I’ve just been reading the two interviews that Iain Dale has just flagged up about his new Politico magazine. It’s an interesting business model - effectively The House Magazine with bite.

The House Magazine has to be one of the most interminable publications going. Ostensibly a way of hoovering up lobby cash in the form of advertising they rarely bother to make their content interesting at all. I was particularly outraged earlier this year at work to get a phonecall from one of its sister publications offering to “sell” us space for an article on one of our campaigns which they had got a government minister to write an article criticising. They were effectively blackmailing a small NGO and if we didn’t happen to be both better at communicating with MPs directly than them and keenly aware of that fact, we might have fallen for it (we won the campaign).

I don’t know any MPs who admit to avidly reading the House beyond the merest of occasional flickings through - God knows they shouldn’t have the time. But a slimmer, easier read might be more of a likely prospect.

The thing that I’m most keenly aware of with blogging is that although very few people read websites such as this, it tends to be political obsessives who, relatively speaking and with plenty of exceptions, are relatively high up the greasy poll compared with the average punter. It’s one of the reasons I can only laugh when people decide to lecture me about making this website more accessible “to the voter”. I don’t have any obligation to reach out to the voter and it isn’t my job to. Even Iain’s website with its 10x bigger readership is consumed by comparatively few “normal” people. With all due respect to the people out there who do indeed strive to use their blogs as a communications tool with their community (and I’m not saying that’s a wasted exercise as local communities have movers and shakers as much we have at a national level), blogging with an overt focus on trying to appeal to the average voter is doomed to failure.

But talking to the “right” people can be very effective indeed. If that’s Iain’s pitch, I can see him selling a lot of advertising space at the expense of Dod’s. Of course, that’s when the tricky part starts. Iain is very quick to emphasise that the magazine will be cross-party, but what will he be doing to ensure that the advertising tail doesn’t end up wagging the dog? If you don’t have a six-figure lobbying budget you don’t exist as far as Dod’s is concerned. One of the things I’ve liked most about 18DS is that it opened the door to a much wider range of voices. Will The Politico have a similar philosophy?

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A few hours ago, I started what I thought would be a pretty straightforward upgrade of this website’s software. Big mistake. Now, 7 hours later, I seem to be back again.

Apologies for the disappearance. Everything seems to be working again, at least at the punter’s end of things. Let me know if you notice anything… quirky.

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Good grief - it’s all memes this time of year!

Well, I’ve been tagged by Alix Mortimer for the Crazy 8 meme, and so I’ll have a go:

8 things I am passionate about:

Land value taxation
Intergenerational equity
Secularism
Electoral reform (STV to be precise - god I’m a cliché)
Human rights
2000AD
Science
Boardgames

8 things I want to do before I die:

Finish PartyWatch
Beat Julian at Catan
Go freelance
Own a comic shop
Vote for and be part of the campaign that leads to a Lib Dem plurality government
Be an elected member of the second chamber of Parliament (no Commons for me!)
Read my own obituary
Visit New Zealand in an environmentally friendly way

8 things I say often:

Just fucking Google it!
I’ve got wood for sheep (f’narr!)
It was the cat
What would Judge Dredd do?
Fucking Moby
It’s all gravy
Cool
Yes (I say this too often in fact)

8 books I’ve read recently or am still reading:

The Possibility of Progress by Mark Braund
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling
Thrill-power Overload by David Bishop
The Nikolai Dante Omnibus by David Bishop (which I do NOT recommend)
Reinventing the State by Brack, Grayson and Howard (eds)
Location Matters by Tony Vickers
Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files by John Wagner et al
1984 by George Orwell (which one of these days I will get round to finishing I promise!)

8 songs I could listen to over and over and do:

The entirety of Vespertine and Homogenic by Björk (which is more than 8 tracks)

8 things that attract me to my best friends:

Geekiness
Humanity
Intellect
Liberalism
A sense of the ridiculous
Passion
Pragmatism
Scepticism

8 people I think should do Crazy 8s:

Antony Hook
Amanda Ryan
Alex Runswick
Nick Barlow
Richard Huzzey
Linda Jack
Alex Wilcock
Will Howells

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Gavin Whenman has tagged me for this desktop meme, so given that I am currently trying to encourage people to take part in a meme of my own, I have complied.

