telegraph and others hoovering up the best and the brightest bloggers.

**Indeed Staines has cited former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie as an important influence on him on more than one occasion.

Is anyone apart from Guido making money from blogging?

Some money. Not pictured: My hand

In a somewhat below-the-belt post on The Speccie yesterday Douglas Murray highlighted how Sunny Hundal (who is quitting full time writing for Liberal Conspiracy) was not making a living from blogging.

This has led me to ponder whether any independent blogging sites* are actually making enough money to support full-time people and be self-sustaining. Liberal Conspiracy wasn't. Left Foot Forward, LabourList and ConservativeHome all have full time staff but also have external backers. Lib Dem Voice is run by volunteers, none of whom draw a salary from it.

The more I think about it, the more I think the answer is none. Apart from Order Order the Guido Fawkes site. That does appear to be profitable enough to support full time staff. Although even there they have straddled the mainstream media by publishing a column initially in the Sunday Star and latterly in the Sun on Sunday. Also, it is worth noting that Guido very much goes down the tabloid sensationalist route (albeit punctuated by occasional deep level economic posts to show what Paul Staines is really capable of).

I know that one of the reasons Iain Dale stepped down from such heavy blogging a few years ago was because even at its peak it was not bringing in enough to sustain a living.

I've already highlighted previously how I have never made any money from my online writing despite now having been at it for 5 years and winning awards and acclaim.

So have I got this wrong? Is anyone other than Guido making money from blogging?


*I am not including sites like CiF, Coffee House, or any other magazine or newspaper blogs as they are not independent and I suspect are cross-subsidised from the main papers although I'll be happy for anyone from them to set me straight on this.

Has Guido got this #restore campaign all wrong? #retaintheban

The Guido Fawkes blog run by Paul Staines and Harry Cole has been pushing a campaign recently to try and get 100,000 signatures on a government e-petition for bringing back capital punishment for the murderers of children and on-duty police officers.

I am personally not in favour of this but others have written extensively about the arguments against and I am not going to focus on that today but instead on the approach that Guido Fawkes has taken.

Both Staines and Cole are very experienced media performers and campaigners, especially when it comes to new media. And there is no denying that they have stimulated a debate about the issue. But thanks to Lib Dem campaigner Martin Shapland there is a big fly in their ointment.

As I write the "Restore Capital Punishment" petition has 8,949 signatures. But another petition on the same site that Shapland introduced recently entitled "Petition to retain the ban on Capital Punishment" has 15,881 signatures. Also it is worth noting that the Shapland petition was introduced a while after the Guido backed one and hence has not had as much time to garner signatures.

It is true that there are other pro-death penalty petitions on the site which may be "splitting the vote" to an extent but there are also multiple anti-death penalty petitions too so effectively both votes are being split. But it would appear that the anti-death penalty supporters online are in the ascendancy.

We shouldn't be too surprised by this. Although there has been a long vaunted majority in favour of the death penalty amongst the public (although I have always felt this is somewhat overstated and once the debate is engaged with the liberal argument is there to be won) that majority is highest amongst older people and lower amongst younger people who are more likely to be active online. Also, as we have seen from previous surveys of things like Twitter there are lots of people with liberal views active on there, perhaps not in proportion to their make-up of the population.

Which brings me back to my main point. I think Guido may have got this one wrong by trying to use new media to push an illiberal measure like the death penalty. Although the initial petition has been a good springboard for provoking a debate, it is looking increasingly likely that online at least the anti-death penalty petition has more momentum behind it. If this continues to be the case then it could be dead in the water before any parliamentary debate even takes place because the government (who probably do not want this distraction) can point to the fact that the petition site is showing we should keep the status quo. And any complaint about this only focusing on the online population could be skewered because the only reason the subject is even being discussed is because of the original e-petition. Which is online. The existence of the more popular opposing petition is a huge spoiler.

The biggest spoiler of all would be if the Shapland petition could reach 100,000 signatures before any other one and especially the Guido one.

I've just signed it and if you are opposed to the reintroduction of the death penalty, you should too.

What impact will the Internet have on the next general election?

A week or so ago I was on a panel for an event with this title organised by Glasshouse Partnership and the BCS as part of its Savvy Citizens campaign.

