“The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” George Burns

Over the next few weeks, my MP (a newly-elected Tory) will go through the parliamentary lobby in support of a range of bills that he knows little about.

@tom_watson - a pin-up for networked politics? (click for pic credit)

Sure. He may have a few reflexive opinions on the general subject matter, but beyond that, like most MPs, he’ll focus upon a handful of issues that he stays on top of: Personal bugbears, issues raised my his more persistent constituents, areas in which he’s been allocated a Parliamentary or Party role.

And however he casts his vote, the letters pages of the local newspapers will regularly castigate him. He’ll often respond by topping-and-tailing cut-and-paste letters provided by someone else in his party.

In this respect, my MP is quite like Tom Watson – the pin-up of the networked politics. I’m sure Tom toes The Party Line when he’s not sure. In other words, my MP and Tom conspire in the fakery that sustains Party politics.

I say that my local MP quite like Tom. But he’s also not quite the same. Earlier this summer, for instance, Tom attained a status that very few politicians have ever held. He could have walked into a bi-partisan pub and had drinks bought for him from all sides because he behaved in a way that most people think good MPs should.

But was Tom really a one-man force of nature – a campaigning multi-tasking up-all-night political polymath, on top of the details with carefully phrased rapier-like questions?

I yield to no-one in my admiration for him, but I really don’t think he was this superman. I say this because he did something a bit cleverer than that: He rode the network into battle. His 3,225 Facebook friends and 51,984 Twitter followers gave him extra eyes, ears, hands and brains. They allowed him to stretch his Parliamentary Allowance and give him all kinds of resources that he won’t need to claim for on annoying IPSA forms.

Sure – he worked hard and picked his fights well. But his real talent was in finding help – and not just of a material kind.

Where his followers weren’t slipping him data, they were chewing over the evidence, road-testing a few ways of describing developments giving him phrases that were useful when the cameras were on. When they were doing none of those things, he got feedback – encouragement and reassurance.

When you know you’re onto something, it gives you that extra bounce. His self-image here didn’t need to develop that self-loathing edge that sustains fake indignation. A politician as exposed as Tom would never get away with that these days.

By embedding himself in the network, he had little choice but to apply high standards of self-criticism. Either be a genuinely good guy, or act his socks off every day.

Now contrast Tom with Sir Stuart Bell – the unobtainable member for Middlesbrough.

Sir Stuart hasn’t held a constituency surgery for 14 years. He is made even harder to contact by the fact he doesn’t have a constituency office.

According to the paper, his response to questions about this has been to point out that he meets with members of the public by appointment instead, and people can reach him by telephone at any time.

So reporter Neil Macfarlane set about trying to find out how easy or otherwise it was to get in contact with the MP. Over several months, the Gazette rang Sir Stuart’s Westminster office and his home number over 100 times. No-one ever answered. That’s despite claiming staffing costs of £82,896 last year. Contrast that with Teesside’s four other MPs, all of who have their phones answered at the first attempt.

Sir Stuart isn’t on Facebook or Twitter either as far as I can see. And – when we find out what he thinks – I doubt if it’s ever as nuanced or road-tested as Tom’s positions. The contrast in self-awareness as well as political competence will be eye-watering.

So there’s a heirarchy here: On the top, Tom Watson, the go-to example of the networked politician.

Somewhat below him is my MP (no slouch with social media by the way, but as guarded as most MPs) who is in a marginal seat and is accordingly, visibly, busy.

Then, a long way further down, there’s Sir Stuart, who has managed to hide way for 14 years without hosting a surgery because, in Middlesbrough, they’d probably elect a Donkey if was wearing a red rosette (Tory equivalents are undoubtely available folks!).

I’m sorry it’s taken me to get to it, but here’s my question:

If you’re good at networking, are political parties as important to you as they were? Does Tom need to get his cut-and-paste replies from Labour HQ as often? Does he need to rely upon the whips to guide him through issues he doesn’t understand as often? Does he need to scour local committee rooms get find local canvassers who will knock on doors for him at the next election?

And most importantly, Tom has created a situation where he has to behave publically like an honest human being. In being well networked, has he redefined what representation is?

And should we be voting for people on the basis of their personal network more than their party rosette?

Update: More on lazy politicians here.

Since I looked at the calculations from We Love Local Government on Councillors’ iPads the other day, I’ve had a few conversations with people working in democratic services at various local authorities.