Bloody embarrassing. I feel like I’m showing people a picture of me in my underwear. All those scraggy files filling the things up.

Anyway, I tag:

• Alix Mortimer
• Paul Walter
• Jack Fairhall
• Pink Dog
• Don Liberali

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Pravdale writes:

LibDem Voice should have been in its element today. But it hasn’t posted anything since the result 2.39pm and a Clegg Youtube video. Aren’t our yellow friends happy? Are they all getting hammered down the pub? Where’s the analysis, where’s the agenda for the future? This is why ConservativeHome is still streets ahead of its competition.

I love the way he talks about the idea of people celebrating in the pub (actually Planet Hollywood I understand) like it is a bad thing and a far worse use of time than blogging (and yes, I do appreciate the irony of sitting at home typing this). This perfectly illustrates why the average member of the Conservative Party might as well come from Mars as far as most normal people are concerned. What a strange little world they live in!

It also profoundly misunderstands the nature of Lib Dem blogging. Unlike the Tories, we don’t all hover around our hive hoping that Queen Montgomerie might deign to give us some royal jelly. There’s plenty of analysis to be found on Lib Dem blogs if you actually care to look. Unlike the Tory blogosphere, the hub is not the be-all and end-all of our web-presence.

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Although I fear that I may be in for a Rigellian Hotshot as a result, it is somewhat amusing to note that if you type Quaequam Blag into Google, the search engine comes up with the helpful suggestion “Do you mean Quaequam Blog?” It doesn’t work the other way.

Well, it made me chuckle anyway.

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I’ve just got back from appearing on what it turns out was the last ever Blogger TV. 18 Doughty Street is, well, the best way I can think of putting it is that it is about to enter a chrysalis from which it will spend the next couple of months changing into something else. Whether it emerges into a beautiful butterfly or a moth remains to be seen.

In all seriousness, I’m pleased for them. It certainly does appear that this is a move forward. Their studios are to move to Westminster, they’re planning to step up the news content and concentrate more on the on demand side and less on the live side. All of these moves seem sensible - I for one have never watched it live but will frequently dip into the on demand service.

The channel itself has changed significantly over the past year. 12 months ago it was all about attack ads and most of their presenters were so embedded within the Conservative Party that they might as well have been called Thatcher. But I’ve been very conscious of the fact that over the past few months since I’ve been going on (which thinking about it has been pretty much a year) the times when I’ve been outnumbered 4-to-1 by Tories has become much less the norm. There has been a self-conscious and sincere attempt to bring it out of the Tory TV image it had to start with. Equally self-conscious and sincere has been the attempt to bring new political voices to the force - not just bloggers - and to talk about political issues at a level of depth that you simply don’t find on mainstream television.

My personal highlight? Going on the Doughty News Hour with Donal Blaney to discuss the Human Rights Act. It’s up to others to judge who won that particular fight, but I certainly enjoyed every minute of it.

My personal low point? Erm, possibly tonight, where I totally over-stretched discussing the Lib Dem leadership election and exploring my own views on air rather than consolidating my position with two Conservative commentators beside me itching to tear my argument to shreds. In short, doing exactly what I was bemoaning about Nick Clegg doing on GMTV this Sunday - live television is not the place to navel gaze! I blame the pork stew I had at the Duke of Cornwall in Islington just before. Never do Doughty Street on a full stomach; you need to be hungry!

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Tories simply adore Nich Starling, they like to remind us. He’s apparently the only Lib Dem blogger who tells it like it is, and gets snubbed for his troubles.

Personally speaking? While I occasionally find myself agreeing with him, I find he tends to be ill-informed and reactionary. Different strokes for different folks I guess.

But I can’t allow this to pass. This evening, following on from a post by Iain Dale, he has decided to have a pop at the Lib Dem’s gender balance rules for selecting Lib Dem Euro-candidates:

The Lib Dems have an odd system for selecting candidates for European elections. For the uninitiated this means that you are forced to vote as your second preference for a female candidate if your first preference is for a male (and vice versa). This means that you might have two favourite male candidates, but one of them has to be in third place because you have to vote for a woman in second place (and again vice versa).