The panel also included Elizabeth Sparrow President of the BCS, Jag Singh of Messagespace and former adviser to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Paul Staines author of the Guido Fawkes blog and Labour MP Derek Wyatt. The event was chaired by Michael Cross, a freelance journalist and regular contributor to The Guardian.

The event was very enjoyable and was structured such that the first half was spent responding to a number of questions that were sent to the panellists in advance regarding the use of the internet and social media with respect to politics in the past, present and the future. It was then opened up to the floor for questions.

Some brief highlights for me: I was interested to hear Paul's thoughts on how instant polling is starting to be used and its possible effects on election campaigns. Derek explained how he thinks that he is the first MP to have an app. Although he also thought that a regular weekly 7:00pm radio slot for the PM to "talk to the nation" would be a real ratings winner about which I am dubious! Elizabeth was able to provide the BCS view on the subject and thinks that mobile devices will become more and more integral in the future although she suggested that our innovative use of new technology is as important as the technology itself. Jag made some good contributions and was able to provide insight into how the internet and social media has been used to great effect in the US. As an aside, it was fascinating to realise through discussion with him beforehand that had Clinton's campaign to become the Democratic candidate and ultimately President have succeeded then Jag would likely have been a senior staffer in the White House now. You know, like Josh or CJ from off of The West Wing (that's how I imagined it in my mind anyway)!

There is a video of the entire event below:

Has Greg Stone paid too high a price?

Greg Stone has resigned as Lib Dem PPC for Newcastle East as a result of the fallout following some lewd comments he made during one of Guido's PMQs live chats a year or so ago. Amongst other comments were a reference to whether Hazel Blears was on Botox and asking whether she had had a stroke and describing a Labour MP as a "sour-faced bitch"

There was various coverage of the comments last month in the press (for example here) and there had been calls for Mr Stone to stand down.

So on the surface, a PPC makes some ill-advised comments in public that have offended people and as a result has stood down. Fair enough eh?

Except, except I feel a bit uneasy about this. I will try and articulate it here. Apologies if it seems a bit disjointed.

Before I start I should mention that I did meet Greg during Lib Dem conference last year and had a drink with him. I thought he came across as a nice bloke and he was good company for the hour or so I spent sitting at the same table as him.

As far as I know, Mr Stone has not made comments like this in his capacity as a councillor or as a candidate. He has apologised on numerous occasions and I suspect he will be much more careful in future.

Now I have been following politics long enough to understand that Greg's position had pretty much become untenable. His political opponents in Newcastle East had started to put out leaflets drawing attention to the comments. It was going to be very difficult for him to continue his campaign in that context and it is therefore not surprising that he has gone. I also am sure that members of the Lib Dems would have done the same had it been an opponent that had made these comments.

I want there to be a wide range of people in parliament. Indeed if you speak to people about the sort of MPs they want to see they will often say they want people who are ordinary. Like it or not, there are lots of people who enjoy engaging in lewd banter when they are amongst friends. I expect if you went into many of the pubs in the Newcastle East constituency you would hear the sort of things described above.

I suppose what I am saying is that I wish our politics was mature enough for people to be able to have the odd lapse like this showing that they are human like the rest of us and not be punished by effectively having their political career destroyed. Sadly that is not the case but we reap what we sow with our politics.

I know some people will think I am just saying this because he is a Lib Dem but I really am not and am on record as having defended members of other parties when they have made mistakes too (e.g. here).

Jacqui Smith may not get away with it after all...

A few months ago I lamented on here that despite what appeared to me to be the possibility of fraud having been committed by the then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith in relation to her second home claims, that the media and the authorities were basically going to let her get away with it.

Then more recently the police indicated that they were not going to investigate her. I always thought this was very suspect and the anecdotal evidence I have seen from neighbours etc. would suggest to me that her sister's home was not her main residence. Frankly it beggars belief that a box room in her sister's house could ever have been considered her primary residence when she had a proper house in Redditch.

