Bloggerheads

Short version:

Scroll down to the picture.

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Long version:

Hey, do you remember when I wrote a rather complicated (and greatly estimated) post about Iain Dale vastly overstating his popularity and Iain responded by (oops) accidentally making it very easy for me to prove and explain how he had been cheating?

Well, pretty much the same thing has just happened, only without me having write a rather complicated (and greatly estimated) post.

Joy!

After weeks of Iain’s ducking, diving over his dodgy poll of weblogs I was left with some data that might have done the job. Not only did I have to research 70+ blogs from a list that Iain could reject as definitive at any time, but there was also a lot of wriggle-room for Iain to claim that this blog wasn’t formally Conservative and that right-wing community was owned by a leftie and so on and so forth. Big headache.

Then Iain, bless him, dumped sterling silver and solid gold right in my lap.

(A link to the precise moment of discovery. For completists only.)

It is and always has been my position that the Total Politics poll of political weblogs was skewed way, way waaaaay over to the right (and heavily in favour of Iain and his mates way, way waaaaay over to the right).

And here’s the proof:

Compare the top 10 ‘most popular’ blogs from that poll (1,140 participants) to the top ten that resulted from Iain’s recent reader survey (“more than 1,100*” participants).

They are almost identical.

Further, Iain asked those taking his survey specifically about their voting habits; 70% of them are Conservative voters.

Here is a nifty image that explains it all. Feel free to borrow it.

(Psst! I should have spotted this before I wrote the fine print for my picture, but Iain did ask who reads him daily in a different queston, and even though he neglected to include himself, he officially tops his survey chart, with 83% of his readers reading him at least once a day.)

Now, lately the Tories are doing well in general polls conducted by reputable professionals, and the departure of Prime Methadone Tony Blair did bring a lot of them out of the woodwork and into the blogosphere, but there’s no way in hell that Iain is going to find a poll showing that 70% of blog readers are Conservative voters, unless he conducts that poll in his own backyard.

And in his backyard is exactly where his Total Politics poll was conducted, attracting maybe a dozen or so more participants than his reader survey, and producing almost exactly the same ‘top ten’ result.

Iain can carry on saying the poll “wasn’t meant to be scientific and never pretended to be” if it makes him feel better and perhaps he can even mockingly feign surprise that the majority of his readers are Conservative voters if it brings him joy, but such disingenuous nonsense falls apart the moment he involves a major sponsor (for the third scam running) and slaps a ‘Total Politics’ label on this latest round of self-promoting, Tory-serving bullshit.

Total Politics brands itself as ‘politically neutral’, and this poll of blogs is anything but.

This poll is, essentially, a poll of Conservative voters.

My thanks to Iain for finally confirming that, even if (oops) he didn’t mean to.

(Note – All of this leaves aside Dale’s childish refusal to honour my boycott of the poll, the stupidity of a wannabe politician being the sole counter and auditor of votes in a poll where he is in the running, and the absurdity of a man play-acting as a champion of bloggers when he is in fact an old-fashioned broadcaster with no taste or regard for accountability.)

Nice to see Iain Dale being so open about the influence of Policy Exchange for a change; most days he’s busy denying their influence.

On one notable occasion when Iain Dale was a Trustee of Policy Exchange and denying their influence, I tripped over Nick Boles.

Nick Boles was at the time the Director of Policy Exchange (which is, for those who don’t know, a large right-wing think tank with charity status) and also wanted to be the Conservative candidate for Mayor of London.

In fact, he wanted this so much that he was willing to use Policy Exchange as an administrative base for a personal website with that party-political aim (more), which is a bit naughty and just the kind of concept that friends of Iain Dale struggle to understand.

So…. the Founder Director of Policy Exchange wants to be Mayor of London, and now (*gasp*) he works for the Mayor of London, along with a whole lot of other people from Policy Exchange who now work for the Mayor of London as advisers* and what have you.

(*Perhaps one of the i-dotting or t-crossing bloggers would care to make a full job list for the record.)

It has not escaped notice that Boris Johnson has been on a leash, pretty much since he was convinced to become a candidate.

That leash is held by Policy Exchange people, and I’ve been watching it get tighter.

I’m sorry if I seem to sell Boris short on this, but no matter how much he might think he is in control, when the bulk of his data and advice comes from Policy Exchange drones, the fix is in from the very beginning.

The initial rush of Policy Exchange people into staffed positions from the moment of his election should have been signal klaxon enough for me, but it wasn’t until Boris innocently enquired about my “disagreement” with Anne Milton that I began to get truly worried.

(That matter involved a website produced by her activists that made groundless claims of paedophilia and stopped about a micron short of inciting violence. Boris, who knew this, was treating it like a disagreement over a croquet shot. You know those letters you write and then throw away before they get near a stamp or your outbox? I’ve got one of those. It’s a one-word letter to Boris that I didn’t send a few months ago. It reads; “Disagreement?!”)

And now Boris is showering former Policy Exchange trustee Iain Dale with – let’s be frank, here – a quite absurd level of purposeful praise… well, let’s just say that there’s very little room for doubt any more.

Boris is at the moment so far gone that he may as well be living in a foreign land, and in a way he is.

The Policy Exchange gang wishes to control Boris Johnson, right down to what he says and who he says it to, and so far they’ve quite successful

I look forward to them popping up and denying it… when they’re not quite so busy congratulating themselves over it.