Nigel.

That said, completely agree that video is a great tool to put across your candidate in an unintermediated way. The challenge, as ever, with any internet method of campaigning, is to get people to see it.

Currently, all the significant impact seems to have been when people have made a PR story out of it (as we did with our videos during conference), and irrespective of the quality of the video, in these terms, the Cameron videos are probably going to be seen as a success.

In terms of the content of Cameron’s video, all I can remember a few hours later is David Cameron doing the washing-up… er that’s it. Enough to make people vote for him? Not convinced.

I thought they were interesting. The screaming baby does sound quite persistent, but in fact when he breaks off to talk to his child, he does actually come across as quite natural and normal. This makes it all the more jarring when he stops talking to them with “where was I? oh yes” and then goes straight back into full-politician mode, complete with lots of emphatic hand gestures as if he were on a platform somewhere.

I read in the press that they were intended to appeal to younger people and those who are not that politically engaged. I’m not sure he succeeds with this: his appeal that MPs should not decide their own salaries is easily comprehensible to anyone, I guess, but before long he is talking about the value of the constituency link, and other relatively obscure constitutional points that might be of interest to politicos but for a normal person not versed in the arguments for and against PR is surely relatively technical. Whatever it is that’s going to decide how people on estates round here vote at the next General Election, it’s not a demand for a cut in the number of special advisers.

And the contrived casualness does look a bit silly – I mean can’t he just tell us what he thinks, without having to do it while he’s loading the dishwasher?

But having said all this I do think video casting of this kind (or whatever it’s called – I’m sure someone’ll correct me in a minute ) is a good way of politicians telling their story themselves and helping us to get to know them better. Cameron’s problem is just that it helps us to realise that he’s a bit of a pillock really.

But there have been several other things we’ve done on top.

The primary thing is that we’ve designed it for the web from the very beginning. And the policy consultations are designed to put an essentially paper and meetings based process onto the web in relatively unchanged form.

Is TakingPower perhaps benefitting from being “cross party”?

Not sure either is ideal though. TakingPower, which has been less constrained (using video, surveys, polls, daily debates etc.) appears to have had more activity than all eleven ‘official’ sites (both Tory and Lib Dem) added together.

“Sorry for the inconvenience but due to high volumes of traffic, WebCameron (BETA)
is currently unavailable.”

Nigel Ashton.

The first two videos I looked at both seemed to be “Welcome to the site”, with Cameron saying some of the same stuff – don’t know why they used both.