Brogan's Boob Blogging

The Daily Mail's politicial editor, Ben Brogan has a very dry blog, read widely in the Westminster Village. It has never had much of a popular following for some reason. Here however is his excellent report on the flight arrangements for the PM's visit to Tokyo. Guido welcomes his more populist style...

The Diarist's Dilemma

About this time on a Sunday the hacks on the Evening Standard's Londoner's Diary and Peter McKay's Ephraim Hardcastle in the Daily Mail will be looking for stories for next week.

Last week, as in many weeks past, they cut 'n pasted from Guido, they are nowadays the only remaining diarists left who still do this. This piss taking thieving has gone on for years. Harry Phibbs actually sells stories he has lifted from here to other diaries. Sebastian Shakespeare told Guido he "doesn't give a f**k" he has space to fill. If they carry on doing it, they will be subject to unconventional and asymmetric warfare. Guido does vendetta with a capital V...

Pink 'Un Euromania is Unhinged

Like many in the City, Guido reads the FT for the markets section and the excellent arts section. The political commentary however is often woeful - it is like the Indy in pink. This morning the leader castigates Cameron for a lack of hard policy positions. Fair enough. It also has this barking Europhile non-sequitur:

Mr Cameron has rightly said he wants to tackle global challenges, such as climate change and migration. To succeed, he must work closely with the European Union. This will be difficult if he is also pandering to the eurosceptic right of his party by pledging to pull out of the EU’s main centre-right grouping.

What difference does it make to global warming if the Euro-Tories agree their line with the French centre-right party or the Czech centre-right party? Mad.

Rupert Murdoch has bought the Wall Street Journal, if the European edition of the WSJ sources more editorial content locally, many in the City will switch, since the FT has already become the preferred journal of record for the Brussels bureaucracy, the WSJ could become the preferred reading of the Square Mile and the business community, which is overwhelmingly wary of Brussels. The FT's centrist establishment tone alienates more readers than it pleases, many of whom feel they have to read the paper on sufferance. Somehow Guido doubts Murdoch's WSJ will be Europhile...

UPDATE : ConservativeHome reminds us that Dan Hannan described the FT as the "Eurocrats paper".

Bankrupting The Guardian

Guido has always believed that the nature of the statist BBC and the non-profit making culture of the Guardian encourages a statist and non-profit making culture to dominate the thinking of the political class. These two media organisations of course see themselves as providing intellectual and moral leadership. The knee jerk "government must do something" attitude of the two organisations supports the statist consensus. Breaking that consensus is an essential condition for the post-bureaucratic age.

Crucial to creating an enterprise culture and undoing the all-party, semi-socialist culture which prevails in Britain is shattering this media hegemony. Reducing the scope of the BBC is essential to this long term goal. The BBC is the primary reason Britain does not have a Silicon Valley culture, the multi-billion pound tax subsidy crowds out competition, undermines innovation and makes it impossible for rivals to compete profitably. The Tories are only tentatively thinking about "harm reduction" policies towards the BBC. The Guardian is far more vulnerable...

The Guardian is financed by a charitable trust (ironically taking advantage of tax exemptions) the two main sources of income supporting that trust are the profits from Auto Trader and the public sector advertising that fills page after page of the newspaper. One of the first thing the Tories should do in power is set up www.jobs.gov.uk. All available public sector positions would be listed there free of charge, this would save hundreds of millions in advertising costs for the taxpayer and deprive the Guardian of a critical revenue stream.

The second income stream has always been vulnerable to competition. Auto Trader profits have financially supported the salaries of the journalists who write environmentalist anti-car editorials in the Guardian. Now a group of former journalists from Autocar Magazine and Auto Express magazines have launched an online-only magazine Drivers-Republic.com. With a bit of luck it will be a deadly competitor to Auto Trader...

Without the taxpayer subsidy and the profits from Auto Trader, the Guardian could go the way of the Morning Star. Once it was deprived of subsidy, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it became an irrelevance.

