Derek Draper vs bloggers?

[afleitch]

Quick round up

There is a site called Conservative Home, and another called Iain Dale's Diary, and another called Guido Fawkes and another called Lib Dem Voice. They and many others are linked together and generate 'hits' through a central advertiser called Messagespace. LabourHome are linked too.

They are all pretty good and pretty friendly with each other. However a new site called LabourList (with Derek Draper as editor IIRC) was launched and has..well isn't very good. It's part of the lefts attempt to 'catch-up' with the right's dominance of UK political blogging and it's welcome.

Guido's site is a little below the belt but it's popular. The more popular it is, the more hits you get and the more trolling you get. Every Friday he leaves a picture for a 'caption contest.' The whole things is unmoderated. Racist comments were posted there and when raised by Draper on LabourList were removed.

However LabourList began a campaign to remove Guido and Iain from the 'links' list. It has also targeted MessageSpace the advertiser and revenue generator and there have been threats made to Alex Hilton of LabourHome who has a stake in MessageSpace and a friendship with the real Guido (Paul Staines)

Now it has moved onto PB.com where Mike Smithson has commented;

'A couple of years ago the Labour PPC for Chelsea and the man who founded LabourHome, Alex Hilton, set up a company with Paul Staines (Guido) to develop the advertising potential of political blogs. It took a bit of time to get going but now the firm, MessageSpace, is producing significant revenue that is under-pinning dozens of different sites.

For Politicalbetting this has been a godsend - and the prospect of regular advertising revenue was a key reason why I gave up my day job and full-time salary in December 2007 to work full-time on the site. I’m now seeing a reasonable income stream that should this financial year cover all the site costs and hopefully provide me with, together with the bookmaker commissions, a net profit of maybe £750 a month.

But this is all being threatened by the man pictured above as part of his pathetic little spat with Paul Staines. Draper and his cohorts have tried to find a cause over some comments that have appeared on Guido’s site in order to claim that he is a racist.

Note that they could not find anything that Guido himself wrote to object to - but managed to dig out two or three comments that could be described as racist. I understand that these were subsequently removed.

Now LabourList is trying to get supporters to contact MessageSpace advertisers to warn them off from using the firm - a move that would hurt many sites and not just Guido. And, in an even nastier intervention, LabourHome’s Alex Hilton has been threatened and told in no uncertain terms to break his relationship.

Could this have anything to do with the stories Guido has been carrying about what Draper has put on his CV It looks like it.

Come on Draper. Stop this contrived campaign and get on with trying to produce a decent site for the Labour Party. LabourList still has a long way to go.'

An interesting spat none-the-less

[The Man From G.O.P.]

Draper is one of the biggest losers on the planet, he's stirring up a hornet's nest, and he's got nonesuch ammo to shoot with.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     Blogging is so five years ago.

[Silent Hunter]

I actually belong to Bloggers4Labour, which is a more decent site.

[afleitch]

Well what a weekend that's been

How best to summarise. Derek Draper plans launch of attack blog RedRag in response to Tory dominated blogosphere. Get's in with Damian McBride, Browns special advisor (public funded but party allied) to generate false rumours about the shadow cabinet and their spouses. Leaks to Guido (see above) Derek and Damian say it was silly banter, no harm done nonsense. Damian apologises. Turns out it wasn't, e-mails leaked, quite offensive stuff, Damian resigns a bit miffed that it came out and he had to loose his job. Pressure on Brown over what he knew if anything. Cameron asks for Brown to apologise. Brown sends letters. End of Story. However letters not apologise, stuff about civil service codes, usual Brown rhetoric. Story not over.

Overall message - whatever you want it to be.

[The Man From G.O.P.]

This will be studied one day. Has to be really the first of its kind, the fall-out from this. Being all internet-y.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Draper is prick and a shit and always has been. Of course Staines is a shit as well, but so what. He's only as important as people let him be and it says much about Draper's [lack of] intelligence that he didn't and doesn't get that. Idiot. The only time previous to this bizarre episode (I mean failing at smearing is quite something...) I'd ever heard anything about McBride is when some people were delighted (I can't remember why) at his demotion last autumn. Can't quite work out what the hell he was playing at; first because while this sort of gossip circulates around the Westminster bubble all the time (and always has and always will) one of The Rules is that you don't try to publish the stuff*, second because it's only a few years ago that Draper was cheerfully and publically smearing the best known resident of North Queensferry seemingly out of pure spite. Anyways...