Anyway, Guido announced today that he is donating £5,000 to fund for the Sunlight Centre for Open Politics which is gathering evidence for a private prosecution against Ms Smith. I support this action as I think this particular example needs to be tested in court properly as it seemed so blatant a contravention of the spirit and possibly the letter of the rules. I cannot afford to give anything like £5,000 but I will give a little bit to this and hopefully many others will so that they can get to the £100,000 they think they will need to launch this prosecution.

I am well aware that Guido helped set this centre up. He has been accused in the past of being partisan although he claims he is against all "sleazy" politicians and I therefore hope that it does not just focus on Labour but that they also look closely at some of the Tories who have been implicated in serious wrongdoing. Bill Wiggin for example would seem to be a prime candidate for an investigation of this nature also.

You can find out the ways to donate here.

Calls for constitutional change and electoral reform grow

Interesting piece in The Independent this morning where the great and the good give their views on what needs to happen now to repair the political system. Several of them are calling for electoral reform and all of them accept that there needs to be constitutional change.

It is also worthy of note that Paul Staines (Guido Fawkes) spends much of his contribution saying that he thinks that a strong link will be found between abuse of the expenses system and safe seats. He did link to my post on this yesterday in a post on his blog where he called for the voter to be the outside regulator.

Patrick Wintour reports in The Guardian today that many MPs and a number of cabinet ministers are pressing for full constitutional reform including potential electoral reform for the House of Commons. I can only hope that after many long years, this issue is now properly addressed. I feel that radical reform is now the only was that the political classes can show that they understand the depth of anger in the country.

"Gordon Brown resign" petition - numbers may go down as well as up!?

I have been keeping an eye on the "Gordon Brown resign" petition on the Number 10 petitions site today and I noticed something a bit odd. at around 15:30, the number was at 6,828 but half an hour later the number was at 6,825. Only 30 seconds or so after I saw the reduced number I had another look and it had then gone up to 6,916. I have the browser instances open separately although there are no timestamps for them.

Now I am not sure what this means. I cannot see a facility for signatories to remove their name. Is it possible that administrators are removing signatories from this? If so, for what reason? If they are removing names in the hope that they can reduce the size of this then they are playing a dangerous game as if that were to be the case it would definitely become extremely newsworthy.

I should make clear I do not know the cause of this anomaly and there may be an innocent explanation. It does seem odd though and I would be interested if anybody out there could shed any light on this.

I have also noticed some of the commenters on Guido's latest thread about this have also noticed the numbers going down at various points.

Guido is spot on about drugs

Great post from Guido today on politician's attitude to drugs. He is spot on with his view that the drug laws in this country are a mess and there is huge hypocrisy from our politicians.

Most of them simply refuse to engage with a sensible debate and instead fall back on appealing to emotion failing to grasp that the current system leaves our children exposed to a massive criminal network of dealers who cut the drugs with god knows what.

He also rightly identifies that drugs are a public health issue, not a criminal justice issue, a point that Transform have been making for many years.

I have posted a number of times on this issue. Here are links to some of them:

Sensible advice on drugs SCANDAL
Drug prohibition cost-effectiveness study published
Debased Debate
Ecstacy comments on Question Time
Jacqui Smith is the one trivialising this debate
Ecstacy and Horses
Michael Phelps is being made a Scapegoat

Where is Guido Fawkes?

At the time of writing, Guido's site has been down since first thing this morning.

This is an unfortunate day for him to be having site problems as he had tantalised yesterday evening us by posting that he would have more Smeargate revelations today. Hopefully he will be back up and running soon.

As an aside, I wonder if this problem could be linked with his recent switch from Blogger to Wordpress?

Is Labour now in meltdown?

There are two stories in tomorrow's papers that indicate that the Smeargate scandal is far from over.

Iain Dale has a post quoting a News of the World story that The Labour Party General Secretary Ray Collins and Gordon Brown's fixer Charlie Whelan were present at a meeting to set up the Reg Rag website which was planned to be the conduit for the smearing stories from the original scandal that Guido brokw last weekend.

Again, from Iain, and also Political Betting, the Sunday Times is reporting that Ed Balls was in charge of Downing Street's dirty tricks unit. This information has apparently come from an anonymous whistleblower.

And Guido has posted ominously (for the government) that he will have more information that he is labelling "Smeargate II" tomorrow.