UPDATE : Tim Montgomerie emails to tell me it is already Conservative Party policy to bankrupt the Guardian.

Exclusive : Indy Owner Profits from Mugabe Poster Advertising

The Indy on Sunday frontpages a tenuous story about MPs owning shares in companies like Barclays that do business in Zimbabwe. Hypocritically, the Indy's parent company, Independent News & Media PLC, owns 100% of CCI, which according to the corporation's own website "is the largest and fastest-growing outdoor advertising company in South Africa, with significant operations in Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe."

So the Indy's owner actually made money from Mugabe's poster advertising campaign for the election. Stick that on your front page...

UPDATE : A co-conspirator points out that Baroness Jay and Ken Clarke are non-execs on the board of INM plc. In Baroness Jay's case it seems particularly difficult to reconcile her chairmanship of the Overseas Development Institute with personally profiting from the firm that profits from Mugabe's election advertising campaigns.

Trouble at the Labourgraph

Today sees another round of sackings at the loss making Telegraph. Rumours abound that Heffer is off to the Daily Mail affronted by the spiritual decline of the paper - as well as an unsympathetic attitude to his hero Enoch Powell from the editor Will Lewis. The £10 million loss last year was they claim due to the move to the Victoria newsroom and the website's multi-media revamp.

This year's losses should be more limited - though the website is still not making money for anyone except ITN who supply content. Morale is low, even the Barclay Brother's consigliere, Andrew Neil, was reported in the Indy on Sunday saying "The bloodletting at the Telegraph has gone on too long. After any takeover there is an element of blood on the carpet, but you have to go forward then and take your staff with you." Admininstration staff on the foreign desk were fired Wednesday, 8 more staff hacks face the sack.

The paper's editorial line is confusingly mixed, for a paper that was once considered the house paper of the Conservative Party it harbours a number of hacks who are determined enemies of Cameron. It is seeking to gain readers from the Daily Mail by emulating the Daily Mail. The only problem being the Mail does it so much better.

The other problem is the problem faced by all newspapers worldwide. Office based readers increasingly read their paper online and do not buy the inky dead tree version for the commute. They are also more promiscuous in their reading choices. The better the website, the less attractive the paper. Guido spoke last night at the journalist's Frontline Club on a panel with digital hacks from the Press Gazette, Guardian and the Telegraph. As digerati they were a bit more clued up than most hacks - so they were very pessimistic. Guido of course cheerfully reminded them that he was the only one on the panel from a profitable publisher...

Who's Miserable Now?

Polly is moaning about the Daily Mail, The Sun and "the dominant voices of the blogosphere" being malicious pessimistic miserablists. Is she having a laugh?

Guido miserable? Has she seen the polls? Labour polling the worst since polling began, Gordon the most hated Prime Minister in history with the most negative ratings ever? If Quentin Letts and Richard Littlejohn fancy coming out to lunch we would probably all die laughing... (don't get your hopes up Polly).

UPDATE : According to a co-conspirator Polly said on Radio 5 this morning that she earns £117,000 for her column.

Totalled

Blogging was light yesterday as it was a busy day for Guido. Met David Farrar of Kiwiblog fame. He is in London on a European pub tour for an IDU meeting in Paris, it ended up being a bit of an afternoon session in the sunshine down the pub. Went from there with Mike Smithson of PoliticalBetting and LabourHome's Jag Singh to Iain Dale's Total Politics launch party to see if Guido could drink the place out of Pimms. Cheers to Lord Ashcroft.

Got increasingly "tired" and incoherent as the night wore on. Everyone wanted to see the tag. Crowd was mainly media-political rather than politicians. Avoided Mark Oaten, argued with Angus MacNeil, congratulated Sunny Hundal on making Liberal Conspiracy work (was clearly more than merry by this point), harangued a certain former Newsnight producer, worried at how much weight Jon Craig has lost - he was delicately sipping a glass of champagne - on the way out Jonathan Isaby's girlfriend told Guido to stop bullying him.

Total Politics bills itself as being positive about politics and politicians, as such it is aimed squarely at the political class. Which is very different from the way Guido takes aim at them...

The Case for Elite Politics and Not Listening to the People

Fresh from telling people that if only they were as clever as him they would vote for Ken Livingstone, Steve Richards has a pricelessly revealing piece in The Indy this morning. It reveals a core trait shared with many fellow pundits who are fully paid-up members of the political class - an elitist contempt for democracy.

Richards accepts that a referendum on Europe would be lost in Britain, he blames this rightly on "distant bureaucrats that run the EU, apparently incapable of producing documents that are comprehensible to voters. We cannot hold these officials to account if we do not know what they are doing or supposed to do." Does he accept this signals that Europe needs to be reformed? No, it means a referendum should not be held.

Bizarrely he goes on to argue that politicians "are so in touch with the mood of voters they are fearful of their own convictions... Party lines are already blurred because leaders fear the voters too much. If they became less neurotically attentive, politics would become more interesting and, I suspect, more progressive." There we have it. In print. If only politicians ignored the voters, the policies he favours could be implemented. If only the voters weren't in the way...

The arrogance and contempt for the will of the people that Steve Richards shows again is breath taking, he makes no bones about it, he wants a progressive tyranny run by people who think like him. He knows the voters do not want the same, so he thinks politicians should ignore the voters. He laments that this is "unfashionable", on the contrary, it remains a core belief of many members of the political class in the Westminster Village and in Brussels. Is it any surprise that an anti-politics culture is growing as people and politicians become disengaged?

See also Steve Richards: Fails Numeracy Test and Steve Richards : "Voters Aren't As Clever As Me".

Online Market Share and Mind Share Means Profit Share

Guido gets asked to speak at more and more dead-tree-press industry events, the stump speech has changed over the last year or so, whereas in the past Guido has said basically we (bloggers / new media) are going to have your (columnist's / newspaper's ) breakfast. The line has evolved even as the mediasaurs embrace blogging. The numbers tell the story:

Source Hitwise, May 2008, UK Blog Market Share

Across the Atlantic old media is dealing with imploding advertising revenue and decreased mind share. After the New York Times and Washington Post the most powerful media force in politics according to academic studies is the Drudge Report, courted by Democrats and Republicans alike A three man operation versus old media titans?

Guido, with only part-time technical help and the occasional intern doing research, is run at a profit - unlike The Independent, Guardian or Telegraph - giving their online operations a good run for their money. The traditional commentariat now also has to deal with well funded professional newcomers such as PoliticsHome which has established a quality niche for political obssessives. The Guardian and New Statesman are embracing Liberal Conspiracy as the new media champion of the left, with news values and editorial judgement that has until now been lacking in comparison with ConservativeHome. They might reflect that when regime change comes, the media opposition to the Conservatives might be marshalled by Liberal Conspiracy rather than their own somewhat tired media clique.

New media operations like Gawker, HuffPo and Federated Media in the U.S. are earning tens of millions for bloggers, hitherto in Europe it has been more like tens of thousands, but that is now changing. Economic viability is important because as producing original content for new media becomes profitable, it will become better. Bloggers have mind share, they increasingly have mass market share and will therefore increasingly take a share of the profits...

Diary Change

On the Indy's Pandora column Olly Duff is moving to the news desk. So he clearly didn't disgrace himself too much in the eyes of Roger Alton at the leaving moving party for Simon Kelner. The gossip column will be left in the hands of Henry Deedes. Floreat Etona!

Over at The Times Hugo Rifkind is moving to features and apparently there may be no successor gossip column in the newspaper (although there seems to be one today, by-lined Adam Sherwin with a familiar story about Nadine employing her daughter). The editor obviously aims to boost sales by making the paper even less entertaining.

Katy-Taylor Richards is no longer a gossip columnist and is now a serious lobby journalist she tells Guido. Which is very confusing, because she writes for the Daily Express.