---

LabourList isn't very good anyway and was never going to do what a surprising number of people thought it might. I've never been able to work out what the site is even trying to do; it's a confused mess for all its professional-ish touches. LabourHome isn't much good either (the quality of the debate is just mindless; not that that's really the fault of the people who run it or the "genuine" members) but has found a couple of niches (information about candidate selections and so on) that it ought to work on. I'd argue (although I am biased) that the Bloggers4Labour format remains the most suited for what Labour-supporting blogs are actually like. A culture has developed on its own and if people high up want to do better on the internets, then it makes more sense to nuture it than try playing at astroturf or at mindless copying. One of the real problems with LabourList is that it presumed and presumes that it is operating in terra nullius. Which is bollocks, frankly.

Thing is, there's no real competition between political blogs (at least not along these partisan lines), at least not in reality. The internet encourages people of similar views to talk amongst themselves; there are echos of the first century of mass newspapers in that.

*Not really because of principle, but practical reality.

1. Not all of the rumours are true or entirely true.
2. The stuff that is true or might be true is usually impossible to prove.
3. "You know, some of our lot get up to the same sort of thing..."
4. Journalists won't print the stuff anyway. Outside nasty hints in the nastier diaries. And that hardly counts. No one out in the real world reads them anyway.

Personally I think that lobby gossip should stay there.

---

Yeah, this was longer than I thought it'd be...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

This will be studied one day. Has to be really the first of its kind, the fall-out from this. Being all internet-y.

I don't know about that. The only thing it has to do with the internet and politics-on-the-internet is locational. It's worked out (and is working out) like a '90's style media shitstorm; everything from the fact that it's based on lobby gossip, to the role of the Sunday papers to the briefings, the rebuttals, the demands to "know" how much certain people "knew" about certain things, the claims that certain people (seemingly everyone, like always) are "angry" or "disgusted" (or whatever), the demands for "apologies" and so on and so forth.

Which should hardly be surprising as that's the World that Draper, Staines and the rest of them cut their teeth in. This almost, I say almost with good reason, feels like the last hurrah of that sort of media shitstorm, rather than signalling the birth of anything new and interesting.

[afleitch]

http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/270972/New-smear-email-nails-Labour-lies.html

'THE VILE website at the centre of the vicious plot to smear top Tories was set up with the help of the boss of the Labour Party, the News of the World can sensationally reveal today.

A new email shows that Labour's General Secretary Ray Collins chaired a secret meeting to create the Red Rag website now ensnared in the Smeargate scandal.

The email's existence links the dirty tricks site to the very TOP of the Labour Party.

And it exposes the LIE, put out by Downing Street, and repeated by government ministers this week, that the smears were just a minor aberration cooked up by a couple of renegades acting alone-and which would never have seen light of day. '

---

Yes it's from the 'screws' but it's their scoop so...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Nice to see that the News of the World takes a strong line against smears, unsubstantiated claims and vicious innuendo.

(I tried attaching two barbs to that comment. Did it work?)

For what it's worth, Collins says that he was at a meeting on interwebs stuff but that "scurrilous rumours" (had to quote that, I love the word "scurrilous") did not come up: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8006542.stm

So, yeah, this is playing out like a '80's-'90's media shitstorm as I suspected. Which presumably means a few more weeks of stories, built, again, around Sundays.

---

Btw, "Smeargate"? Really? Really? You'd have thought journalists, of all professions, would be more creative.

[The Man From G.O.P.]

This will be studied one day. Has to be really the first of its kind, the fall-out from this. Being all internet-y.

[The Man From G.O.P.]

This will be studied one day. Has to be really the first of its kind, the fall-out from this. Being all internet-y.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6122756.ece


2010:

The honorable Leader of the Opposition, Nick Clegg