A few points…

Roger Gale describes the Conway incident as a “witch hunt“. One has to wonder why the Standards and Privileges Committee would do such a thing if that were the case, since if Gale is to believed surely all MPs would be liable for the same treatment. Surely mutual interest would prevent such a witch hunt from ever happening? MPs don’t look like they are in the mood to make something out of nothing at the moment, particularly given the daily grind of “sleaze” churning out of the tabloid press on a daily basis. Plus, if Conway is being persecuted, why the apology? Why doesn’t he stand his ground?

Guido is somewhat more on the money by implying that Cameron is dithering here. We’ve had the admission of guilt from Conway; why does he still have the Tory whip?

Over at Iain Dale’s Diary, Iain makes the perfectly valid point that he is not about to rat on a friend. I sympathise - really I do. But given that Iain has always been very quick to point the finger on funding scandals himself - he not only wrote the book on Labour sleaze, he’s published two editions of it - I hope he will accept some responsibility for his friend’s downfall. The reason the outcry has been so great is that unlike most of the current crop of Labour sleaze stories (but like the Abrahams and cash for peerages incidents), this is a genuine scandal. By over emphasising these, Conway’s fate to some extent has been sealed. You can’t brag about your growing influence with one hand (which I don’t question), while denying you helped create the political weather for this with the other, Iain.

Notwithstanding the fact that I’ve no doubt occasionally crossed the line, I try my best on this blog not to get carried away by ’sleaze’ - not least of all because I happen to think the general Lib Dem attitude to our own recent funding scandal is a mite complacent. We should be wary of enjoying these too much because we end up creating impossible standards that no-one can live by. People like Wendy Alexander, Alan Johnson and yes, possibly even Peter Hain (haven’t made my mind up fully on that one - as cock ups go, this was a pretty extreme case), ought to be able to pay a fine and move on. The idea that ministerial careers should be destroyed for the misreporting of a few hundred quid is absurd.

As promised earlier, I’ve added a number of plug-ins to my site:

• creative commons license widget - cos I’ve been meaning to add it for ages
• Subscribe To Comments - because it’s so 2008.
• WP-PostRatings - as an experiment to see if anyone actually uses it.

Hmmm… doesn’t look much like an orgy, does it? In my defence I was going to add a couple more but I didn’t find anything I really liked.

Knock yourselves out!

One of the more annoying trends of the past few months has been the rise of the spamblog. I’m not sure if that is the correct term for them (although I notice at least one other person refer to them as such), but they are those weblogs, apparently entirely bot created which do nothing other than steal/reference other people’s blog posts in the hope of going up the Google ratings.

I don’t know if it is simply that this site has become more popular of late, but I’ve been bombarded with them recently. Where they get annoying is you end up finding copies of your own post (and others) littering search results (see homeophobia as an example).

Obviously I don’t approve any trackbacks I get from these, but anyone know the best way to scupper them in their tracks? Is there a way one can report them to search engines?

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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!