"Torygraph" European Coverage Attacked by Own European Correspondent

Guido went all out on European gravy affairs last week. Speaking to one of the most media-savvy players on these issues Guido ventured that the Telegraph's coverage was surprisingly thin (in the dead-tree-version) - which given their hardline Euro-sceptic editorial stance seemed bizarre.

"Bruno was spiked" came the reply - which explains some of the more bizarre blog posts by Bruno Waterfield their Brussels correspondent. Guido is not referring to the four-letter flecked references to dick sucking or his identification of the actual high-speed Euro gravy train. It has been deleted now, but he actually complained on his own Telegraph blog about his story not appearing in the paper with words (from memory) like "what do you expect, it is the Torygraph". Bruno clearly not a happy Brussels bunny...

Didn't We All in the 80s?

The incoming editor of the New Statesman, Jason Cowley, has confessed to liking to dress up with "arch ostentation" and stealing his mothers' make-up. Nothing wrong with that...

The Price of Freedom of Information

After spending over £100,000 and losing his appeal the Speaker is going to finally hand over the 14 MPs expenses to Heather Brooke tomorrow at 4pm. She will then be chauffeur driven to Wapping, where the Sunday Times will pore over the expenses of 14 leading politicians going back three years.

They have bought from Heather exclusive rights - the Sunday Telegraph is only getting the details of the two MPs it FoI'd and the rest of the media is being carved out completely. The Speaker is desperately keen to smother the story in the post Crewe and Nantwich media wake. The other papers are up in arms that the normal practice with FoIs is not being followed - once the applicant has been given the information it is normally freely available. The Sunday Times has effectively bought up an FoI with the connivance of the Speaker.

Guido doesn't blame Heather - she along with her co-litigant Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas have got their hands on the one and only copy of the material - she wants to look at it herself first before throwing it open - which she plans to do on Sunday. The Speaker is not following normal practice - it is not his job to give exclusives out.

Heather told Guido that

I get the bulk as I asked for 10 over several years. Initially I asked for all 646 MPs but the Commons authorities said that would cost too much so I was forced to narrow it down. Funny how they had no money to compile the expenses but plenty to go to Court to stop them being made public!

As is always the case, the money I get for my articles goes back into my campaigning. Unlike the Speaker, I don't have unlimited taxpayer funds on which to draw so this is how I make my living. It's certainly not a profitable venture I can assure you (3 1/2 years for one story is not a good business model) but worth doing I think.

The receipts will number in the thousands. The sooner Heather gets them online - the faster we will be all able to hold our pigging politicians to account...

The Speaker is now hiring a dedicated Legal Counsel for £100,000, plus bonus and package. Heather financed her legal fight herself, the political class uses taxpayers' money to fight against the public interest. Trebles all round for them and you pay...

The Guardianista Class

Ever wonder why it is that the Guardianistas are against grammar schools? A co-conspirator points out that this post keeps getting mysteriously deleted from the Guardian's CiF comments:

Editor Alan Rusbridger (Cranleigh); political editor Patrick Wintour (Westminster); leader writer Madeleine Bunting (Queen Mary's, Yorkshire); policy editor Jonathan Freedland (University College School); columnist Polly Toynbee (Badminton); executive editor Ian Katz (University College School); security affairs editor Richard Norton Taylor (King's School, Canterbury); arts editor-in-chief Clare Margetson (Marlborough College); literary editor Clare Armitstead (Bedales); public services editor David Brindle (Bablake); city editor Julia Finch (King's High, Warwick).; environment editor John Vidal (St Bees); fashion editor Jess Cartner-Morley (City of london School for Girls); G3 editor Janine Gibson (Walthamstow Hall); northern editor Martin Wainwright (Shreswbury); and industrial editor David Gow (St Peter's, York).

If only Guido had had the advantages they did...

UPDATE : A school chum draws attention to Seumas Milne who is an Old Wykehamist (Winchester College) and at Balliol, Oxford, another mentions the Observer's Andrew Rawnsley - Rugby School and Cambridge University.

