DID YOU SEE that video on You-Tube? The one where the Birmingham MP Siôn Simon invited people to sleep with David Cameron’s wife and take his children. Do you know what my first thought was when I saw it? How cheap.
And by this I don’t mean that I thought it was tacky. I mean that I was struck by how little money it must have cost.
You see, there was a time when to make as big a chump as Mr Simon has made of himself, to be a contender for the Nobel Prize for Chumpishness, to insult the other party leader and the public’s intelligence on film, you had to have a large political machine and millions of pounds of other people’s money at your disposal. I know. I’ve done it.
What makes Mr Simon’s video an important moment is that to achieve his political bellyflop he only required a video camera and a PC. The presence of another politician (cameraman Tom Watson, MP) with equally little judgment (think Blunkett-class) was an optional extra.
Tomorrow the former civil servant Sir Hayden Phillips will release his interim report on the funding of political parties. Sir Hayden is an extremely skilled operator and his work will be earnestly discussed, I’m sure, as if its conclusions mattered and its reforms (whatever they might be) stood a chance of working. The truth is that it will be utterly irrelevant.
For Sir Hayden will be reporting on how to finance existing political institutions just as those institutions are being changed beyond recognition by forces we barely understand into forms we cannot predict.
Perhaps you’ve heard of the reality TV show Survivor. It has been a worldwide ratings phenomenon, but that’s not what interested the media commentator Henry Jenkins. Professor Jenkins has been studying a group called the Survivor Sucksters for his book Convergence Culture.
The Sucksters (so-called because their original web discussion list was called Survivor Sucks) are individuals devoted to spoiling the television series. They spend an unbelievable amount of time trying to work out what happened when the programme was filmed and what might then happen in each episode. They don’t, incidentally, want to spoil it for anyone else. Just, bizarrely, for themselves.
Let me give you an example of the lengths they go to. Survivor involves a number of people being stranded in a secret, remote location and then eliminated (“booted”) from the programme one by one until the winner is left. So one Suckster, a travel agent, scours her industry contacts until she finds a large booking to a remote destination.
At which point, her colleague, working with the Denver-based Space Imaging Company, uses high- resolution commercial remote-sensing satellite to scan the area from space to find tell-tale appropriate buildings. Meanwhile, other Sucksters are trying to piece together who was on the programme and then compare old pictures of them with more recent one. By assessing their weight loss. an estimate can be made of how long they spent on the show before they were booted.
Oh my God. These people are so mad Tony Blair might make them Home Secretary.
Their eccentricity, however, is not Jenkins’s point. Convergence Culture looks at the tussle between the Sucksters and the show’s producers for control of Survivor. They love each other and hate each other in equal measure, relying on each other while frightened that they might kill each other off. Survivor Sucksters are one example, among many, of the way that new media forms are supplementing and challenging traditional media outlets.
Last week Tim Montgomerie, the editor of the conservativehome.com website, the premier independent source of insider Conservative news, and Iain Dale, the Conservative activist and blogger, launched their own internet television station, 18 Doughty Street TV. It’s as if the Sucksters had started their own Survivor. Bloggers have been commenting on the news and now they are running their own TV station.
In Montgomerie’s case, his relationship with the official Conservative machine is very similar to that between the Sucksters and the show producers — love and hate, reliance and fear.
Although the success of the Doughty Street venture is far from assured, its creation, like that of the Siôn Simon video, is a strong indication of the way that independent forces are now going to supplement and challenge the official apparatus. The EU is alarmed enough to wish to regulate internet TV, a barmy idea.
The traditional shape of politics — strong, centralised staffs under the control of the party leadership producing propaganda aimed at a very few media outlets — will be changed profoundly. The grip of the Westminster press lobby will be loosened as will that of the Whips’ Office.
Party activists, perhaps without bothering to join officially, will communicate directly with each other and with voters. Individual MPs will establish their own campaigns, develop their own lines to take, shoot their own suicidally stupid and juvenile party broadcasts.
And while all this is happening dear old Sir Hayden and the party leaders will be pottering on trying to regulate party funding as if, for all the world, it will be possible in future to regulate such things. For all the world as if the money won’t just flow elsewhere, to the Sucksters out there, making their own programmes and propaganda beyond the reach of the regulators.
We don’t know yet what politics will look like in 30 years’ time, just as we don’t know what converged media will look like. But we do know this: the change is coming. Get ready.