Click pic for credit

It seems that the big worry is less that Councillor’s iPads will cost/save money or have any productivity/accountability gains, than that Councillors will spend council meetings futzing with their new toys instead of paying attention to procedings properly.

A few quick thoughts on this:

• Are we worried that tweeting councillors will be interacting with the public when they should be focussing only upon the views of other elected members? And aren’t the more savvy ones doing this already with their phones?
• Is there an upside to Councillors being able to do quick lookups and on-the-hoof research during council meetings? Will the quality of deliberation go up?
• Are there small-c constitutional issues here? An elected councillor has legitimacy that unelected interlopers don’t have. Should it be that the only evidence that could/should be considered at a council meeting should be tabled by – or through – an elected councillor? Do councillors have a quasi-jurist role (not a new suggestion around here)?

Either way, I’d suggest that a revolution has happened in the last fifteen years – not just in how we communicate but in how we think. I think that the parable of declining spam illustrates this perfectly, and we need to start thinking about the whole question of representation in the light of it.

It’s not that small a question, but one that has profound implications for our governance.

It’s a good question that tells us a lot about some of the bigger issues in local government.

The London Borough of Havering are doing it, and the argument for this is that it will cut printing costs. The good people at one of my favourite blogs We Love Local Government have done some sums:

“…over that four month period, on average, the Council spent £398.48 per month to provide 17 printed copies of the Cabinet Agenda to the Councillors. This, I think, means that in a year the Council could be spending £4383.28 on Cabinet agendas”

So. For the sake of argument, with no bulk discounts, 17 iPads at £400 a pop (the lowest priced option with only WiFi & no 3G – lets assume that there’s one or two WiFi signals available in the Council chamber!) comes to £6,800. The £500 option (with 3G)? No problem – that’s £8500 for 17.

So assuming they don’t all lose or break them, and assuming they can all actually get them to work in the first place, we’re looking at an idea that will be in the black after six months or so.

This also assumes no productivity savings and no efficiency gains. It assumes that there is going to be no positive cultural shift and that using a new medium will add nothing to the capacity of councillors to use a new medium in new ways – to improve their representative skills. I’ve spent long periods of time working with Councillors on their use of online communications tools and the two biggest obstacles we kept hitting were this utilitarian approach to kit and training, and (or course) the outdated rules on use of communications tools for political purposes.

For me, it’s a slam-dunk. Place the order now! However, WLLG still aren’t totally comfortable with the idea and have four observations at the end of the post:

• These tools should never become a perk of being a Councillor. So to ensure they are tools, a business case for why Councillors need them should be put forward that shows how they can be used as tools to further the Councillor’s work.
• Use some procurement sense. As with a contract, work out your options and find the model that offers value for money for the Council.  So would another tablet Computer be able to do the required job, instead of the fancy and fashionable I-pad?
• If the Councillor breaks it, through misuse by them, then they cover the costs. At the end of the day its the Council’s property not theirs.
• This one is not a rule, more a suggestion/question. I’m not sure it would work but could the Council do a similar thing with I-pads that the Cycle to work scheme does? So the Council buys the I-pad and slowly the Councillor buys off the Council, if they want it.  Though I suppose it wouldn’t be tax-free like the cycle scheme.

I’d suggest that this represents a triumph of a grumpy anti-politics that ultimately diminishes the legitimacy of local government itself. It’s a populist starting point that negates so many other important considerations. It’s almost as though we can’t clear our throats without acknowledging the Tax Payers Alliance agenda.

I’m not blaming the good bloggers at WLLG here – it is, after all, endemic. It’s largely unchallenged by any of the main political parties that all claim ownership of the term ‘localism’.

There’s a two way compact between us voters and Councillors (as with all elected representatives): They strive for the highest standards in terms of civic representation (the stuff this blog bores on about all the time) and, in return, we give them a high social status and reasonable compensation to cover the opportunity cost of being a Councillor.

I don’t think either side of this compact is being met – I’d be interested to see how many councillors would be able to write a half-decent A-Level essay on what good representation entails – but I do think it’s time to put a bit of dignity back into local government. Someone has to make the first move.

Where I live, the council is no longer based in a granite monument to municipal values (the Town Hall), it’s on some campus in a part of the borough that’s awkward to get to without a car. I’m sure there’s an excellent business case for this, but there’s no way you can build a case for political decentralisation on the back of an institution that has a purely utilitarian approach to it’s democratic and administrative functions.

Decentralisation doesn’t happen because of some localism agenda that is dreamed up in the the think-tanks of That London. It happens because the core tensions that diminish the legitimacy of local democracy are being addressed. I see no sign of this happening any time soon.

Mark Pack has a very good post up on Lib-Dem Voice – advice for budding politicians: ‘30 things every would-be politician should do this summer‘ (he was inspired by a similar post for aspiring journalists elsewhere).

I really don't know if Niccolò would endorse this advice...

Thirty is a big number – too big for me. But I’ve got a few observations that I’ve been working on that I’d like to offer – in beta – that are intended to help people who are already politicians adapt to the way that interactivity has changed the way that public life is conducted.

There are new possibilities, pitfalls and expectations that need to be met. Here are my ten (draft) ground rules for interactive public representation.

Some of them involve a fundamental rethinking of the standard advice that has been offered to young politicians through the ages:

1. Cut your workload by effective listening. A lack of thinking-time results in indecision and procrastination. Find ways of asking for solutions to small problems and internalising the answers without it disrupting your work. Establish a network of informers – people who will give you short summaries of the key questions that you are facing and answers to little questions. A briefing on how you consume shared information will help here. This is what Twitter can do for you.
2. Build a network of people that you deal with. Social networks are important – they ensure that you have a well of goodwill to draw upon. New technologies allow you to stay in the peripheral vision of large numbers of people. You can even approach a sub-set of your networks and invite them to take very simple steps that will promote your work more widely. To join your ‘relay team’.
3. Find ways of keeping that network informed without doing any extra work. Increasingly, you can show your networks that you’ve read / done / attended something by adapting your personal systems. Many effective communicators use social networking tools effortlessly once they’ve investigated how some APIs and RSS feeds work (you can ask a social media geek to spend a short time sorting this out for you if you need to). This can effortlessly solicit useful recommendations and let the people who work with you know what you’re really interested in. Remember, we all vastly overestimate how much the people we need to know about us actually do know.
4. Switch ‘broadcast’ off. There are ways of effortlessly providing your network of informers with positive feedback and evidence that you have heard them. This will motivate them to provide you with more, better information. The really valuable thing that social networks offer is a cluster of articulate people that you can eavesdrop upon (in a non-sinister, non-intrusive way, naturally). Broadcast is becoming less useful to you anyway for reasons that I’ll come to shortly.
5. Don’t ask for solutions – ask for descriptions of problems. To do the former will attract lobbyists and force you into a frustrating auction of promises. Doing the latter will give you time to think, allow rival pressure groups to neutralise each other, and help build a consensus around any decisions that you ultimately make. Your network of informers and staff need to understand that you expect high standards from those who brief you but this often encourages rather than discourages them. Psychiatrists never tell you what do to. They tell you to talk through your problems. The right answers suggest themselves. That’s ‘the talking cure’.
6. Show your working. By making decisions in a more transparent way, you can explain trade-offs, enhance your reputation for inclusivity and avoid accusations of partiality. The ‘crowdsource a description of the problem’ advice helps here. In the past, this involved bureaucracies and checks and balances. It created monopolies and gatekeepers. It is so much easier to do this now in a highly visible, productive and human way. This is what a blog can help you with.
7. Certainty stops you thinking and silences your advisors. Projecting an air of open-mindedness and a willingness to be persuaded results in better decisions and fewer unintended consequences.
8. Avoid unnecessary partisanship. Politicians always overestimate how much it impresses others. It creates unwanted enemies and cuts off the valuable flow of information that your networks can bring you. Politicians often confess that their best advice sometimes comes from candid and not-unfriendly opponents
9. The ‘big idea’ is dead. Think about it. When is the last time that a politician or organisation ‘unveiled’ a ‘solution’ or a ‘Big Idea’ that no-one had thought of before? Remember how well that was received? Forget it. People don’t want to read your prescriptions. They want to work with you to write them. Your problem – indeed, this may be the biggest ethical challenge that you face – is how you ensure that your interactivity doesn’t skew your decisions in favour of the interests of ‘active citizens’ and away from those of people with mild preferences or those who are unable or unwilling to interact with you when you’re framing your policies.
10. Be good. There was a time that politicians could inhabit a closed order in which they were only judged by the standards of their caste. Those days are over. By being open and interactive, by building a network of friends and informers, by showing your working and being inclusive in the way you make decisions, you will be able to take your place among the more trusted and respected associates that the public encounter every day.