UPDATE II : This was apparently in Private Eye originally. Wouldn't know - actually don't read it. Y'know - it is like fortnightly - so twentieth century...

Sir Michael White Concedes to Guido

Many will remember fondly Guido's spit roasting by Paxman and Sir Michael White last year. Guido remembers that they both took particular umbrage at Guido's news priorities. At the time the top story on the blog was a video of Gordon picking his nose. Paxman went into his faux outraged Grande Dame routine at this prioritising of political tittle tattle. Today in his column Sir Michael concedes that perhaps Guido knew better what the public want. He has obviously been studying the YouTube charts:

"YouTube's clip of chancellor Brown picking his nose is twice as popular as his PM's debut last June."

Prime Minister Gordon Brown arrives at Downing Street
Views: 118,600 on the Downing Street YouTube channel

Prime Minister Gordon Brown picks his nose on budget day
Views: 233,649 on the Guido Fawkes' YouTube channel

So you can teach an old dog new tricks...

The Sheep With The Wool Pulled Over Her Eyes

Janet Daley's stunning insights into the character of Gordon Brown in her Daily Telegraph column last year caused disquiet with many on the right because she is seen to be of the right. She firmly bought into Gordon's project, thinking that he would be intellectually firm in the face of the shallow flim-flammery of Cameron.

She wrote immediately after the Glasgow terror attack:

Mr Brown made a terse and perfectly judged statement. For all its brevity, it conveyed the essential message of calm resolution and national unity: "I know that the British people will stand together, united, resolute and strong.'' This was High Seriousness delivered in the old-fashioned way, with spare wartime urgency and without sentimentality.

He even became to her a great, non-neurotic TV performer:

Again, yesterday, in his interview with Andrew Marr, Mr Brown did not put a foot wrong ... Interestingly, these were the first television appearances I have seen in which there was no sign of his peculiar nervous mannerism of rolling his tongue inside his mouth that is so beloved by satirists. Has he been trained out of it, or has he been transformed by his role and the state of national emergency? Either way, its absence helps to remove the impression of neuroticism that would not have inspired public confidence.

So no more laughing at Gordon the Great. The next month in August 2007 she contrasted Brown's biblical strength to the effete Dave. Gordon had, in Janet's view, the strength to withstand the trials of power:

First the terror attacks, then the floods, now the pestilence. Gordon Brown seems to be undergoing the trials of Job. But in this case, it is not so much his faith that is being tested as the country's in him. And, my goodness, isn't he rising to the challenge?

Once again he has appeared on our television screens within hours of terrible news, not just to assure us that he personally is taking charge of the foot and mouth crisis but to thank the authorities in affected communities for their cooperation and competence - to make it clear, in other words, that he is in command but also deeply respectful of people on the ground who must deal with the problems over which they have singular expertise.

Wow! Will this guy ever put a foot wrong?

Gee, Janet, who knows? Your psephological predictions suggested not: "What the voters will look for is not a leader who bangs on about how things look, but one who can cope with reality."

Reality struck Janet hard in September :

Was Gordon the Great just an illusion?

Can Gordon pull it back? This week is the true beginning of the Brown era, as opposed to the fag end of the previous one. With the Queen's Speech and the first Brownite legislative programme we should get the answer to the political question of the moment: was the New Brown a figment of our imagination, the most transitory illusion ever to capture the imagination of the Commentariat, or was there really something there worth grasping?

Almost a redemptive mea culpa.

The Commentariat collectively, Janet in particular, wrote in the summer of 2007 with all the considered judgement of a herd of sheep. They however would have you believe that they possess valuable insights and good judgement based on their intellect and access to the key players. They have opinions just like everyone, no better, no worse. They merely express them better than most. More often than not their access and close proximity to the subjects they write about clouds their judgement. Mostly their opinions are not worth the chip-wrapping they are written on...

The Profundity of the Punditry : Janet Daley

Still looking for examples of Janet Daley's stunning insights into Gordon Brown from last year. Send any gems you have found to Guido.Fawkes@Order-Order.com...