So this mean that in the Eastern Region in the Euro Elections you had to vote for Linda Jack (who I think would be a very good MEP), even if you didn’t want to because she was, apparently (don’t ask me, I never received a voting paper) the only woman on the list.

Sounds dreadful doesn’t it? And indeed it would be, were it not for the fact that it is a load of dingos’ kidneys.

The fact is, you can vote for candidates in whatever order you like. If your first ten preferences are all men, you can number them all, one through to ten. It’s really not hard.

Just so there can be now doubt, the manifesto booklet has printed in large, friendly letters:

You may vote for the candidates in any order you wish.

What there is is a rule that ensures that a third of the selected candidates overall, and one in three of the top three, must be a man and a woman respectively.

Now it is entirely possible that a candidate like Linda Jack, being the only woman, might end up getting placed in the top three despite not doing any work. That is obviously unfortunate. However, in Linda’s case, the reason she came second in the Eastern Region was that she got elected to second place fair and square. You can read the summary here, showing that she got the second largest number of first preference votes, and you can read the detailed results here, showing her getting elected to the top two places.

Why did Linda do so well despite apparently doing much work for it? I would guess because she is relatively high profile and was the only woman. A lot of people on these list selections tend to positively discriminate themselves out of habit.

In fact, while it would have been used if female candidates did particularly badly, the one third rule wasn’t actually applied on any Euro-list in England. Indeed, it is only rarely applied in any internal elections. See Colin Rosenstiel’s website for details.

Now, we could argue that the gender balance rule should be removed because it isn’t necessary, but to claim that it has distorted the results when it hasn’t actually been used is batshit crazy talk.

Don’t get me wrong. There are serious problems with our existing Euro-selection rules. They are similar problems to the ones with the GLA candidate rules that I wrote about earlier in the year.

The rules make it almost impossible for candidates to campaign. This year, candidates were told they couldn’t even get supporters to join Facebook groups as that was deemed to be against the rules (why, when no-one joins a Facebook group unless they want to?). Linda may brag about the fact that she didn’t do any campaigning but she would barely have been allowed to do any if she’d wanted to. Living in a relatively membership-free part of London, the only evidence of any campaigning I received was a smattering of emails. I didn’t get a single person telephone me or deliver a leaflet, and I wasn’t able to attend the one hustings that the London region ran.

The severe curtailment of campaigning disproportionately benefits the incumbents who of course are allowed to communicate with the selectorate regularly throughout the rest of their term of office at the taxpayer’s expense.

The fact that most of the incumbents appeared to get anything between 70% and 90% of the first preference votes (London appeared to be the closest we got to a contest) suggests that for them this wasn’t really a selection at all, but a coronation. The fact that these are selections for what amount to closed lists ought to compel the party to be more rigourous, not less. Reviewing the gender balance rules is just about the last thing we should be doing.

And as for the non-arrival of postal votes, Nich appears to be the only person in the country unaware that we had a postal strike during the selection. Whatever the rights and wrongs with going ahead with the ballot under such circumstances, it is a bit rich to imply we are going to have the same experience with the leadership election. And it should be pointed out that overall turnout was up compared to the last Euro-selections. Not exactly a disaster then.

Keep telling your Tory fans what they want to hear Nich, but I hope you won’t mind if I continue to issue the odd correction.

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Oh dear, and he was doing so well.

Linda Jack and Charlotte Gore have condemned Chris Huhne’s campaign for publishing an endorsement by Chris Clarke which contains a blatant attack on Nick Clegg, branding him a Tory (unless there is a third candidate of whom I was previously unaware). It’s negative. It’s untrue.

Up until now I’ve not been that fussed about the level of yah-boo in this contest. A lot of Chris’ attempts to define himself have been leapt upon by his opponents as implicit attacks on Nick Clegg. I don’t think that is fair, and having spoken to members of his campaign team I’m very conscious of how keen (at least some of them) are to make this a fair fight.

But as Charlotte says, this is crossing a line. It has handed Chris’ opponents to take the gloves off themselves. He ought to take that quote down immediately, and not use Chris Clarke on any of his subsequent publicity materials.

