For a man whose notoriety is based on the speed with which he vacuums up sensational information and immediately regurgitates it upon an unsuspecting world, the question can only be: what took him so long?

Prince Harry had been in Afghanistan a whole ten weeks and the internet’s biggest news peddler hadn’t uttered a word about it. Clearly he didn’t know. Matt Drudge is not one to agonise about ethics. He’ll post first and let others ask questions later.

Many in the British media, and even a number of bloggers, kept quiet about the Prince’s service all that time. But finally somebody blabbed. Foreign newspapers had said that the Prince was in Afghanistan or Iraq. But the final word could easily have come from one of Drudge’s many sources. In the decade since his biggest scoop, many in the media have passed on information to Drudge, a process he has referred to as “kissing the ring.”

That story, of course, was that Newsweek magazine had killed an article about President Clinton having an affair with an intern in the Oval Office. The next day Drudge had her name: Monica Lewinsky. After a very sluggish start, the rest of the media played catch up. We know the rest.

It is unlikely Drudge will ever top that scoop. But as this week has shown, he still breaks stories. Before the Prince Harry furore he had detonated a small incendiary device in the middle of the Presidential campaign by putting up a photograph of Barack Obama in the dress of a Somali elder. He said that the picture was being circulated by someone in Hillary’s campaign, sparking claims of dirty tricks from the Obama camp and furious denials from the former First Lady.

Previously it had been reported as an intriguing irony that the campaign of a woman who had seen her husband’s peccadilloes exposed by Drudge should be so cosy with him. It has been claimed that titbits of news have been given by the campaign to Drudge ahead of the rest of the media. And if he has appeared obsessed with her campaign, it is hardly surprising given that the Clintons have kept readers logging onto his site in their millions.

His site has been called America’s “bulletin board” and he himself “the most powerful journalist in America” and “the Walter Cronkite of his era”, a reference to the famous news anchor of the 1960s and 70s who had huge power over the direction of the news agenda.

Much of the time Drudge does not break stories, but picks up and amplifies those of others that are then followed by traditional media outlets. This is even true in the case of Prince Harry. The story had been reported elsewhere, including an Australian newspaper, but almost nobody else had seen it. Once an item is on Drudge the world knows. His site is visited more than those of The New York Times or Fox News.

Drudge likes to cultivate a sense of mystery about himself. He rarely gives interviews and little is known about his private life. In one of the few times that he has talked he said: “I have not missed a day in nearly 13 years. They keep saying ‘Oh, the secret life of Matt Drudge..’ There is no secret life here. It is found literally on the website, because this is all I’ve been doing.”

He was born in 1966, grew up in a Washington suburb, the son of liberal Democrat parents who divorced when he was six. He did poorly at school, didn’t go to college and drifted to Los Angeles, where he worked in a gift shop for years before realising the potential of the internet. He started a subscription gossip newsletter but became more famous than most of the people he had been writing about when he landed the Lewinsky scoop, presumably from somebody close to Linda Tripp, the erstwhile friend of the intern who taped their conversations.

He has a nationwide radio show on which he expands on his libertarian conservative views. He has a hatred of surveillance and big government. On his site he displays some more curious obsessions, including pet rescues and the weather, particularly hurricanes. The latter would be explained by the fact that he lives in Miami. Or at least he did when somebody last pinned him down.

While he is reclusive, Drudge loves being known. He once disclosed that he searches databases every morning to see how often the news media has written about him and joked that “I love it when I pop up in the Jakarta Times.”

Today Drudge has been running links to articles in American and British newspapers about Prince Harry, including that the story was broken on his website and that the result was that the young royal would be coming home. But the story had dropped down his own news agenda; his main item was a picture of Hillary Clinton grinning in a somewhat maniacal fashion in front of a picture of a horned figure.

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