I am starting to get the feeling that things are spiralling out of control for the government now. They have completely lost control of the agenda and are just firefighting. It must be devastating for a control freak such as Gordon Brown to find that extremely damaging headlines are being dripped slowly out like this and there is nothing he can do about it. However it is all his own fault as he created the culture in which these people operate.

Coupled with polls out tomorrow showing Tory leads of 17% and 19% respectively, tomorrow could be the worst day of Gordon Brown's political life.

Derek Draper should go - now

Blimey!

I've been away for the bank holiday weekend down in Devon and so have only just got to a computer. I only had intermittent coverage on my iPhone so have not been able to follow the blogs as closely as I mormally so. I didn't actually need to read the blogs however to see what has happened as it was the main headline on the BBC News yesterday and has been rumbling on today.

There's not much point in me going into detail about McBride's resignation. I don't know much about him but everything I have heard makes him sound like exactly the sort of person that we do not need in politics and I do not lament his passing.

However, when it comes to Derek Draper who was the recipient of the e-mails and co-conspirator in this sleazy episode, I do have some experience. He responded to a comment I left on LabourList when it first started up and either him or one of his cohorts also commented on a post I made a couple of weeks ago when I accused him of damaging the blogosphere.

After this weekend's revelations I now very strongly feel that he is not fit to run a website so closely associated with a major political party.

Draper has posted an entry today on LabourList entitled "Apologies and Regrets". The tone is moderately contrite but I am afraid there is still too much self justification and attempt to spin his way out of things.

I don't like to kick a man when he is down but there seems to be no indication that he is going to step down so here is a quick fisk:

Since the beginning of this year we have worked hard to build a Labour supporting presence online. 99.9% of that time was taken up by setting up LabourList and trying to build it into our version of ConservativeHome. I am proud of what we have achieved in those three months. But of course I regret the 0.1% of my time that I spent thinking about how we might set up a separate left wing “gossipy” site. We had been looking at the success of the right across the blogosphere and seen how effective their more scurrilous elements were. To be honest I think we were a bit dazzled by what they get up to.

But why Derek? Why have you been so dazzled by the sort of bile that the more scurrilous elements of the right in the blogosphere pour out? Surely a blog closely associated with the Labour Party should be arguing the case for the policies on their merits, not trying to smear opponents.

But in the end both myself and Damian McBride came to believe that such a site would be wrong. That is why when you look at LabourList tens of thousands of words have been posted since those emails were sent back in January and the site we had kicked around the idea of - Red Rag - remains completely empty. You can see where my energy and passion has been going.

But Damian did write and send those emails, I did respond hastily and stupidly and now, thanks - it appears - to someone hacking into my private emails, they are in the public domain. Damian has paid a heavy price for writing them but I have to stress one important point: without the hacking they would never ever have seen the light of day. They were destined for the trash can. But we should never really have considered the idea and I am sorry we did. We got ourselves drawn into the most negative part of the blogosphere when we should have been concentrating exclusively on the more positive aspects as a model for LabourList.

Indeed. Also, from what I have read I doubt you were hacked. E-mails are very easy to forward on and unless you completely trust everybody who could have seen them then I suggest your first instinct should be that you have a leaker.

So I am sorry. I am particularly sorry to the individuals mentioned in those juvenile emails, and especially sorry to Nadine Dorries, George and Frances Osborne and David and Samantha Cameron. I can understand why they – and others – may be sceptical but all I can do is absolutely promise that these stories were just daft ideas that never – and would never have - got off the drawing board.

So in those last three months we have had some successes and made some mistakes. The most obvious being this silly idea that the smears and slurs of the right-wing blogosphere could be challenged through setting up an alternative Labour supporting gossip website – whether it contained the infamous stories in Damian´s emails or more harmless tittle tattle.

LabourList has a lot of work to do to grow and support progressives online. I want to draw a line under this email affair and make it absolutely clear that we will be doing that by discussing issues, policies and campaigning. Dozens of people have posted and thousands of comments have been made, the site grows every day, and gets richer and deeper too. That is because LabourList is about ideas and not smears.

As I have posted before, LabourList seems to be used primarily as a way of diseminating Labour Party propaganda and latterly to execute Draper's blogwars which have so spectacularly backfired on him.

