It may have passed many of you by, and gone largely unnoticed by the majority of the British public, but two Tory bloggers have announced that they are no longer carrying on with their blogging. It’s a move that has drawn considerable comment (online) and raised the question of whether the Tory part of the blogosphere is ‘imploding’.
The most significant – and longer established – of these is Iain Dale, who has decided that blogging is the thing to give in the midst of a busy life. His publishing company has been behind some high profile political books recently, including David Laws’ account of “Five Days in May”, and Mr. Dale has moved into 5 nights a week radio broadcasting on LBC. He has made the transition from new to mainstream media, and decided that mainstream media is where it’s at. He’s not wrong. Whilst his own blog was widely read – one of the few that could claim this – and probably (though unquanitifably) carried some influence amongst Tory activists and big cheeses, blogging still doesn’t make public conversations with the predictablility and regularity of mainstream media. Mr. Dale influences more people with his radio show, and has a bigger consequent profile, than he did from his blog alone. I suspect his suspension/cancellation of his blogging activities is an admission of this.
Less consequentially, the Tory student blogger ‘Tory Bear’ has also stopped. This was definitely a minority interest blog, and when Tory Bear tried to influence the recent Conservative Future election, he only managed to persuade 60 people of the virtues of his preferred candidate. (Mind you, with a membership of 18,000, Conservative Future itself only motivated 200 people to vote.) With the exception of one or two ‘big beasts’ (sadly not including the estimable blog you are reading!) the blogosphere is still on the margins of political influence, even if it generates a vigorous political debate amongst its largely self-contained audience. Political Insight magazine commented after the election on the internet election that never was – the television debates led virtually all the election coverage, and it was a glorious bit of mainstream media maladministration that caused Gordon Brown’s memorable ‘bigoted woman’ gaffe. Even scandal waits for the mainstream media to pick it up before it becomes a central – if regrettable – part of the political conversation, as William Hague’s special adviser travails showed.
Nevertheless, whilst it may lack the hitting power of the mainstream media, internet politics is a vibrant part of the political scene. The existence of our own website and occasionally updated blog is testament to our belief that a political organisation needs a web presence to help further its views and join in that competitive task of persuading and engaging with others. The web is wonderfully democratic. It allows the promulgation of a huge range of views and ideas – indeed, the very range available is one of the things that arguably limits its overall influence. And the retiring of two bloggers, even if one has been such a web fixture as Iain Dale, should merely open the space for other people to step in. The indefatigable Tim Montgomerie at Conservative Home has recently been identifying new blogs of the right, and offered a seven point defence of blogging against an FT critique of the same. Mr. Montgomerie, too, uses the mainstream media – a regular column in the paywalled Times for example – to promote his views, but there is no doubting that the internet is his primary mode of influence peddling. Less prominently, but for One Nation Conservatives just as essentially, liberal Tories at Platform 10 maintain a regular series of thought-provoking pieces designed to keep the Conservative debate alive and balanced. The internet, and especially the Tory part of it, is alive and well – but yes, it does change!
