Derek Draper and the Labour new media blitz - minus women

There was an interesting post on Guido Fawkes last week about a new media breakfast being hosted by Derek Draper at which Blue State digital presented how Labour can use the internet to win the next British election. PR Week reported, after the event:

PR Week has learned that [Philip] Gould was present at a ‘new media breakfast’ meeting which took place in London this morning.

Also present was David Lammy, the Labour MP with the best connections to US president-elect Barack Obama.

The meeting was convened by Derek Draper, who is overseeing the party’s blogging initiative. It was attended by an assortment of Labour-supporting bloggers, PR professionals and political campaigners....

PR Week added:

A handpicked selection of 77 individuals were invited to attend the meeting and around 60 are thought to have attended.

Those who were invited but could not make it included Weber Shandwick European CEO Colin Byrne and Google European comms director D-J Collins, but both are understood to be fully behind of the initiative.

Guido kindly added the names of those who were invited:

Tom Watson, Colin Byrne, Sadie Smith, Mark Hanson, Simon Buckby, David Clark, Charlie Whelan, Chuka Umunna, Sue Macmillan, DJ Collins, Sarah Mulholland, Richard Angell, Ed Owen, Simon Alcock, Douglas Alexander, Patrick Diamond, Sunder Katwala, Gavin Hayes, Jessica Asato, Robert Philpot, Richard Huntington, Tristram Hunt, Ben Wegg-Prosser, Damian McBride, Andrew Dodgshon, Theo Blackwell, Tom Miller, Tim Allan, David Bradshaw, Stuart Bruce , Jag Singh, Matt Strong, Paul Simpson, Spencer Livermore, Ed Owen, Chris McShane, Matthew Taylor, Alex Finnegan, John Miles, Adam Dustagheer, Dan Thain, Mark Lucas, Luke Pollard, James Crabtree, Tim Shand, Alex Hilton, Simon Redfern, William Davies, Howard Dawber, Nick Anstead, Richard Lane, Jon Steinberg, Pete Bowyer, Steve Cowan, Hopi Sen, Luke Bozier, Andy Regan, Toby Flux, David Taylor, Chris McShane, Matthew McGregor, Noel Hatch, Sunny Hundal, Greg Jackson, Dave Prescott, Luke Akehurst, Phil Dilks, Jonathan Upton, Simon Fletcher, Tom Price, John Stolliday, Adrian McMenamin, Paul Hilder, Paul Miller, Ben Brandzel, Anthony Painter, Ravi Gurumurthy.

Now I have no idea if this list is accurate, but notice only one fact: there are - I think - four women's names. Perhaps Guido was misinformed about the composition of the Labour leaning digerati?


Or perhaps Muscular technocracy is now the engine of British politics as well?


Those Big Beasts.

The Return of the Big Beasts: plumbers too

Bagehot in last weeks' Economist ran a piece about the return of the big beasts. Here's what Bagehot means:

Now, almost as a herd, these resting big beasts, the formidable and the chimerical, seem to be moving back to the front-line of politics. It is a telling migration.

The most exotic specimen to be unleashed is, of course, Lord Mandelson, resurrected as business secretary in October. Gordon Brown also brought Margaret Beckett and Nick Brown, two other veteran ministers, back into government. Less conspicuously, he has been taking advice from Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s hatchet-man. Rumours that Alan Milburn, a former health secretary, is set for a role in policy formulation may be unfounded. But David Blunkett—who, like Lord Mandelson, twice resigned from the cabinet—may re-surface. Peter Hain—forced out by a funding scandal in January, but now partially rehabilitated—retains Mr Brown’s esteem. On the Tory side, there is persistent talk of using Ken Clarke, a former chancellor, home secretary, health secretary (and so on) for more than the odd policy commission. Mr Cameron has already offered him a job once, and the two are on good terms. Michael Howard, Mr Cameron’s predecessor as leader, is increasingly conspicuous on television.

Meanwhile Jack Shafer, pimping his Slate death watch on newspapers (Shafer plays Pythia to Jeff Jarvis's Apollo these days), comes up with a list of jobs lost because of the digital:

• Bank tellers
• Typewriters
• Typesetting
• Carburetors
• Vacuum tubes
• Slide rules
• Disc jockeys
• Stockbrokers
• Telephone operators
• Yellow pages
• Repair guys
• Bookbinders
• Pimps (displaced by the cell phone and the Web)
• Cassette and reel-to-reel recorders
• VCRs
• Turntables
• Video stores
• Record stores
• Bookstores
• Recording industry
• Courier/messenger services
• Travel agencies
• Print and cinematic porn
• Porn actors
• Stenographers
• Wired telcos
• Drummers
• Toll collectors (slayed by the E-ZPass)
• Book publishing (especially reference works)
• Conventional-watch makers
• "Browse" shopping
• U.S. Postal Service
• Printing-press makers
• Film cameras
• Kodak (and other film-stock makers)

Reading the list I'm wondering whether any of these Big Beasts will make a come-back in 2009. I think some will. Call it the new arts and craft movement: a reverence for well made books, hand made limited editions, film rather than pixels; vinyl has already made its case, and drummers won't ever go away, not in the AC/DC mode, anyway. Print porn seems to still be Belle de Jouring, and book & record stores need only the V&A "nice cafe" moment to become nodal meeting points (they can become flaneur HQs, of course: social networks with great coffee). And "repair guys"? Surely they are the most likely Big Beast revivals: currently a television repair man call out is £150 minimum. (Well, that's how far my online research took me.) What other kinds of battle hardened, experienced, Beasts are due a revival? Keynes? (See below). Local news (see whichever Big Beast makes the jump to own more than EC1)?

Trust...well, there's the big thing.

Who would, after all, have predicted "Light Entertainment" as the Big Beast cultural capital of the virtual decade? John Seargeant, anyone?