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.

House of Comments - 100th Episode Extravaganza!

Episode 100 of the House of Comments podcast "100th Episode Extravaganza" is out. This week Mark is joined by Emma and Nick as well as former House of Comments co-host from way back Stuart Sharpe and our first ever guest from back in 2009, LBC presenter Iain Dale to celebrate our 100th episode. Topics discussed this week are the Harriet Harman and Jack Dromey NCCL/PIE story, Labour's special conference (which Emma spoke at) and the move to One Member One Vote and also whether the Conservatives and Labour would be wise to rule out potential coalition in 2015 as a manifesto commitment.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here.

Other podcasting software e.g. for Android can be pointed here to subscribe.

You can download the mp3 for the latest episode directly from here.

Or you can listen to the embedded episode below here:

listen to ‘Episode 100 - 100th Episode Extravaganza’ on Audioboo

Any feedback welcomed in the comments below.


PS: A big thanks to Audioboo for hosting the podcast for us. We would also like to thank Kevin MacLeod from Incompetech.com for our theme music.

I agree with Iain on PR for local councils

If I haven't mentioned it before on here it's good to see Iain Dale blogging regularly again. With some of his recent posts he is starting to get close to the standard he maintained in his heyday.

Anyway he has a post today where he is complaining about his local council and their expenses. Here are a couple of snippets:

Tunbridge Wells is one of those councils whose political complexion has barely changed in 60 years. And it is unbelievably complacent. It fails to listen, its consultations are a joke and many of the councillors are fully paid up members of the Old Boys Network. There is a group of younger councillors who are trying to change things, but they are resisted at every turn by their older counterparts. This is the makeup of the council…

Conservatives 37
Liberal Democrats 5
Independent 2
Labour 2
UK Independence Party 2

....

I’ve never been in favour of PR for general elections, but I am persuadable for local council elections. We need to rid local government of these one party state fiefdoms, whether they are Conservative or Labour. They breed complacency and corruption. Council tax payers deserve better.

I of course disagree with Iain's comments about not wanting PR nationally but the fact he is willing to entertain it for local elections is interesting. I have lived under one party fiefdoms almost everywhere that I have lived since I left home at the age of 18 in 1992 (various places in Manchester and Liverpool were locked down Labour and since moving down south in 1997 most of where I have lived have been true blue Tory strongholds) so I know exactly how he feels.

But the effect is more pernicious still than just arrogant councils who are unresponsive to the needs and concerns of their electors because they know a donkey with the right coloured rosette will get in. It also affects how competitive the parties are for seats at a national level. When a party has no councillors and very little chance of them in a local area they often atrophy*. Having elected officials at council level is the lifeblood for parties.

I think there is a strong case for all of those who insist that we need to keep First Past the Post for national elections using the argument that seats are not really safe and can be won over time to support a proportional system for local elections. That way although I would still disagree with them about the national situation, they would be actively trying to do something to make some of those safer seats more competitive by allowing parties to get a foothold locally. And a nice side effect would be more accountable local politicians and an end to the one party fiefdoms that Iain and I agree are highly damaging to our localities.

*I recognise that it is not always the case that this happens and there are notable examples of where local parties have fought from nowhere to eventually get councillors and sometimes even take over the council but generally the rule applies that weak local parties stay weak. Tunbridge Wells is clearly an example of this having been Tory for over 60 years.

Iain Dale highlights the Lib Dem plight

Iain Dale wrote a piece for the Mail on Sunday yesterday entitled "Nothing to do with us, Guv - It's those wicked Tories!" in which he claims that some Lib Dems in government are essentially trying to have their cake and eat it by being in power but trying to shirk responsibility for the unpopular decisions.

His thesis runs thusly:

...too many (Lib Dems in government) seem to believe they can cherrypick the government decisions they can bring themselves to support. Their attitude to the coalition’s more unpopular policies seems to be “nothing to do with us, guv, it’s those wicked Tories.” Collective responsibility doesn’t work like that.

That’s why David Cameron was happy to accede to Nick Clegg’s request for a LibDem minister in almost every government department. He knew it would bind them in, with no get out of jail free card.

All political parties are coalitions within themselves. No politician can ever agree with 100% of what their own political party does. But the LibDems have taken wearing their hearts on their sleeves to new extremes as they try to salve their collective consciences. And some of their major figures, who showed so much promise in opposition have struggled with real power and real responsibility.

There is a big problem with that though. Accepting full collective responsibility for decisions that a Lib Dem government ruling alone would not have taken is essentially misrepresenting what the party is about and making them look a lot more right wing than they actually are.

This is a problem for the Tories in government too the other way round but less of a problem for them for two reasons. Firstly they have not had to make as many compromises as the Lib Dems as they have much greater parliamentary strength. And most importantly, secondly, compromising with the Lib Dems brings the Tories more onto the centre ground which is where David Cameron wants to pitch his tent anyway (like his political idol Tony Blair (or "The Master" as Cameroons refer to him) was so adept at doing) and which is to their electoral advantage. It is very much not to the Lib Dems electoral advantage to be seen as more right wing than they are.

Later in his piece, Iain seems to hit the nail on the head himself:

The problem for Nick Clegg is that it will be difficult for him to differentiate himself from the Conservatives at the next election.

That is the exact point I am making too! So Iain seems to recognise that the party needs to differentiate itself from the Tories somehow and yet castigates Lib Dems who try to maintain their distinctiveness. It is the classic dichotomy that minor coalition partners face.

We need to find a way to square the circle. There are no easy answers but the longer we are unable to, the harder it will be to convince the public that we can both govern responsibly and at the same time still stand for something distinctive.

Rebutting Iain Dale's STV criticisms

Iain Dale has popped his head above the parapet today and highlighted some of what he perceives as the problems with the Single Transferable Vote system. He also briefly touches upon AV and AV+.

I tried to leave a comment on his post but it got so long that the system rejected it! Instead I thought I'd interweave my thoughts on here with his. Iain's post is in italics and my responses are in bold:

Several commenters in the previous post have taken issue with my assertion that Proportional Representation, and most especially the STV system, weakens the constituency link - and this is the reason why I cannot support it. Let me explain.

The proponents of STV deny that STV weakens the constituency link. In their view, if you have bigger constituencies with 10 or 12 MPs you still get the constituency link because seats are awarded proportionate to the votes received. Well, in the sense that you have constituencies and MPs who represent them, the constituency link still remains. Sort of.

The trouble is, that in 3, 6, 8, 10 or 12 member constituencies no one would really know who their MP is, just in the same way that no one now knows who their MEP is. The second effect is that when they eventually find out who their MPs are, which of them do they contact with a constituency issue? The probability is that they will contact the MP representing the party which they voted for. Nothing wrong with that, you may say, but I think it is a good thing that current MPs represent ALL their constituents, not just those who put a cross against them on the ballot paper.

This point about STV "weakening" the constituency link is one that can be debated. It depends what you consider a good link between MPs and constituents. Having one MP per constituency is of course one way to do it but there are disadvantages to this way too, for example someone who is say viscerally opposed to Labour may have to deal with a Labour MP. It is also possible that you want your MP to represent your views about something to which they themselves are diametrically politically opposed to. Now in both of those cases it is possible under a single member system for the constituent to be represented in a way that satisfies them but I would argue that under a multi-member system they would have a better chance of being well represented. Not least because if one of their MPs did not do a good job they could try one of the others. Conservatives relish competition in most other areas. It seems slightly odd how opposed they are to that same competition when it comes to the political sphere.

One other minor point, most advocates of STV do not suggest seat sizes of more than 6 MPs. Between 4 and 6 is the optimal amount. I just raise this because you lead with an example of between 10 and 12 which is basically double what would be likely to happen and is therefore potentially a bit misleading.

Can we also dispel the myth that AV is in any way proportional. The Jenkins proposal of AV+ where you had additional members would be. But it would put a lot more power in the hands of the central party.

AV is indeed not proportional. I have heard a number of Tories using this as an argument against a "Yes" vote. However as you well know the Tories refused a vote on a proportional system. AV is a compromise which ensures a fairer result in each individual constituency and avoids the situation at the moment where nearly 2/3rds of all MPs (in the 2010 election) got in with less than 50% of the vote in their seat.

AV+ is a bit more proportional as you state but that was also not on the table from the Tories.

And of course under STV, the party has even more power and influence over candidate selection.

This final point is just plain wrong. There is no reason why under STV the central parties should have more control over who is selected. That is entirely down to the way the selections are made. They could be similar to now with local parties choosing their candidate(s). It could be instead through open primaries or other mechanisms that allow local people greater control over the candidates. Also, because each party is likely to be fielding multiple candidates to maximise their vote across the constituency there is a built in incentive to field a diverse range of candidates which should lead to more women and ethnic minority candidates standing.