Incidentally the Telegraph today repeats the mistake that the Tories have not taken a seat from Labour in a by-election for "30 years", a mistake also made by the Sunday Times yesterday. That error was compounded by the article claiming Margaret Thatcher's constituency was Grantham. Mistakenly they refer back to the famous Ilford North by-election of 1978 which presaged the fall of Jim Callaghan's government. In fact the Tories more recently gained Mitcham & Morden from Labour in a 1982 by-election, when Maggie was of course actually MP for Finchley.

Coming Next Week : Holding the Punditry to Account

The exasperated collective counter-attack by the establishment Commentariat on bloggers has inspired Guido to start a new regular feature. When the great and the good assembled at the RSA last Wednesday, shepherded by Julia Hobsbawm, John Lloyd (in absentia) and Matthew Taylor*, to bemoan their diminished status, they drew the battle-lines for a battle that should be joined and won for the blogosphere. The Commentariat desperately want to maintain their monopoly role as media gate-keepers, as the sub-edited filters of democracy and the monopoly producers of public commentary. Guido has said this before; in an age of near costless technological disintermediation "the news" is no longer what they say it is, we can make the news ourselves, unfiltered by the metropolitan media elite. Successful boutique news sources are proliferating. The media Goliaths now face an army of blogging Davids...

A lot of what was said at the Editorial Intelligence event was plain ignorant, the conflation of blog writing with blog comment interaction in particular. It is true that the comments left here and on the Guardian's CiF can be pretty vitriolic and profane, but they are genuinely reflective of what readers really think. Polly Toynbee hates the contradictory "barrage" of comments that follow her articles because she has an over-inflated view of the value of her analysis. Many of us only read her articles for the pleasure of seeing them torn to shreds in the comments that interactively follow. Polly is highly paid and successful because she is a provocative columnist, not because she is a better analyst of social affairs than Frank Field. That is a valuable hack talent she shares with Richard Littlejohn...

The fear and ignorance heard last Wednesday did not showcase the "Power of the Commentariat", it highlighted their decline. They are weakened and rightly so, for they have time and time again failed to hold political power to account successfully. Proximity breeds compromise and the politico-media class has for example tolerated lying about expenses by politicians for decades and that toleration spread to tolerating spin, which is as often as not professional lying. Democracy is worse off because the Commentariat are compromised by being so embedded in the political class - or as Polly Toynbee explains "in sympathy with politicians".

Laughably the Commentariat simultaneously fear and deride what they perjoratively term the "cult of the amateur". The irony of this is not lost on Guido. The pundits of the unpopular press really need a re-think here, very few journalists earn as much as top bloggers. Guido can think of a few lone website owners who produce their content and make far more than most journalists of the Dead Tree Press. They are also profit making publishers, unlike the Independent, Guardian and Telegraph.

This misplaced arrogance of the Commentariat deserves a research-based response. The writings of the Commentariat no longer just end up as fish and chip wrapping, their writing is accessible via the internet forever. So tomorrow, hopefully with the assistance of the wisdom of the blogging crowds, Guido will start putting the profundity of their punditry in context and under the microscope, starting with Janet Daley.

What did she, with all her intellectual authority, tell us about Gordon Brown last summer? Feel free to be profane...

*Matthew Taylor has complained bitterly about bloggers before. Contrast Taylor's attitude to Rupert Murdoch's attitude to the democratising of commentary. Overwhelmingly the Commentariat basically has a protectionist attitude, the increasing pluralism of news sources scares them because it devalues them. Shrewdly and counter-intuitively, Murdoch has an enabling attitude, expanding by freeing the market for commentary. He gets it.

Steve Richards: Fails Numeracy Test

The man who told us last week that if we were only as clever as him we would vote for Ken Livingstone, demonstrates his genius again this morning in the Indy.

So what, if anything, can Brown do to avoid a 1997 landslide in reverse? Currently, a fatal narrative is in place. It can be summarised in three words: "Brown is a disaster".

Via Dizzy.