The Perils of Political Blogging

I was chatting by email yesterday to a fellow blogger. He's currently a local councillor but he's got ambitions to be an MP and he's already jumped through the hoops that the parties put you through these days of fighting an unwinnable seat first, so the party gets a chance to look at you. After that it's a case of dead man's shoes: waiting for an MP to either die or announce they're not standing at the next election and then getting on the candidate short list.

As you'll gather from my opening remark he's a blogger. He blogs regularly about issues that concern him on his home patch and, when he's trying to get selected for a constituency elsewhere in the country he visits there and then blogs on what he finds. I'm all in favour of it. The more people putting their head above the parapet and talking about the issues the better: that's how we engage voters.

But here's the problem. He now suspects that other candidates are reading his blog and using it to give themselves an advantage over him. So he's pretty much stopped blogging.

That seems like a shame. I've suggested he change strategy and blog only on more local issues, rather than those targeted postings he's done before aimed at the seats where he's hoping to be selected. That would show that he's active and engaged locally, so likely to do a good job in the target seat, without revealing his hand on the issues he's identified in the target seat.