James Fletcher was one of the behind the scenes quiet players of the Cameron era, he produced the videos that gave Dave a modernised feel, did some of the WebCameron stuff and went on to do campaign videos for Boris back in the day. He worked with Lynton Crosby over the years and was rumoured to be, in concert with Dominic Cummings, the ventriloquist behind @SteveHiltonGuru. Even though James opposed Brexit, he made some of the Vote Leave campaign videos. He eventually left SW1 and British politics for New York City, to settle down and marry a CNN anchor a few years ago…
James went West to make movies and his latest is a documentary about how a gameshow host bagged the presidency and became the most powerful person on earth. It has some great interviews with some of the key figures of the era. It is streaming now on Apple TV and Amazon Prime…
Missing reading old George Osborne speeches about the moral case for low taxes? Or the one when he promised to raise the inheritance tax threshold? Have no fear, they are all still available from the British Library – including the 2006 to 2010 Cameron opposition period:
Guido is of course too modest to mention who else they record for posterity…
“Brown believes the days of political parties as ‘small organisations of people who are accused of talking to themselves’ are over. In future, constituency parties will become local hubs, building links with other networks and groups, and using new technology to reach out way beyond their usual supporters… There are so many different forms of communication – writing, phoning, the internet – at the moment we’re not doing enough to keep people informed and to show people that when they have a view, we’re prepared to listen to them.”
How is he doing at keeping people informed about his exciting campaign-hub-network-thingy for Britain? Well their feeble copy of the original Where’s Gordon?™ has only 4 reports of his whereabouts in 20 days, the original managed daily updates. The thousands of votes for a discussion on the NHS are ignored, there is no discussion. The whole site is as dead as wooden rocking horse, it is an ex-listening, ex-campaigning website. His whole “engaging online” guff is all bullshit, he doesn’t need to win votes so the whole need to engage is just tiresome. Guido knows WebCameron and WebGordon is no WebCameron.
Gordon now has no need to listen, no need to engage, no need to win a mandate from his party or the wider electorate. He will assume power and we will just have to lump it.
Sam Roake, formerly the Head of Web Campaigning at CCHQ, has left the building. He is keeping tight-lipped about the reasons why, as is CCHQ. Presumably there has been a falling out since as far as Guido can determine he has not got another job to go to.
Last week they quietly re-launched the WebCameron site, it is actually a step backwards technically from the one Roake created. It now focuses on Dave’s Diary (tip: make the posts shorter and more often Dave, like errm, Dale’s Diary). It has a forum which is based on off-the-shelf software. Gone is that pesky “Ask Dave”, gone is the uploading of user generated content, gone is all the cutting edge stuff.
WebCameron now has all the capability and cutting edge cheap look and feel of the LibDem Youth and Students website but with videos. In short it is a step backwards. Simple geeky details like the RSS feeds changing without warning meant that subscribers didn’t notice, they just stopped getting their feeds, Guido didn’t notice any email warning either. Sloppy.
The Tories are now looking to hire a replacement, with a wish-list of abilities that are much in demand in the Clerkenwell-Soho hot-spots of the Web 2.0 mini-bubble. Rishi Saha, of Pimp-My-Party fame, is searching for a Tory leaning geek. Roake won’t be unemployed for long.
UPDATE : Guido now understands that Roake has received offers already. Bubble 2.0 is definitely out of Beta.
So says David Cameron, or at least that is the inference to be made from his blog about the use of the term “Islamist terrorists”.It’s hard to over-emphasise the importance of language. I know it sounds like a side issue, but it isn’t. We are just not getting this right. Every time the BBC or a politician talks about “Islamist terrorists” they are doing immense harm..
Gove’s book, Celsius 7/7, refers to “Islamist terrorists” on almost every page. Guido has only read the reviews and very mixed they were. Guido’s strategy for dealing with the clash of civilisations utilises iPods, mini-skirt clad girls, Playboy, Jack Daniels & Coca Cola, Sony PlayStations and Ferraris in a kulturkampf to convince disaffected young male muslims of the superior attractions of Western values. Not sure if Gove advocated that kind of hearts and minds strategy, but it would be much more effective than lessons in civics or whatever it is that Blunkett and Reid advocate. Which strikes Guido as fundamentally misunderstanding the primal motivations of disaffected young males…