UPDATE: The offending quote has been taken down. I still think the damage has been done and that the whole post should be taken down as a symbolic gesture, but at least it suggests they’re listening. Power of the blog, eh?

UPDATE 2: Another comment has now been added acknowledging that the article has been edited and that Anna Werrin is taking responsibility, which is much better and will hopefully defuse the situation. As Sam writes below, it does seem to have been cock up rather than conspiracy (although as someone who has chronicled Team Clegg’s various cock ups over the weeks, I have to say such things shouldn’t be treated too lightly).

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This evening I attended the launch party of the Liberal Conspiracy, the latest brainchild of Sunny Hundal of Pickled Politics fame. Sadly, they didn’t supply us with sparklers or have any of those rubbishy indoor fireworks you used to be inflicted with at children’s parties, but a fun time seemed to be had by all.

As far as I can tell, I was the only Lib Dem there; to what degree I was the only Lib Dem who attended or the only Lib Dem who was invited was not clear, although I understand that a lot of people were at the Hackney Empire.

Sunny’s ambition is to produce nothing less than the hub of the liberal-left. First impression? It includes a lot of people I like and respect, but seems to lean more towards the left than the liberal, and that this is reflected by their ideals as well.

For example, the FAQ states:

You can join in as long as you somewhat share our broad goals and aims (social justice, equality, eradicating poverty etc.)

Where’s the emphasis on liberty? And:

The Labour party may represent the best vehicle for our political goals as they are in power, but our allegiance is towards liberal-left policies and ideas than specific parties.

Sure it may, but it may not. The inference I read in that statement is that the Labour party does represent the best vehicle for the liberal-left. From what I’ve seen so far, the left tail is very much wagging the liberal dog; indeed, their definition of liberalism doesn’t appear to get much more sophisticated that the Nick Cohen-esque critique of it meaning little more than moderate and middle class. Not so much a political philosophy as a belief in the importance of being nice.

The thing is, that’s almost the same definition of liberalism that I’m pretty certain David Cameron is thinking of when he calls himself a liberal conservative.

As for me, I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently and am reconciled to the fact that I am leftwing. I’ve been resistant to this, partly because it gets ingrained into you during your Liberal Democrat indoctrination that the party defies such lazy characterisation. At my first LDYS conference, Simon Hughes went on about how the party was “not left, not right, but forward!” I think I’ve heard him make the same speech at least once a year ever since.

Ultimately, equality is a leftwing concept and I believe in equality. As we’ve seen on this blog, it isn’t a concept that is without controversy within the Lib Dems. I plan to be returning to it soon following Andy Mayor’s laying down of the gauntlet this weekend (I have to say that I find it ironic being accused of being a paid up member of the “Church” of Leftology from someone who is demonstrably a member of the long dead cult of Manichaeism^*, but that’s par for the course I suppose).

But even someone who is as unforgiveably leftwing in Andy’s eyes as myself believes that in the final analysis equality must always be subordinate to liberty. I wonder if the Liberal Conspirators feel the same way? Is it, in short, really liberalism - left or otherwise - that they really want?

I’m hopeful that they do. Sunny has showed himself to be on the side of liberalism time and again in recent years. If they plan to make progress, the robustness of liberalism will beat the mushiness of moderatism hands down, and we shouldn’t read too much into an FAQ on day one of a project. Lib Dems (of a liberal-left persuasion of course) could do worse than to help them hone themselves, and we know a thing or two about campaigning as well.

^* I’m in despair at Lib Dems at the moment who seem determined to dumb down. The response on Lib Dem Voice to Chris Huhne’s interview on GMtv was to crow about his use of the word Gadarene. Many of his sternest detractors were Oxbridge graduate public schoolboys for fuck’s sake.

If you watched that interview unsuspectingly on the telly, I doubt you would even be aware of Huhne making a Biblical reference. I may have my criticisms of Huhne’s campaign and ability to communicate, and I know that to an extent this is Clegg-heads playing games but is it really so outrageous for party leaders to occasionally let it slip that they are rather more widely read than Janet and John?

Plus, nobody laughed at my bacon joke which was frankly fantastic. Philistines^**.

^** Presumably in Clegg-head Wonderland, that is too elitist a reference as well.

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