Douglas Carswell's Blog

What if all politicians started to blog?

Listening to various witnesses give evidence at the Leveson inquiry has made me feel uncomfortable. The impression of chumminess between the political elite and the media elite just does not feel quite right.

As David Cameron has put it, there’s been “too much cosying up” to media types by party leaders all round.  

But what should we do about it? 

A new Independent Press Standards Agency (IPSA) to regulate such contacts, perhaps?  Absolutely not. New rules preventing ministers from ever exchanging ideas with anyone outside the civil service? Heaven forbid.

Maybe the answer is much more straightforward. Ministers and MPs all need to blog.

Why do you think politicians toady up to media barons in the first place? Because they want the media big wigs to help them get their message across to the voters. Curry favour with the media people, and they’ll put your slant on things. 

But the internet ought to let ministers and party leaders get their message out there directly. If ministers were to blog, there’d be less need to seek favour from those who might otherwise filter the message.

Sure there would still be a mainstream media.  But it would have to report what our elected representatives actually wrote, not feed us a faux impression of them that their best buddies in the media wanted the rest of us to have.  

There'd be less need for politicians to maintain a stable of pet pundits as cheer leaders. Less need to have “spin doctors” help them weave that web of inauthentic blah blah that those outside SW1 increasingly despise.   

If all politicians were to start blogging, we would start to learn what they – not the party machine – thought about things. We would have to get used to the idea that different people in the same party have different ideas – and stop calling it a gaff.

Who knows, we might even start to respect our politicians once again ..... 

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