Don’t listen to the hype about ‘Web 2.0’ politics, says Andrew Gilligan. Online campaigning is only of interest to a handful of Westminster nerds and journalists
Ed Balls has ‘had to take the roast chicken out of the oven’. For Sarah Brown, ‘waking up in our house in Fife was today’s special treat’. William Hague is ‘enjoying a good Burger King at Wetherby services’, and the breaking news from Eric Pickles is that he is ‘out with the team in Brentwood’. In the general election as it appears on Twitter — or should that be Pooter? — there can be no doubt that the battle of ideas is well and truly joined.
Questioning the importance of the ‘Web 2.0 campaign’ has, of course, become as outrageous an assault on the conventional wisdom as, say, challenging gay marriage. But I need to break this to you: contrary to the panting predictions of a thousand middle-aged hacks desperate to look with-it, this will not be the Twitter or Facebook election.
Twitter, in particular, has managed something really quite miraculous — to come up with content even more banal than the rest of the campaign. And the public has, it seems, noticed. Mr Balls, said by the Observer to be ‘the Cabinet’s most prolific tweeter’, has a grand total of 6,668 Twitter followers, roughly half the circulation of the Dawlish Gazette. Mr Hague manages 3,681. Gordon Brown last week spent an hour of his precious campaigning time doing a webcast to 310 viewers.
Last week Tweetminster, a website which tracks political trends on Twitter, produced the first ‘poll’ in about two years which actually had Labour ahead of the Tories, by 35 to 34 per cent, and forecast a Labour overall majority of 14 seats. The projection was based on the touching belief — allegedly supported by Japanese research — that those candidates with the greatest number of mentions on Twitter are most likely to win. (On this definition, Jan Moir, the Daily Mail columnist famed for her un-PC writings, would be heading to Downing Street.)
Tweetminster, again rather touchingly, describes itself as the place where politics meets ‘real life’. But another Tweetminster finding, that the most discussed topic on Twitter last week was ‘the digital economy bill’, might just be a mini-clue that the average Twitter user is not wholly representative of the British people.
If you want to find out the political views of middle-class metropolitan white people under 35 with fixed-gear bikes (in the unlikely event that you cannot already predict them in every possible way), well, Twitter could just be your place. For the rest of us, I think we’ll stick to the boring old opinion polls.
That Japanese research, by the way, doesn’t seem to say quite what Tweetminster claims. But that’s just yet another much-loved feature of the internet: it’s full to the brim with half-truths and wishful thinking, and never more so than at election time.
Because what much of the political web really is, is yet another place where the tiny minority of the politically obsessed talk to themselves. It’s where Tories tell each other that a £3-a-week marriage tax break is a real game-changer, where Labour people can huddle away from the ‘right-wing press’ and pretend the overall majority is still in sight. The vast majority of that minute band following the eating habits of Ed Balls and William Hague are surely political obsessives. You’d have to be, wouldn’t you?
Now I have a blog myself, quite a busy one, and I like it. I also write regularly for a hyperlocal website, greenwich.co.uk, which may well be the future of local news in my area. Blogging is good for journalists — it raises our profile, and allows us to break stories that wouldn’t make the paper.
It’s also true that some great journalism about politics is done on the web. Mike Smithson, of politicalbetting.com, is, I think, possibly the best political commentator in Britain, with an unparalleled record of forecasting electoral outcomes. The ConservativeHome and Labour List websites are essential and important reading for political activists.
All these, however, are narrowcasting, reaching no more than a few tens of thousands, while election campaigns are about reaching as many people as possible. But there is one other class of heavy blog and Twitter readers: journalists. And here is where the online warriors hope to score, by influencing the contents of publications that are actually widely read, and are worth reading.
The precedents, alas, are not encouraging. I closely followed the 2008 mayoral election in very wired-up London. The Labour candidate, Ken Livingstone, invested hugely in web campaigning. A great many anti-Boris Johnson blogs and viral videos sprang up, some of them fairly unpleasant (one YouTube video, for instance, depicted Boris as a mop of blond hair on top of a giant penis).
It made no difference whatever. I can remember only one significant web breakthrough into the mainstream media — when Boris was captured on someone’s cameraphone admitting that he’d underestimated the costs of his new Routemaster bus. For the most part, however, indeed perhaps more than ever before, it was old media — specifically my then newspaper, the Evening Standard, and BBC London — that drove the campaign, with revelations of actual substance and facts rather than silly videos.
Since that election, various anti-Boris blogs and Twitter feeds have spent the past two years obsessively blaming the Mayor for every late-running bus and crack in the pavement. Boris’s poll ratings have only risen; indeed, his opponents have appeared so petty and mean-spirited that it has almost certainly harmed them.
This demonstrates the other difficulty of online campaigning: it may help the other side more than you. The anti-Boris blogs and tweets provide Team Johnson with something they find really valuable: an almost anthropological insight into the opposing tribe, in all its self-delusion, frustrated entitlement and refusal to come to terms with why it lost. I’ve always thought it was nice of the Ken people to tell their opponents everything that was going through their heads.
The only Web 2.0 moment of the 2010 campaign so far has also been a backfire: the highly amusing tragedy of Stuart MacLennan, who tweeted himself off his perch as Labour candidate for Moray, describing rail commuters as ‘chavs’ and outlining his longing for ‘slave-grown bananas’.
Web 2.0 groupies say that social networking allows political candidates to ‘connect’ with voters and show their authenticity. Mr MacLennan was certainly authentic, but discovered the hard way how that was altogether too much of a good thing. Inauthenticity is a much safer choice — but it is hard to imagine anyone making a voting decision based on their excitement at being tweeted their MP’s lunch preferences.
Online works for journalists. But successful journalism is about disclosure. As Mr MacLennan’s experience underlines, successful political campaigning, at least for the moment, is about control. Maybe in a future, genuinely Web 2.0 political era, the huge and wonderful power of the net will be unleashed to rip away that control from the discredited, moth-eaten apparatus of two-party politics. Until then, however, we will have to make do with Mr Hague’s burger and Mr Balls’s roast chicken.
Andrew Gilligan is London editor of the Telegraph Media Group.