No electoral system is perfect but most proponents of STV think that it is the least worst system available and that FPTP is just about the worst worst! AV is an improvement on the status quo. FPTP has all sorts of problems which I expect will be highlighted during the coming campaign.

UPDATE: It looks like my comment on Iain's post did get through after all (twice!) despite the error messages I received.

I am on Radio 5 Live after the leaders' debate tonight

I have been invited to be on Tony Livesey's Radio 5 Live show following the final pre-election leaders' debate tonight. I think the start time is a bit dependent on what time the football finishes but it should be from not long after the debate ends until 1:00am.

Will Straw and Iain Dale will also be on the show. It will hopefully be a good one!

Tune in if you can.

Press tries to smear Clegg

It is quite astonishing to look at the front pages of some of the press this morning. They are really going for Nick Clegg, especially the Telegraph and the Mail, both of which has very flimsy "stories" that really do not stand up to scrutiny and are blatant smear jobs not warranting even page 17 status let alone splashed across the front page. I'm not linking to them, you can find them if you wish. Tom Bradby, Nick Robinson and Jeremy Paxman all suggested last night that the Telegraph story is a smear or something and nothing.

It can only be because the press are running scared that the Lib Dems might actually do well at this election now. Every time the press runs smears like this, the stakes get a bit higher because the more it is clear that they are desperate to try and force the Lib Dem polling numbers down. If they are not successful in this endeavour then it will demonstrate that the power of the press has severely declined.

Obviously I hope that they are not successful, but I would be saying this even if they were going for Brown or Cameron. I want this election to be decided on issues. When there was talk of the Lib Dems coming under more scrutiny I welcomed this. I want to see our policies being debated properly and I think they stand up well against our opponents. This is not what the Mail or the Telegraph have done today. They are just hurling a tonne of crap at Clegg and hoping that some will stick.

Conservative blogger Iain Dale did a very good post earlier this morning which made clear what his view is on this sort of thing. Here's a snippet:

I don't want Nick Clegg to win. I don't want him to be Prime Minister. But he is not the devil incarnate. He's a nice guy, doing a fair job of leading his party. I do not agree with many of his policies. I think many of them are misguided. But I am happy to accept that he believes they will be best for the country. I am happy to debate them with him or any other LibDem and that's what politics and this election should be about. It should be about debating ideas, arguing about policy. It shouldn't be about this sudden urge to denigrate Nick Clegg as a person. It will backfire on those who promulgate these attacks because most people can see with their own eyes that he is a transparently decent individual.

Of course politicians should be scrutinised and questioned. But not like this

I hope Iain is right about this strategy backfiring for the press and fair play to him for posting this. I also hope that other bloggers from across the spectrum are willing to speak out against this sort of thing.

UPDATE: Caron has an excellent suggestion for how to deal with these press smears by trying to make sure they are hit in the pocket here.

I am on LBC's political panel this evening from 8pm

I will be on LBC from 8pm this evening as part of Petrie Hoskin's political panel. The other guests are Hopi Sen and Iain Dale. I wonder what the main topic will be...

You can listen to it on 97.3 if you're in or near London or via this link online if you aren't.

How can we increase the diversity of candidates?

Iain Dale has a post today entitled: "Why Don't the LibDems Select BME Candidates in Winnable Seats?". He makes the argument that the Conservatives have BME candidates in a number of winnable seats and estimates they will have between 11 and 16 BME MPs after the next election. He suggests there will be none on the Lib Dem benches.

In the comments, a number of people have taken him to task about his assumptions. LibCync points out that Operation Black Vote has identified 3 potentially winnable seats for the Lib Dems with BME candidates. He also points out that Nick Clegg has taken action to try and resolve this issue (see here and here).

Iain has rebutted this by suggesting that privately Lib Dem friends of his have expressed concern about the lack of BME representation and that the 3 seats identified are unlikely to be won.

I don't know if the seats cited will or will not be won by the Lib Dems but it is in the nature of the third party within our current electoral system to struggle to win seats. We have very few "safe" seats compared to the Tories who (certainly this year) will expect to have over 300 seats following the election. So comparing the raw numbers is pretty unfair. It strikes me that 16 BME candidates who have a shot at becoming an MP would be roughly 5% of the Parliamentary Conservative Party were they elected. 3 for the Lib Dems assuming we end up with roughly 60 seats again would also be 5% were they elected. Seems about the same to me and hardly a crisis situation.

But taking Iain directly up on his point about the chances of the 3 candidates OBV identified being quite low. That may be the case but it is not the Lib Dems fault that the electoral system is so stacked against it. We want to reform the electoral system to STV with multi-member constituencies. From the Electoral Reform Society, here is the second point from their website on advantages of STV:

With STV and multi-member constituencies, parties have a powerful electoral incentive to present a balanced team of candidates in order to maximise the number of higher preferences that would go to their sponsored candidates. This helps the advancement of women and ethnic-minority candidates, who are often overlooked in favour of a 'safer' looking candidate.

This is clearly an important issue and I am glad Iain is raising it. I wonder though if he might take another look at the benefits of electoral reform (that he has often been quick to dismiss in the past) and how it could help improve the chances of BME candidates for all parties.

UPDATE 14:45: Sunder Katwala has done a very detailed piece in response to both Iain and my posts here.

Iain Dale and Tracey Cheetham on House of Comments Podcast - Episode 15

The latest "House of Comments" podcast with myself and Stuart Sharpe of the Sharpe's Opinion political blog is now live. The website for the podcasts is here and the fifthteenth episode which we recorded on Tuesday 23rd Feb is available to download via this page here (raw mp3 file here if you prefer). You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here. Or you can listen to it right now here:

The format is to invite one or two other political bloggers each week and discuss a few of the stories that are making waves in the blogosphere.

This week we were joined by Labour activist Tracey Cheetham who blogs at "A View from the Public Gallery" and the leading Conservative blogger Iain Dale.

We discussed the accusations about Gordon Brown's alleged bullying, lobby passes for bloggers, the recent Sir Nicholas Winterton episode and whether the Conservative Party has modernised enough.

If you are a political blogger and would like to participate in the future, please drop me an e-mail here.

How diverse is opinion within the Conservatives?

Iain Dale made an interesting point on his "Seven Days Show" podcast on Tory Radio this week. In a discussion about religion and its place in politics he mentioned that the only thing we have in the UK that is close to a religion relating to politics is Euroscepticism in the Tory party. He said:

If you actually came out at a selection meeting and said that you believed in a federal (European) union you just wouldn't get selected.

I suspect he is right. In fact I suspect that a prospective Tory candidate wouldn't even have to go that far in order to scupper their chances of selection. I would have thought that even a moderately Europhile position would be enough to do the job in most cases.

I wonder though if this will ultimately be damaging to the Tory party. It is true to say that the vast majority of its parliamentary ranks in the Commons are steadfastly Eurosceptic. There are a few exceptions but they tend to be people who have been MPs for a long, long time, probably most famously Ken Clarke. However there must surely be aspiring politicians out there who instinctively feel like Tories but who harbour warm feelings towards Europe and the EU. Perhaps even (horror of horrors!) the European currency. These people will either have to keep very quiet about their true feelings on this issue or choose another party if they wish to progress their career.

Now some, perhaps many Tories may think this is a good thing. But I wonder if one of the most Eurosceptic Tories would agree with them.

Daniel Hannan today writes on his Telegraph blog that as well as ethnic and other forms of diversity within political parties there should also be ideological diversity within them. I agree with Daniel here. It is the sign of a confident and mature political party that it can tolerate differences of opinion within its ranks.

It would appear however that the subject of Europe is one that has polarised opinion within one of our largest political parties. It seems to be a legacy of Margaret Thatcher's latter years as PM and the bitter splits that came to the fore in the party in the 1990s. I cannot see the former diversity of opinion on this in the Conservative Party returning any time soon and I think that will ultimately be to the party's detriment.

The Top 20 Lib Dem Twitterers

Iain Dale did a list of the top 20 Labour and Conservative Twitterers this morning. I thought we Lib Dems deserved our own list for comparison. I went through the list of Twitter accounts listed on the "Tweets" page of the Lib Dem Blogs aggregator and pulled out the top 20 (in terms of followers).