On that note, though, while I do think it is right that we hold our opponents accountable our tone has sometimes been wrong. On the specifics of Iain Dale I do think he should have condemned Carol Thatcher when she used the term Golliwog but I have never said he was a racist. From what I know – and hear of him – I don´t believe him to be prejudiced at all, and actually a rather decent guy, just wrong about that particular issue. If I ever suggested other than that I apologise to him too. It may also surprise you to hear me ackowledge that, from what I know and hear, Paul Staines aka Guido Fawkes is also not a racist, though we did, rightly I believe, criticize him for hosting racist comments on his site, alongside other offensive material.

Lots of self justification here.

Maybe this affair will encourage the whole blogosphere, right and left, to commit to a new start, where offensiveness and personal attacks are avoided and debate is elevated not dragged down into the gutter? Maybe this can be a turning point at which we all redouble our efforts to tap into the internet´s positive potential rather than allowing its more peurile aspects to come to the fore? But that won´t happen without many many more people getting involved and taking blogging out of its ghetto.

Maybe it will Derek, but I think that your aims can best be served by you withdrawing from the blogosphere. You came from nowhere late last year and have tried through various tactics to get well known in the blogosphere and to influence things. You have succeeded in that, but it has all blown up in your face and it is you that has dragged things down. In that context this paragraph is sanctimonious tosh. Hand the reins of LL over to someone who understands blogging and can do a proper job.

For those who have suppported LabourList and feel they have been let down, I apologise. I would encourage them – and others - to stay with us: read the site, get involved, make some comments and write some posts. Join the community and make it what you want it to be.

That was always the way to build Labour´s case on line not getting distracted by silly plans for tittle tattle and gossip. I did realize that in time, but should have done so even earlier.. However I really am proud of LabourList and what we are trying to achieve and I rededicate myself to that 100%.

No, it's too late now Derek. You are damaged goods and you need to step back.

For me, the worst aspect of this whole episode is the revelation that one of the intended smears was to suggest that George Osborne's wife was suffering from mental problems. Draper's response to this suggestion was to say that it was "Absolutely, totally brilliant". Derek Draper is a psychotherapist who had a nervous breakdown following the lobbygate scandal in the late 90s.

That he of all people should react to a suggestion regarding a plan to smear an innocent party as being mentally ill in this way tells me all I need to know about him. He hasn't changed and it is now clear to me that he is incapable of changing. He must step down from LabourList.

PS: I know I promised not to post about LabourList any more, but after this weekend I felt I had to! I will now redouble my efforts not to again.

UPDATE (06/05/2009): According to Iain Dale, Mr Draper is indeed now leaving Labourlist for pastures new. Not before time.

Smart move by Nick Clegg on second homes

Just read on LDV quoting a Sam Coates story in The Times that Nick Clegg is going to propose that the capital gains from second home sales revert to the public purse when the properties are sold. He also wants to make sure that they cannot claim at all for mortgage interest payments, only rent.

Whilst there will doubtless be practical complications, I think these are great ideas in principle and they chime with what I have said in the past about needing to make sure that MPs do not benefit from the capital gains as they do at the moment.

Clegg also wants an end to the ability to claim for things like flat screen TVs and furniture and only be able to claim for utilities and council tax.

As Guido suggests, MPs are likely to be horriried by these proposals but something has to be done to restore public trust and Nick Clegg's proposals are exactly the sort of radical reform that is needed to do this.

It will be interesting to see how Gordon Brown and David Cameron respond to this smart move by Clegg.

Fawkes vs Draper - but which one is best?

Only one way to find out...

FIIGHHTT!

On a more serious note, neither of them covered themselves in glory in that discussion. Draper was his usual hectoring aggressive self (and was even inconsistent at least twice contradicting himself). Staines did not do well either. That is the second time I have seen him being interviewed now (the first time being his infamous Newsnight appearance) and he does not come across well as an interviewee.

There was also too much blogocentric talk referring to people and things that only bloggers and Westminster insiders would understand. I doubt many non-blog involved people will be rushing to find out more about political blogging on the strength of this.

I did like it though when Neil shouted at Draper to "Shut up!". It's about time someone did!