OK, OK, they’re not finished. And none of them ar

(Note: A minor edit was added at 9.58am to point 9)

I was very sad to hear – via Slugger – of the passing of ‘Horseman’ – one of the better (anonymous) bloggers that I have in my RSS feed.

Being busy, I missed his last posting on his Ulster’s Doomed! blog – a terrifically good one at that.

Writing about our image of politicians, Horseman points to one country that stands out – Sweden.

“In Sweden 43.8% of people have a ‘rather favourable’ opinion of their politicians, compared with an EU average of 12.4%. And only 18.4% of Swedes have a ‘rather unfavourable’ opinion, against the EU average of 55.4%.

Swedes are not foolish people, and are no more likely to be fooled by their politicians than anyone else, so what these results show is that Swedish politicians are simply better than any others. If their voters have a positive opinion of them it must be because they are more honest, more diligent, more representative and more efficient than any others.

And, of course, good politicians lead to good politics and good governance – and these lead, almost inevitably, to a more responsive state in which the needs of the people are served better than elsewhere. No wonder Sweden is close to the top of the list in almost every international comparison, whether it is looking at freedom, affluence, education, development or happiness.

Whatever it is that Swedish politicians are doing, they are doing it well, and their voters are happy with them. We need to learn from them.”

We may all have our explanations for this. My own suspicion is that there is a more entrenched culture of inclusion and an awareness of (and strategy for neutralising) the damaging disruption that unrepresentative pressure groups and media interests bring to bear on public life.

But back to Horseman, briefly. He was a very good blogger – quite a number cruncher and one with an idiosyncratic standpoint (as all of the best bloggers have). His main story was a belief that the nationalist electorate would overtake the unionist one in Northern Ireland at some point in the middle-future. It wasn’t one that I bought wholesale, given the relative lack of actual hardcore nationalist sentiment among Northern Ireland catholics. But that’s for another day.

My sympathies are with his family and friends for whom he must be a huge loss.

There’s a good post up here on Conservative Home about what advice MPs should take seriously. I had one here a while ago about personality types – it would be good to do anything that could be done to weight these models – help the poor buggers to work out how they should be behaving at the moment.

As a prelude to a bit of election-related fun research, I’m compiling a list of the different attributes that we expect to see combined under the bonnet of the perfect MP.

Just for the avoidance of doubt, I don’t expect any candidate to fit firmly into any of these categories – I’m going to be looking to see what different attributes we are expecting from them.

Once I’ve finalised the list, I’m going to do a ‘constant value’ survey on this blog – giving you all a fixed number of ‘tokens’ to spread around the different character-types. It would be interesting to see what voters want from their politicians – and I may repeat the exercise with local councillors at a later date.

Please note: This list / descriptions are rich in prejudice (mine). If you can come up with a better list, counter-proposals, better descriptions, etc, let me know in the comments?

Now, are there any that I’ve missed so far?