Here we go:

1. Lib Dems 7,692

2. Nick Clegg 7,199

3. Jo Swinson 2,666

4. Vince Cable 2,399

5. Lynne Featherstone 2,226

6. Alan Belmore 2,030

7. Toran Shaw 1,607

8. Mark Pack 1,580

9. Lib Dem Voice 1,547

10. Phil Willis 1,359

11. Lembit Opik 1,301

12. Julia Goldsworthy 1,264

13. Susan Kramer 1,253

14. Jonathan Fryer 1,245

15. Will Howells 1,094

16. Andy Reeves 1,013

17. Graham Watson 985

18. Sandra Gidley 973

19. Mark Thompson 952

20. Norman Lamb 923

If you think you have been unjustly missed from this list please let me know and I will update it. If you aren't on the Lib Dem Blogs Twitter list then you won't be here so get yerself added!

As Mark Pack (or number 8 as he will henceforth be known) has already pointed out on Twitter, this is just purely based on follower numbers which is a debateable measure but I have stuck with the same method that Iain has used for comparative purposes.

UPDATE: Stephen Glenn has commented asking if he is in position 21 just outside the chart and indeed he is! This is becoming something of a meme with Stephen regularly just missing the cut in various charts so I thought I'd include a link to his twitter feed here to compensate for his rotten luck. He is definitely worth following!

What if Iain Dale's prediction was right?

Iain Dale has done a fun (and presumably very time consuming exercise) where he has gone through every individual seat in the country and made a prediction about who he thinks will win based on gut feel in each case. He says that the overall result surprised him:

Conservative 331

Labour 216

LibDem 69

Plaid Cymru 5

SNP 7

Green 1

Others 3

Northern Ireland 18*

Which would give the Conservatives an overall majority of just 12 seats.

Various posters on Political Betting question some of Iain's assumptions, the main one being that they think he has overestimated the number of Lib Dem seats, perhaps due to his own personal experience in North Norfolk against Norman Lamb in 2005.

Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to think through what an election result like this might mean for the parliament that ensued. I think there would be several main effects:

1) I do not think that David Cameron would go to the country again soon afterwards. Although a majority of 12 is very small, it is a majority. Technically he would be able to govern with no assistance needed from any other party (assuming his backbenchers hold the line!). It would be a very brave Prime Minister who gave that up in the hope of something better when it could instead be snatched away from him altogether. However...

2) Because he would have such a small majority he would have to listen to the views of his backbenchers much more keenly than the Labour government has needed to. It would be the sort of situation that I remember from the dying years of the Major government. Because there is quite a sharp divergence between some of the Conservative leadership's policies and its MPs (e.g. on climate change and Europe for example) this could start causing problems very quickly. I can imagine that Mr Cameron might even need the support of the Lib Dems and even Labour in order to get some of his measures through.

3) Related to point number 2, although the Lib Dems would only have increased slightly in number of seats, they would have greatly increased influence because of the arithmetic of the parliament. Cameron, knowing that he may need support from outside his own parliamentary ranks would likely take account of the views of the Lib Dems when drafting legislation.

4) Because some of the decisions that Cameron would have to take would be pretty unpopular (on the economy etc.) it is likely that any by-elections triggered in existing Conservative seats could easily be lost. It would only take 6 or 7 of these before his administration would become a minority one. That is perfectly possible - indeed it happened to John Major (although some of his loss of majority was due to defections which are much less likely).

5) This would make the subsequent general election in 2014 or 2015 all to play for. Because of this, I would expect that the Labour Party would not tear itself apart in opposition as the possibility of a return to power in 4 or 5 years time would be very real and this would focus their minds. One of the reasons that the Conservative Party was such a basket case from 1997 onwards is because they were so far from a return to power and they knew it.

6) Finally, I would suggest that whilst the Labour leader would not be Gordon Brown within a few months of the election, the Lib Dem leader would remain Nick Clegg right through the parliament. Having increased his party's share of seats, this would cement his (already pretty secure) position.

As it happens, I also think Iain is overstating the Lib Dem total (I think our vote share will remain about the same as 2005 but our seat number will slip slightly) but I actually think Labour will hold up better than he thinks too and as I stated in my 2010 predictions, Cameron will form a minority government.

This is all good speculative fun of which I expect much more as we move ever closer to the election.

Has David Cameron got it wrong on Lisbon and UKIP?

I've just been listening to Iain Dale on Simon Mayo's show discussing the Tory slip in the polls with Peter Riddell. Iain stated that he thinks the main reason why the Tory lead is now averaging in the low double digits rather than the high teens as per a couple of months ago is largely attributed to David Cameron's decision not to have a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

Now we have already established that I am no Mike Smithson, but I did decide a few weeks ago to have a small flutter at 10-1 that there would be some sort of referendum on Lisbon by the end of 2010. Of course now that is looking very, very unlikely but when I put the bet on, I tried to think if there was an upside if the bet did not come in. I thought there was and that it would be an entertaining spectator sport to watch the Tories tear themselves apart over this issue if Cameron dared not to have a referendum.

