During an interview with Harriet Harman on today’s edition of BBC2’s Daily Politics, presenter Andrew Neil took a snide swipe at the New Statesman, asking the Labour deputy leader: “What’s the logic of saying that the online site of the New Statesman should come within this regulation, a site which has no great influence in Westminster, but that Guido Fawkes, probably the most influential site in Westminster, should not?” Is this the same Mr Neil who last year expressed a wish to buy the New Statesman, only to be rebuffed?
But then Neil is hardly a disinterested party. He is currently chairman (formerly chief executive) of Press Holdings, the company that owns the Spectator magazine, so perhaps it’s not surprising that his usually forensic mind let him down on this occasion. Based on the most recently published figures, the Spectator website, which includes Guido Fawkes blogger Harry Cole as a contributing editor, attracted just 380,000 users a month in 2011. By comparison, between 1 and 7 December – a single week – the NS site had 229,472 unique browsers and 594,710 page views, and between 1 and 30 November received over a million uniques – twice the traffic recorded by the Spectator.
If Neil wants to use his BBC platform to disparage the New Statesman website, he should at least declare his interest in doing so. We’ll be keeping an eye on you, Andrew!
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