This entry was posted on
Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at
11:30 am and is filed
under The Political Weblog Movement.

Paul Staines (aka ‘Guido Fawkes’), Iain Dale and Tim Montgomerie; what do these three people have in common… I mean, besides their awarding each other top billing in Iain Dale’s not-at-all-expert guide to political blogging?

Here… watch them in action with me. (Careful, now… they don’t like being watched… so we’re going to have to sneak up on them very, very quietly…)

Here’s Iain Dale delivering a withering if poorly-formatted fisk of an article by Melissa Kite, and here’s Tim Montgomerie waving his media cred in front of us before delivering a good kicking.

Melissa Kite responded here, but neither Tim nor Iain have found the time to link to this response themselves. (In fact, Iain appears to be far more concerned about his planned a letter of complaint to Mel Brooks about all those Jewish jokes.)

[MINI-UPDATE – More on Iain and Borat here.]

No, instead Iain and Tim leave the response to Daddy and his team of flying monkeys (including Praguetory and Dizzy).

A lot of right-boosting chatter turned up under the Kite post (“Conservative blogging seems to be thriving…” etc.), but this was the one that really caught my eye:

“We vastly outnumber our leftie friends, from what I can see…”

From what you can see?

From what I can see, this fresh batch of blogging Tories relies heavily on the use of sock-puppets and any immediate headcount is bound to give a false result.

Take my two locals for example… Mike Chambers and Dennis Paul. Over the last year, between them they’ve created half a dozen anonymous weblogs and used dozens of online identities. They also happened to be quite active in the comments of Staines’ weblog (and later Dale’s) during the ‘Blog Brother’ pile-on.

Both Paul Staines and Iain Dale make good use of sock-puppets and their puppeteers to protect themselves from criticism, which only accelerates the breeding cycle. It’s a flying monkey see, flying monkey do thing.

And here comes Tim Montgomerie to hand out special awards to those same flying monkeys… in a staggeringly-important awards event that’s exclusive to Tories and run by a weblog that is barely 18 months old.

Here’s Praguetory waving his nomination about by way of introduction (before delivering a devastating ‘no comment’ to anything I may have said about him).

See how much better it makes him feel? See how much more important he seems to casual bystanders?

Bless.

Never forget folks, the right’s dominance of the blogosphere* is self-evident. They have superior numbers and are so very skilled at blogging that they win awards for it and everything.

[*Note – Said blogosphere may or may not exist, depending on the whims of the ‘dominant’ party or parties.]