The thing is that although there were (and are) plenty of Tories who were deeply unhappy about Cameron's Lisbon decision, the media side of this was handled very well. Expectations were managed and although people like Daniel Hannan and Roger Helmer were mightily miffed, as a story it was all over within a few days and the narrative moved on. So you might think job done.

I don't think it's that simple though. For a start, Cameron's supposed way of making sure "matters do not rest there" are widely recognised as very insubstantial and some think they are almost meaningless. A law to ensure any further cessation of powers to Brussels is deemed by many to be too little too late and all the indications are that this and the other measures will be kicked into the long grass anyway.

So if I was a Eurosceptic Tory (and the term nowadays is almost a tautology) then the only party truly representing my views on Europe would be UKIP. I am sure there will be plenty of Tories who for the sake of putting in the most Eurosceptic of the main parties will still vote Conservative but I am sure there will be some who feel so strongly that they cannot stomach doing so and will vote UKIP, whatever the consequences. The question is how many.

I wonder if Cameron will eventually rue his decision on Lisbon. I know that he wants to be able to focus on more important and substantive issues if he becomes PM and in a way I admire him for facing the Eurosceptics down but in order to be in any position to focus on anything he actually has to be in power.

The risk is that by going against what many in his party feel so strongly about, he jeapordises his chances of ever actually being in that position.

Nigel Farage should have a Commons pass

On Friday, Iain Dale blogged about the fact that Nigel Farage, the outgoing leader of UKIP and MEP has been complaining that his Palace of Westminster pass has been removed. The Westminster authorities have decided to remove the privilege from all MEPs. They claim it is to "save resources" but there is a very strong suspicion that the move is to ensure that the two elected BNP MEPs cannot have passes.

Iain says:

I have to say I have never quite understood why MEPs had passes to the building in the first place, so I can't get as excited as Nigel Farage about this.

I disagree with Iain here and fully back Nigel Farage. I think Iain should be getting excited about this. The authorities have taken away a privilege from all MEPs apparently in order to ensure lack of access for two of them. Whether you like the EU or not it is surely right that we make it easy for our elected European legislators to liaise with our elected MPs? This measure will make that more difficult.

As I have said about the BNP before, when the debate was raging about whether Nick Griffin should be allowed on BBC Question Time, they have elected MEPs. From this, certain things flow in a democracy. The Westminster authorities may think they are doing the right thing but they are making a mistake.

How many more rules are they going to change to affect two specific MEPs but also cause problems for the remaining 70 who are not fascists?

PS: I have also noticed that quite a few of the comments on Iain's post seem to agree with me.

Has Bracknell sent a message about local candidates in primaries?

The result has just been announced of the Conservative Bracknell open primary/caucus and the winner is Dr Phillip Lee. I want to extend my congratulations to Dr Lee for his victory in this hard fought contest.

The contest has been very closely tracked in the blogosphere not least because of the presence in the shortlist of the leading Conservative blogger Iain Dale who came third. My commiserations to him.

What I wanted to focus on in this post though is what message Bracknell may be trying to send to the Conservatives and politicians in general about these primaries and the candidates they were offered. I should state that despite being a constituent I was not at the meeting (I am abroad at the moment) so I do not know how each of the candidates performed. However I was concerned right from the outset that there were no local candidates on the shortlist.

My friend Darren did some interviews with some of the candidates on Bracknell Blog and from Phillip's interview, as well as other information I have seen it struck me that although he did not live in the constituency, he was the "most local" of the candidates having been a GP just 10 miles outside the seat boundary and actually having some on-call patients within the constituency. Given all of this, my hypothesis was that if the "localness" of a candidate was a crucial element in the minds of the voters then Phillip would win. That has now come to pass.

Of course I do not know if this was the crucial element in his election, there may well be other reasons. I would however be surprised if it was not at least a factor and given how close the contest seems to have been (it went to 5 rounds) it could easily have been what made the difference. So, perhaps there is a lesson here for all parties but especially the Conservatives who have been most keen on this form of caucus/primary type election.