• The judge – a learned and experienced civic leader, hearing different arguments from constituents, weighing them and reaching a decision that everyone has to accept most of the time. Wouldn’t expect to take sides and would expect to refer constituents to the Citizens Advice Bureau: “It’s my job to make the laws – show me if they’re not fair and I’ll try to change them – but I’m not your social worker”
• The juror – an everyperson who has to be studiously fair-minded. A juror has  to be free of any personal interest in a case and should step aside if this is not the case. They expect evidence to be presented to them, then they then reach a decision based upon their own informal framework of fairness rather than a rigid and mechanistic application of the law. We don’t have high expectations of them as individuals, but in groups, we are reasonably confident of their ability to be wise and fair
• The people’s politician – sticking up for the silent majority – knows what people really think and will always stand up to the self-serving elites. Less interested in what metropolitan elites think and more in tune with the natural wisdom of the people who write to them. A good ear for popular discontent.
• The monk / nun – someone who is a (perhaps) improbable example of virtue to all of us. Hair-shirt types with a fairly inflexible and easy-to-understand morality. You can depend on them though….
• The entrepreneur - lively, adventurous, risk-taker. Careful – but not that careful. Good with figures and tight on spending. Creative and lateral-thinking, win-more-than-they-lose, expect hefty remuneration and like to be in charge.
• The entertainer – clever, witty, not over-ideological but a good conversationalist – likely to be generally even-handed and able to bring the best out in people. Trusted, mostly….
• Beacon of virtue – a successful high-profile individual who stands up against corruption rather than getting involved in ideological debates. Using their wealth and success in the public interest
• The includer – someone who goes out of their way to make sure that everyone has the chance to have their say – outgoing, open-minded and non-doctrinaire and terribly earnest
• The social worker – takes up cases of the less fortunate people who visit their surgeries. Lots of time spent on casework and letter-writing. Spends more time solving constituents problems than attending to high-flown matters of state up at Westminster.
• ‘Our scoundrel’ – on the logic that ‘if they don’t know how to look after themselves, they won’t be able to look out for us either’. This MP pulls the odd flanker to get a bigger budget for a local project and probably awards a few of the contracts to a few associates. But so what ? We got an a better MRI Scanner for our hospital than the jobsworth who represents the constituency up the road, didn’t we?
• Tub-thumper – not necessarily conventional views, but always worth listening to. Strong views – often controversial and provocative. Good at getting people talking and starting a debate. Fairly fixed in their views and hard to budge when they think they’re right
• Youth Club Manager – works long hours, keeps any eye out for the more vulnerable kids on the estate. Firm, fair and pragmatic. Probably  not a genius but not overly dogmatic either. This MP cares about others so that we don’t have to.
• Senior-serious-smart – a combination of the old-fashioned head teacher / bank manager /mandarin. A good chess /poker player. Knows how things are done and how to organise a department. Makes their own decisions because they know things that you don’t. Know that you don’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.
• The party activist knows that there is no ‘i’ in team and understands the need for consistency. Accepts collective decisions and sticks to them. Used to think that politics is about a clash of big ideas (and still does sometimes) but also knows it’s about striking a balance between principle and electability – after all, if you lose elections, all of your moral posturing is for the birds.
• The gamer – a problem solver. Very creative and lateral thinking. Doesn’t need paying much but a bit of social status would be nice. Takes lots of risks, fails a lot with serious consequences for all. But a good gamer can make a massive impact on a problem in the end by looking at things the way that others wouldn’t
• Think tank director – funny-shaped head and really irritating little square glasses. High level thinker, politically astute and business-savvy. Knows what works and is able to sell ideas. Knows how to create strategic paths to bring make gamechanging policies work.
• Community activist- someone who knows how to get things done at a street level. A bit nimby-ish but very keen on the local environment. Nose-in-everything, won’t-take-no-for-an-answer, personal-hygiene-not-a-priority, writing-a-bloody-letter-to-The Guardian, member of Greenpeace, heart-in-the-right-place-though and we’re glad there are a few like them around…
• Community warden – someone who goes around making sure that bureaucrats do their job. Finding examples of things that should be done but aren’t. This MP makes sure everyone knows their entitlements and responsibilities and a gallery of these can be seen on Glum Councillors.

If you click around the categories and tags (below) you’ll find more articles on this general subject ….. (it’s not a new one here)

Ewan McIntosh has picked another example of augmented reality up:

“Point your mobile phone at the person speaking at the lectern, the cute person in the bar or that potential recruit and see, hovering around their head, all their social networks, tastes in music and books, and dodgy photos from last night.”

The potential is quite interesting, but it’s also a bit scary. In a post here a while ago, I asked what the upsides and downsides were of forcing politicians to be ostentatious in their displays of personal virtue and openness. But former BBC Newsnight Editor Brian Walker seems to be going a good bit further in raising demands for personal transparency in this post quoting Mo Mowlem’s cancer specialist Mark Glazer over at Slugger O’Toole.

Shorter version: Mo Mowlem had a frontal lobe tumour – a condition that “can cause disinhibition, behavioural disturbance and poor judgement” at a time in which she played a critical role in fostering the negotiation of Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement. This was almost a wartime posting and any errors of judgement could have had serious consequences.

So, disinhibition, behavioural disturbance and poor judgement then? Sounds familliar:

If you want to argue for mental health tests, then maybe you have to also demand a daily breathalyser? Churchill was thought to have rarely been sober beyond lunchtime during the war and we seemed to do alright in that one, didn’t we?

Senior corporate roles within PLCs have made both physical and mental health a pre-requisite. It’s not just footballers that have to have a medical as part of their job-interview any more. When a friend of mine sought a board-level post on one of the UK’s larger PLCs, I was astonished at the degree of intrusion that she had to agree to -it was not just the bog-standard psychometric testing either. One thing made this process manageable though: She was well advised not to tell anyone in her professional circle that she was applying for the job in the first place – something that she had no problem doing.

If it was public knowledge that she’d gone for the job, and she didn’t get it, then her mental health would have been a matter of public speculation.

Applying this kind of corporate risk-aversion to representative government adds a new layer of bureaucracy that politicians have to be responsible to – one that competes with their primary responsibility to those who elect them.

This isn’t entirely a one way street though, as the Guardian article that Brian points to notes:

“As time has worn on, Glaser has begun to feel that her illness may, oddly, have been a reason for the success of the peace talks, rather than a cause of instability that threatened them. “She was racing against time,” he says.”

Surely this is another argument for distributed authority in which decisions are taken in a collegiate way by a diverse group of individuals rather than they are made currently? And is this insistence upon individual public virtues actually a symptom of a decline in the quality of our democracy?

Perhaps a group of individual drunks, lunatics and hypocrites making collegiate decisions would make produce better policies than a group of buttoned up risk-averse purveyors of public cant with strong individual powers? And, as Brendan O’Neill argued a while ago, isn’t politics and democracy supposed to be about a clash of ideas and principles rather than a game of personal one-upmanship?

Just a quick signpost to this post on the ReadWriteWeb blog about. I think that this observation has implications for the nature of representation – and even for leadership.

“Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh once wrote that Twitter made him “a better and happier person.” He asks, “What would you do differently if there were a permanent public record of what you do or say?” Hsieh argues that Twitter adds a public broadcast element that reminds him to be more positive, thankful and empathetic. He writes that those same values trickle down to the corporate culture of Zappos.”

And political representatives really do need a bit of that positivity at the moment. It does beg the question: Does the use of these interactive tools – always staying in the peripheral vision of friends, journalists, colleagues, rivals, constituents and peers – make us more empathetic or attractive? And if so, is it possible that these tools could be the saviour – rather than the undertaker – of representative democracy?

The January 2010 issue of Wired Magazine has a bunch of policy-related proposals under the slightly familiar heading ‘Let’s Reboot Britain’.

It’s always a slightly trying time, reading Wired when it strays into politics and public policy. For an example of what I’m talking about, this article (Synopsis: I know! Now somebody’s invented teh internet, we can have referendums about everything all the time!) captures the mood and raises the question of how some of it ever slips by an editor in the first place.

But there’s also one that is well worth a look: The idea of publishing all laws in beta format. For those of you who aren’t techie-inclined, this means that laws could be released in the way that software is. Most software – in it’s early versions – isn’t actually that good. It’s often released cheaply or free of charge and feedback loops are established and monitored carefully. The best software often starts off clunky and full of holes. Perhaps good laws could follow a similar trajectory?

There is another post about the need to encourage failure – again taking the paradigm of technical innovation and applying it to civil society.

I mention these because they represent potentially innovative approaches. But they would also involve a huge reassessment of politicians. It would require a more consultative personality and a recasting of the notion of ‘leadership’. It would need the lust for certainty to be understood as a sin again.

And continuing my current uncharacteristic love-in with The Conservatives at the moment, the idea of publishing elements from a manifesto in draft and then inviting the public to ask questions, seek clarifications and propose improvements runs contrary to the traditional political Zeitgeist in which u-turns and muddles are cardinal sins. Taking it even further, Jeremy Hunt is promising to put all Green Papers online as a commentable document during a Public Reading Stage. A few weeks ago, the cheeky sods did the same thing with a leaked government IT strategy document – again, combining mischief with a deft understanding of what is possible.

The need to respond rapidly and firmly to the shrill demands of the rolling 24 hour media was a cornerstone of New Labour. It can be explained – at least in part – by the fact that Labour has traditionally had a more adversarial relationship with the media than the Conservatives, but it didn’t make for particularly good policy-making as this TV documentary illustrated.

If the Tories can break this cycle, it won’t be a bad thing by any means.

(Update: I’ve fixed the second link in this article now – apologies).