Ed Miliband’s new spinners Tom Baldwin and Bob Roberts are rightly raking in the plaudits. Almost overnight, his bland, labouring statements have been transformed into a streamlined and effective critique of the Tory-led government. Where once Miliband opposed in prose, he now does so in tabloid poetry.
But there is a third member of the Milibyte media machine, one who shuns both the limelight and the shadows.
Alex Smith is the new leader’s cyber-spinner. Residing in the fourth dimension, he occupies an electronic netherworld. Where old-style comms officers operate with sharp press releases and speed-dial mobiles, Smith’s weapons are delicately nuanced Twitter hashtags and fiercely compacted URLs.
If the battleground of the new politics is to be the internet and the blogosphere, Alex Smith is Ed’s cyber-warrior. Nicknamed “Cylon Smith”, after the race of machines from Battlestar Galactica that turned with ruthless efficiency on their human masters, he is attempting to bring the discipline of modern press management to the chaotic arena of online politics.
He first came to the Labour leader’s eye after his LabourList website became one of the first on the centre left to challenge the well-established Tory “blogemony”. Building on experience gleaned from the inevitable secondment to the Obama campaign, he was poached by Miliband, for whom he successfully recruited young Labour supporters, and bloggers, to the cause. At the start of this month he cryptically announced he had “taken up a permanent post in the leader’s office in communications”.
The role of cyber-spinner is a difficult one. As one of Ed’s more senior advisers once told me, “The trouble is we’re still not sure how to engage with the blogosphere. We understand it’s important, but when we deal with the lobby we know what we’re dealing with. Bloggers are an unknown quantity. They play by different rules.”
Risky business
Smith is the man charged with getting some ground rules laid down. Soon after Ed Miliband’s leadership victory he hosted a meeting with a number of leading Labour bloggers to try to find ways of co-ordinating the left’s online output. A number of ideas were mooted, from a collective “blogging hub” to a co-ordinated fundraising drive.
However, Smith’s role has evolved beyond structural planning. Even before he accepted an official position with Team Ed he was putting in place a concerted programme of cyber-rebuttal. Initially, negative stories would receive a short, sharp response on Twitter. Posters would be advised that issues were a “non-story”. Recently, more formalised responses have appeared. Earlier this week it was Smith who was first to attempt to rubbish reports that Charles Falconer had been offered, and rejected, the position of Ed Miliband’s chief of staff.
This attempt to manage the blogosphere is unusual and risky. But even veteran bloggers acknowledge that Smith has demonstrated a sure touch in engaging with a difficult medium. “I think he’s done a pretty good job,” said one seasoned online scribe. “He’s out there pushing messages, but he’s doing it in a straight way. I work pretty well with him.”
Other observers point to how he has nurtured a stable of supportive high-profile bloggers, including Sunny Hundal, Will Straw and Sunder Katwala. “He pulled these guys together during Ed’s campaign, and he’s kept them tight,” said one insider. “They’re all bouncing off each other very effectively.”
Bobby dazzler
The proof of his success was highlighted towards the end of last year with the publication of the Total Politics 2010 Blog Awards. Left-of-centre blogs took up four of the top ten places and seven of the top 20. The previous year there was only one left-wing blog (Tom Harris) in the top ten and four in the top 20. Iain Dale, the Bobby Moore of the political blogosphere, heaped praise on the “strides made by left-of-centre bloggers”.
Not everyone regards Smith’s arrival as positive. Some Labour officials say there is poor co-ordination between Miliband’s online and mainstream communications strategies. Others regard Smith himself as too inexperienced for a front-line communications post.
“He cleaned up the mess left by Draper [as in Derek, the former editor of LabourList], and got lucky with Ed. But he’s not a communications professional,” said one source.
May 2010 was supposed to have been the first “internet election”. In the end it was the debates, the Duffy gaffe and old-fashioned grass-roots organisation that defined the campaign. But it is widely agreed that, as more of the mainstream media disappear behind paywalls, more and more broadcast output becomes available on the internet, and the army of political activists seeking to shape the political debate directly grows ever greater, the influence of the blogosphere will only increase.
As it does so, the influence of the virtual communicators will grow as well. Alex Smith is Labour’s first cyber-spinner. And he has a plan.
UPDATE: The beauty of the blogosphere
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