I think it will be worth looking at how other contests of this nature go in the future to see if a pattern of local (or "more local") candidates being selected is borne out. If it is then it will be food for thought for the party bosses making the decisions about how to select candidates. After all, if it becomes increasingly difficult to parachute favoured candidates into safe seats in the future I suspect they will not like that. At all...


PS: I should just make clear my view that I think contests of this nature would be unnecessary if our electoral system was changed to Single Transferable Vote with multi-member constituencies. That would give the entire electorate the chance to rank multiple candidates from different parties as part of the election itself.

New political podcast - House of Comments

Myself and Stuart Sharpe of the Sharpe's Opinion political blog have started a new series of political podcasts called "House of Comments". The website for the podcasts is here and the first episode which we recorded yesterday is now live and available to download via this page here (raw mp3 file here if you prefer). You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here.

The format is to invite one or two other political bloggers each week and discuss a few of the stories that are making waves in the blogosphere.

For the first one, Iain Dale of Iain Dale's Diary joined us and we discussed various issues including conference opinion polls and if they mean anything, Gordon Brown's eyesight and whether it is a valid topic for debate, The Taxpayers' Alliance and their director who does not pay UK tax and General Dannatt joining the Conservative party.

I would be interested to hear what people think about this venture and the first one. We hope to do them weekly (although we have to skip next week due to holidays) and intend to ask a variety of political bloggers from across the spectrum to participate in future episodes.

UPDATE: Stuart has blogged about the podcast here now as well. He has pointed out something I forgot to mention which is that originally we were also going to have a Labour blogger on the first one alongside Iain although they had to pull out at the last minute for health reasons.

Iain Dale and other Bracknell candidates should be judged on policies, not slurs

Bracknell Conservative primary candidate Iain Dale is the subject of a horrible, homophobic slur in the Daily Mail today. I am not going to link to the Mail or reproduce it here. You can read the details in a post that Iain has done today if you wish.

The thing I wanted to comment on though is Iain's fear that he expresses in his post a couple of times that by highlighting this he is damaging his chances in Bracknell. I really, really hope he is wrong about that.

I should make it clear that I am not supporting any particular Conservative's candidacy here in Bracknell and whoever is selected as candidate for the Conservative party I will be vigorously campaigning against them and for our excellent Lib Dem candidate Ray Earwicker.

However I hope that these slurs do not have an adverse effect on Iain's attempt to get selected. As with all the other candidates, people should judge them on their ability as a candidate and how they perform at the hustings here in Bracknell on the 17th October.

Frankly, I am gobsmacked that a newspaper in 2009 can get away with hateful smears like this and I hope that Iain's complaint (and I suspect his won't be the only one) to the Press Complaints Commission is upheld.

There is some other blogosphere reaction to this here and here.

Me saying words on the wireless. Sort of.

I seem to be making a habit these days of calling into Iain Dale's internet radio show. I was at it again this week.

I called in to pick up on a theme that Jonathan Shepherd of Tory Radio had started earlier on in the programme about MPs expenses. He felt that the MPs expenses thing has now gone far enough and MPs have become an easy target (he has blogged about it here). He felt that there are very few if any MPs who will try and defend their colleagues for fear that something will be found in their expenses.

I spoke in agreement with Jonathan's views but I went further and suggested that there will be something in the expense claims of all MPs that can be spun negatively. Whether it’s a paper clip, bath plug or in the case of Jo Swinson, nothing but a receipt that happened to have make up on it (which she never claimed for - it was on the same receipt as something else legitimate). That didn’t stop The Telegraph the Guardian and the BBC from smearing her.

The time has come for this to end now. the Tax Payer’s Alliance was going after someone recently because of claims for a training course for a member of staff. Are we now saying that MP’s staff should not be allowed to go on training courses? Are we trying to turn MPs into the worst employers in the country? Enough!

You can hear me on the podcast of the show here. I am on around the last 20 minutes.

Dale's Norwich North Scoop

Iain Dale has a bit of a scoop regarding the Norwich North selection.

Apparently Nick Clegg approached Martin Bell and also the editor of the Eastern Daily Press both of whom turned him down.

I was going post my thoughts on this but Nich Starling has said pretty much what I was going to.

I will just add that I seem to recall 18 months ago that there were lots of people approached about the Conservative London Mayor candidate position before they finally accepted Boris as the candidate. It is by no means unusual during a high profile election (like any by-election) for parties to try and raise their profile by going for a well known national or local figure.

I am sure the Tories will try and use this against April Pond but I am really not sure there is much mileage in this story.