With Parliament now in recess and Middle England migrating to France for August, traditional media enters the silly season as news editors look to fill column inches. This period of wild rumours has found a natural home on the blogosphere.
The British blogging scene was salivating for a few hours at the possibility of a triumvirate of big political personalities clashing for the post of London Mayor with the rumour Lembit Opik had put his name in the hat.
With the thought of such a celebrity-driven election, The Daily Referendum suggested: “Maybe Simon Cowell can be signed up to run some kind of ‘The Mayor Factor’ competition for TV?”
In an interview on ePolitix.com, Ed Davey proclaimed: “Lembit is a good friend of mine, I share an office with him, and if he decided to run he would certainly make one of the most interesting candidates in the race. Would Lembit make a good mayor? I think that Lembit would make a much better mayor than Boris Johnson or Ken Livingstone.”
This was picked up by Welsh blogger Matt Withers, who concluded: “Sounds pretty definite to me. Ken v Boris v Lembit, eh? This could get interesting…”
When Lembit finally denied he would be running, it prompted accusations of storms in tea cups. Not least from Peter Black AM: “What puzzled me was why Lembit did not kill the rumour stone dead immediately, but then he has always enjoyed the spotlight and clearly wanted to drag his denial out as long as possible.”
The summer break also brings on a bout of annual blog backslapping. In the Witanagemot awards there were more categories than bloggers. Some of the more outlandish categories were “Blogger you’d most like to shag” (won by Rachel from North London) and “Blogger most likely to vote for a donkey if you slapped the correct colour rosette on it” (Iain Dale).
In fact, Dale swept the awards, including the award for most deserving of a book deal. Which is just as well seeing as he is compiling his annual top 100 list for the 2007 Guide to Political Blogging in the UK. This year he is relying on contributions from readers, which you can add to here.
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