When it comes to the web, are you John Julius Norwich, or Alan Clark?
The Times’s Daniel Finkelstein has, this week, become the latest to follow in the footsteps of the second Viscount Norwich, while the statistics suggest that the author, broadcaster and former parliamentary candidate Iain Dale has become the obvious heir to the Clark legacy.
Daniel’s emulation of John Julius has nothing to do with his following Lord Norwich into the field of authoring culturally learned historical narrative. And Iain’s statistical claim to the Clark legacy has nothing to do with the number of romantic conquests that he’s chalked up. No, what links Daniel to Viscount Norwich, Iain to Alan Clark, and indeed all of them to each other, is the blogosphere.
Daniel is simply the latest writer to free himself from the constraints of newsprint and carve out a distinctive niche for himself as an online literary presence. His new blog, Comment Central, appears on the Times website and provides Daniel with an opportunity to guide readers towards the most interesting articles, snippets, analysis and comment anywhere on the web.
In that respect, Daniel’s blog fulfils the same function every day — indeed, given how often it will be updated, several times a day — as Viscount Norwich used to fulfil every year. The John Julius Norwich “Christmas Cracker” has been a staple seasonal gift for years now. A miscellany of amusing, interesting and provoking literary snippets, historical gems and contemporary observations, it has been a riotously successful commercial take on the old idea of The Author’s Commonplace Book. The idea behind the commonplace book was that the man of letters would file away in one place all the interesting pieces of prose that he came across in his reading, whether they were particularly revealing insights or just astonishingly well written. It would then become a personal “best of” compilation, the literary equivalent of the compilation “party tapes” that many of us used to put together, with the most compelling tracks that we had come across in hours of bedroom listening put together for our friends.
The original idea behind blogs, or weblogs as they were originally christened and no one now calls them, was that they should be virtual commonplace books, online Christmas crackers, logging the best of what was on the web every day, just as John Julius Norwich assembles the best of what he’s read for the delight of his friends every year. What makes the best commonplace books, or blogs, special is the editors’ personality and skill in selecting just the right mix to inform and entertain. And in that respect, Daniel, as a comment editor who has years of experience in selecting and showcasing original opinion, is destined to prove a brilliant logger of the web, alongside acknowledged leaders in the field such as Andrew Sullivan.
But while the original weblogger was meant to have the skills of a great commonplace book editor, most blogs, it has to be admitted, are scarcely edited and just plain commonplace. Increasingly, blogs have become just the logs of what people happen to have done that day, unadorned diary entries, placed on the web. So many bloggers have become little more than electronic Adrian Moles or 21st-century Pooters, inclined to imagine that the minutiae of their daily lives is intrinsically interesting because it’s posted on the net.
But amid all the self-absorption there are some online diarists whose work transcends the herd. Just as most diaries are dull, while some are of passing interest to a minority (Roy Strong’s for connoisseurs of social climbing, Richard Crossman’s for political historians), so there are others (Samuel Pepys, Alan Clark) that survive because of the quality of the writing and, above all, the quality of the gossip. Our mental picture of the Thatcher years will forever be framed by the pen portraits and gossip in Clark’s writing. It’s no wonder he sold hundreds of thousands.
And, in that respect, Clark’s modern-day equivalent is Iain Dale. His online diary had almost 150,000 visitors last month, which gives him a readership in the UK more comprehensive than, say, The Economist. And what makes Iain’s diary so popular is the quality of gossip that he imparts. It’s not just the sort of amusing material that makes its way into newspaper diary columns. Iain breaks big political stories, and has revealed material about John Prescott, Philip Anschutz and the Dome that has stormed on to newspaper front pages.
What makes Daniel and Iain so successful is what made John Julius Norwich and Alan Clark their respective market leaders — intelligence, writing ability, wit and (perhaps not so much in Clark’s case) judgment. The internet may be more immediate than traditional publishing, and more democratic in the ease with which anyone can carve space out for their work, but ultimately the same imperatives imply on the web as in Waterstone’s — sooner or later quality will out.
Action stations?
During early August there was a growing demand that the Prime Minister lead the call for an immediate ceasefire in the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. Mr Blair was lambasted for his indifference to Muslim suffering by some of his own, hitherto most loyal, supporters. Now that a ceasefire has been concluded, the UN and EU are sending troops there, to help, it is hoped, avert future conflict.
Meanwhile, the Government of Sudan, which has killed hundreds of thousands of its own citizens, Christian and Muslim, has just kicked out some peacekeepers from the African Union, who were providing the last, flimsy, protection to the people of Darfur. The Sudanese Government has also said no to any new UN deployment. Many more innocent Muslims will now die at the hands of a state which has already been responsible for terrible suffering.
Will there now be marches through London to demand we take action? Will Labour backbenchers insist on the recall of Parliament? Or will we once again be reminded of the moral relativism to which so many have now succumbed, where its never worth protesting against an evil unless it can be blamed on America?
A tropical nip
Since student days, autumn has been my favourite season. Primarily because that’s when the climate is best for enjoying a proper pint, ie, not lager. You need a cold day to appreciate room-temperature beer. But my favourite pint, India Pale Ale, was designed to be drunk in the tropics. Can any reader enlighten me as to why bitter tastes better when the wind gets nippier, and why an ale designed for the noonday sun of the Raj is still ideal for a September evening in Surrey?
The writer is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath
