Every so often, as a Labour Party member, you come across a Tory who is an absolute godsend - if you’ll excuse the use of religious allusion by a confirmed atheist.

Back in the Thatcher days you were spoiled for choice although no one ever quite came close to matching Peter Bruinvels and John Carlisle, also known to Labour members as the MPs for Johannesburg East and West on account of their unswerving support for British companies doing business with the apartheid regime in South Africa. Bruinvels, in particular, was a delight, not least because evolution had also given him that classic Tory Boy middle-aged-by-thirty chinless-wonder look that has completely gone of political fashion in recent years, apart from amongst UKIP supporters where Nigel Farage is doing a sterling job of keeping the look alive.

And by a strange coincidence, the very same constituency that gave us Carlisle, Mid-Bedfordshire, today provides another Tory godsend of any altogether different character - Scouse ex-pat Nadine Dorries and the only sitting MP, to my knowledge, to have given up her husband to spend more time with her party (she went to Westminister, he emigrated to South Africa) in addition to being the MP who cited Thatcher’s ‘right-to-buy’ policy as the reason she was attracted to politics, which makes her one of the best arguments in favour of social housing I’ve seen in quite some time.

Dorries has had an interesting start to her Commons career - it took her less that 12 months to find herself up before the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards after using House of Commons letterheads for a bit of under-the-counter electioneering on behalf of a prospective Tory councillor standing in a by-election in here constituency.

Her defence was to play dumb and claim to have been misadvised by parliamentary colleagues - and if you’ve read her ‘blog’ you’ll appreciate fully why the ‘playing dumb’ tactic worked out so well for her - the complaint was upheld but she got nothing more than a slapped wrist.

A few weeks back Dorries, who comes across rather like Marlene from Only Fools and Horses (minus the steadying influence of Boycie), got her parliamentary undergarments in a tangle after Jack Straw used a couple of comments from her blog during Thursday’s business questions, as the basis for giving the Tories a bit of ribbing, prompting her to make the ridiculous suggestion that she’s was being cyberstalked by Jack.

The truth is undoubtedly far more prosaic - Straw simply has a bag carrier monitoring the blogosphere for usable material and they hit on a rich vein of Tory idiocy when they ran across Dorries, but that hasn’t prevented her from further mutterings on the subject.

A few weeks ago you may remember that I mentioned that a very senior Labour MP had warned me to “be careful” because Labour HQ were monitoring Conservative MP’s blog sites. It appears the blogs infuriate the Labour party because they have no control whatsoever over what is written or who reads it.

Infuriate? No of course not. This issue here is not about Labour’s inability to control what’s written on blogs but Nadine’s own failings in that respect - she is, its sad report, suffering from a terminal case of foot-in-mouth as evidenced by her preceding post, the reaction to which, over at Iain Dale’s blog, occasioned that latest outburst and which stands proud a veritable classic in the annals of ‘I’m not racist, but…’ writing, to whit:

She was born in the wagon of a travellin’ show 

I sang the well know song by Cher all the way home from a meeting tonight. I know all the words, I bet you do too.

I spent the night in Flitton Village Hall in the company of over 500 residents.

I was a bit taken aback by the number of people present. I drove up at 8pm, and if I hadn’t known where the hall was, I would have spotted it easily by the droves of people walking towards it.

As I got to the main gate, I was met by a lady who passed me through the crowd to another, and then another, until they got me into the hall where I went straight up onto the stage. There was no room anywhere else for me to stand, people were sitting all over the floor and the chairs had been full for some time. People were standing in the car park listening through the open windows.

I commented as I passed through the crowd how surprised I was that there were so many people there. Some joked and said, we’ve all come to see you Nadine – but I know that wasn’t the case, the meeting was about Gypsies and travellers.

Aside from exhibiting extremely questionable musical taste, it should be fairly obvious alread, exactly where this is going, which is why it should be obvious that Dorries is about to observe the first Tory rule of making comments on the subject of race relations and ethnicity and attempt to demonstrate that whatever else her motives might be, she’s actually a racist because she knows, went to school with or otherwise has friends or acquaintances who belong to the same ethnic group she’s going to slag off later. It’s the regular Tory Party production of ‘The Sixth Sense’ - ‘I know Black People!’ - or it would be if Dorries was bright enough to understand the script…

As a little girl I spent idyllic Irish holidays on my Uncle Tom and aunty Mollie’s farm in Bangor Erris, Co Mayo. My Uncle Eammon and Aunty Bridget owned the local village shop, they still do, My cousin Moira and I often used to serve in the shop.

When the tinkers called with their big horse drawn wagons, Aunty Bridget used to fly behind the counter and shoo us into the back room. The fear was that because I had Blonde hair, a rare thing in Eire, the tinkers might steal me.

One brave day when Aunty Bridget was feeding the baby, I served the tinkers, and lived to tell the tale.

The tinker was a statuesque woman, dressed in black and brown, accessorised with eyes and teeth the same colour. Her hair was long, wild and wind blown and had obviously never seen a comb or been washed in weeks. She probably had been born in the wagon of a travellin’ show.

She sat on the board at the front of the wagon and didn’t move. Moira wouldn’t come out of the shop and I couldn’t tell what the woman sat high up on the wagon was asking for. Moira translated from behind the door, and then threw the tobacco and barley twists out to me.

The tinker threw the money down to me for the goods, and then I threw them up. Moira wouldn’t let me give them to her unless I got the money first.

Moira was hissing at me from behind the door in her scared ‘Holy Mary mother of God will ye get ye’sel back in here now, Jesus ye are too close,. She’ll have ye before ye know it ”

The tinker smiled at me, which I remember shocked me, and I think I jumped a bit, she then cracked the whip on the two big horses, shouted something in Gaelic, spat her chewed tobacco at my feet, and rode off

I picnicked out on that for months.

When I got back inside, Aunty Bridget made me wash the money,  and scrub my hands under the brown, peaty, icy water of the outside tap. The water pumped straight from the Owen More river which ran by less than 50 yds away.

I remember Moira and I laughing so much around the tap, I think we were relieved to have survived the scary ordeal!

Generally the idea behind the ‘I know Black people’ story is to try and establish some sort of tenuous basis on which you can then go on to defend yourself from any charges of racism, not demonstrate to the world that you come from a long-line of ignorant bigots, a point that seems rather to have escaped her on this occasion as the usual denouement for a story like that generally entails the author undergoing some sort of redemptive experience later in life, a feature conspicuous only by its absence in this case.

In 1994 the then Conservative government removed from Local Authorities the obligation to provide Gypsy sites.

The Labour Government have just re instated this obligation and my constituency has to provide 40 pitches by 2021, 20 immediately. All are to be designated in local rural villages. Feeling are running high.

And who’s decision is that exactly? Why the local council’s of course. The equation is a fairly simple one here - local towns equals lots of voters, rural villages equals not many voters, so you put the sites where they’ll cause the least electoral damage.

You’ll also notice the blatant bit of spin going on here - the council has to provide 40 pitches by 2021, 20 of them immediately - so that space for 20 caravans straight away, which could mean one site with 20 pitches, two with ten pitches or four with five pitches - anyone notice all of sudden how the idea of two-four sites comprising between five and ten caravans suddenly sounds a lot less scary.

The councils have no option, they have to do it. When I saw Richard and Tricia, local councillors, putting forward their position to the audience I realised what a tough job it can be, being a local councillor. It is a vocation, it does take long hours, and you get very little thanks. Appologies to all those standing in local elections for the first time!

But that’s not strictly true is it - the council is compelled to provide the sites but it does have options when it comes to deciding where exactly to put them.

There is a word, or rather an acronym, for this kind of thing, the origins of which are generally attributed to former Tory minister Nicholas Ridley - although the OED cites the Christian Science Monitor for first usage, but I’ve interrupted Dorries in full flow so let’s see what she has to say next.

My position on this subject is very hard line. If you want to live in Flitton village, get yourself an education, a good job, save up and buy yourself a house. Big round of applause. Not deserved though, because my hard line position is not an answer to what the residents of Flitton are facing.

There is a bit of story here that she’s not deigned to mention. The average price of a property in Flitton is currently cited as £293,826 with one street in particular - Wardhedges, being listed as the joint most expensive street in the district with an average price for a house of £800,000. The overall profile for this neighbourhood puts in the top 2.5% in the UK in terms of the wealth of its population.

Now do you feel quite so sorry for them?

Anyway I’ll skip the next couple of paragraphs, which are self-serving and irrelevant and get on to the next bit, where things get interesting again…

For all the bleeding hearts that are about to blog me and tell me that gypsies and travellers are now classed as an ethnic group because of their culture and beliefs I say this - I have no problem with that. You can believe and follow whatever culture you like – but if you want to live in England you do it living in a house, send your children to school and conform to the societal framework that the rest of us have to, because that’s how it is in Britain. That’s how we live; it’s a British culture thing.

Is it? So what, Britain has absolutely no history or tradition of travellers and travelling communities, travelling fairs, circuses or itinerant farm labour?

Of course it does - every country does to some degree or another and what we today call Gypsies and travellers we once only a very small part of a British population that was almost perpetually on the move during the summer months in rural errors, travelling from town to town and farm to farm in order to find work. In the sense of what remains of Britain’s traditional travelling communities - which is a very different matter from the so-called new age travellers who took to the roads in search of an alternative lifestyle - what we have are last remnants of a very British and very traditional way of life, one that dates back centuries.

Dorries claim that ‘it’s just not British’ is a completely ahistorical one, the product of a deep-seated ignorance of British history and culture.

Her position is one of the most abject hypocrisy - take what she has to say at face value and it might appear that she’s trying to defend the rights of a traditional rural community - in reality, the people attending this meeting are upper-middle class commuter-belt professionals who work in Central London. Thats’ the actual profile of Flitton and is there is anything still remaining of its original rural community then at £300,000 for a house the one thing you can be sure off is that they can no more afford to buy property and live there than could the travellers.

Still, she’s on a roll so lets what’s next.

If you want to show me traveller sites where there is harmony within the community, I will point out to you that on those sites the children probably attend the local school, and the families largely conform and are law abiding.

I will then take you to see some of my farmers fields, three acres in Brogbrough is where we will start, where travellers have created mayhem.

That’s an interest contrast - the sites that don’t cause problems are those where children go to local schools and their families abide by the law… because they have a properly set up site to live on. Meanwhile where there are problems - the farmers fields she mentions - the main issue is that those travellers don’t have a properly managed and planned site to live on. The argument, if you look at it properly, is entirely self defeating as the primary difference between the two scenarios is that in one there is a municipal site and the other there isn’t - so the obvious solution is to provide more properly managed and planned site where travellers can live without causing problems…

But that’s not what she wants - all she wants is to move the problem on somewhere else. Somewhere that doesn’t affect her wealthy, upper middle-class professional constituents.

NIMBYism, like I said!

There should be no such thing as a right to reside unless that residence is to take place within an appropriate home subect to all the usual planning laws and constraints the rest of us who pay tax and council tax have to abide by.

As one lady in the audience, sat on a hard floor, pointed out last night - if the new laws are about equality then surley that is equality for all. Travellers and Gypsies should have to live by the laws which make us all equal. Exactly.

And all the conditions cited above can be met simply by providing an adequate number of properly managed sites for travelling communities - sites that comply with planning law and provide access to basic amenities including things like rubbish collection, etc. These sites can be made available for rent - they’re not free of charge by any means - and the council tax necessary to pay for the amenities the travellers receive while living on-site - rubbish collection, access to local schools, etc. including in the ground rent for their pitch.

Which sounds rather a lot like the government policy that she’s complaining about.

My solution to the traveller problem is this; In Britain the culture is to live in a static home, work, pay taxes and save for the things you want in life. Live here by all means, have your own culture, as many do, however, you have to live in within the framework of the values this society operates within.

Not much of a libertarian then, eh Nadine?

This is the reality, given adequate provision in terms of access to suitable planned sites, there is no basic reason why traditional travellers should cause significant problems - the worst that can happen is that you have too much demand in one place at one time and have to move some people on to another location… as long as the provision is there.

Its a matter of supply and demand - too much demand and not enough supply at the moment, and if you increase the supply rather than demonise the people with the demand you solve the problem.

Its not that difficult if only you think about it, but then thinking, as should be apparent, is hardly Nadine Dorries’ strong suit…

Last word on this - despite the obvious ignorance and hypocrisy of Dorries’ remarks, I’m not actually suggesting that she is a racist - I simply don’t know enough about her to come to that kind of conclusion.  Rather her inability to construct a cogent and honest argument here is something as I see as a more fundamental problem for the Tory Party as it tries to shake off its ‘nasty party’ image and advance a much more enlightened attitude to issues of race and ethnicity.

Even if they mean well and are committed to making the Tory Party genuinely inclusive, many Tories have no real idea of how to talk (or write) intelligently and meaningfully on questions of race and ethnicity. For now much of the Tory Party is at a stage that is analogous to that of some who mistaken refers to a Black person as ‘coloured’ in the mistaken belief that’s the acceptable way to talk - the might have good intention but their understanding of how the world has moved on lets them down and is a source of ongoing embarrassment.

Unless evidence emerges to the contrary, that’s how I’d suggest that you interpret Dorries’ comments.

I must express my gratitude to Dizzy for providing an exemplary piece of evidence to support that whatever else you might like to call Iain Dale, ‘blogging expert’ is not an epithet that you could every reasonably apply to him.

Here’s Iain, from last week, waxing lyrical about Dizzy’s ‘best EXCLUSIVE yet’ - Dale’s capitalisation, by the way:

Dizzy has his best EXCLUSIVE yet, HERE. His’people’ are saying he doesn’t have to register his leadership campaign with the Electoral Commission because there is no campaign or campaign website. Dizzy begs to differ and proves that he already has a backend website up and running through Labour’s marketing agency Silverfish. In fact, it’s been there since last October…

During the Tory leadership contest I was responsible for registering all donations to the Electoral Commission and the Register of Members’ Interests for the Davis campaign. They were quite clear that even before the contest had been formally launched we had to register everything and anything. It didn’t matter if no money had changed hands and there was a benefit in kind (eg a helicopter trip), it had to be declared within four weeks of the ‘donation’.

It seems to me that Gordon Brown and indeed one or two of the Deputy leadership candidates (Hazel Blears and Hilary Benn, especially) had better be very careful here.

There’s just one slight problem here - Dizzy’s got it completely wrong having made the classic blogger’s error of interpreting the ‘evidence’ to fit a pre-conceived conclusion rather than deriving conclusions from the evidence.

Look, let me show you what I mean and how it happened… here’s Dizzy’s ‘exclusive’ in full - with my own annotations of course.

This morning’s Times carries an interesting article about how senior figures in the Labour Party have tried to stop the Electoral Commission from scrutinising the forthcoming leadership election. They quote an Electoral Commission source saying

“We would assume Gordon Brown doesn’t need any money. He would take the line there’s no campaign going on at the moment and he doesn’t have a website.”

Okay, so the first thing to note here is that the starting point for Dizzy’s investigations is an article in the Times in which the suggestion is made that unspecified ‘Senior Labour figures’ have tried to lean on the Electoral Commission to prevent them scrutinising the upcoming Labour leader election too closely - but how much authority/jurisdiction does the Electoral Commission actually have in such matters?

As it happens, very little. The only role that the Electoral Commission has in law is that of regulating and maintaining a register of personal [campaign] donations to candidates standing in the election - in itself only a duplication of the function of the House of Commons register of members’ interests, in which the same information must also be recorded.

That’s only part of the story, though, because not all such donations have to be registered with the Electoral Commission. In the case of donations from permissible donor, which covers any of those listed below…

an individual registered on a UK electoral register;
a UK registered political party;
a UK registered company;
a UK registered trade union;
a UK registered building society;
a UK registered Limited Liability partnership;
a UK registered friendly/building society;
a UK based unincorporated association.

…only donations over £1,000 must be reported to the Electoral Commission along with any donations from impermissible donors or unidentifiable source over £200 - those donations also have to be returned to the donor, while donations under £200 are no ones business but of the donor and the recipient. And donations only have to recorded within 60 days of the donation actually being accepted and the money (or gift-in-kind) actually changing hand - promises of support don’t count until they’re actually called in. Oh, and time and services given voluntarily don’t have to be recorded at all.

The relevance of all this, especially the Times article and its failure to give an accurate picture of the applicable regulations in this matter - the article states only that “Under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, candidates in a leadership race have 60 days to declare campaign donations. Currently Mr Brown does not register any contributions in the register of members’ interests or with the Electoral Commission.” - is that Dizzy has been given rather a ‘bum steer’ right from the outset. The Times article plants a suspicion that something untoward may be going on, thereby setting Dizzy on a course in which he will try to validate the Times’ contention. His starting point is already one in which he is looking for evidence to support a specific contention/conclusion, rather than simply looking to see if any evidence actually exists and, if so, whether or not it actually support the contention.

And so we get…

No website you say? Well I guess it all depends on how one defines “website”. If you mean he has no textual presence on the Internet putting out his stall for leadership then yes, arguably he doesn’t. However, if by website we mean the back-end preparations such as registering domains and putting the infrastructure in place to build it, then actually he probably does and the work for it appears to have started between October and December last year.

Interesting semantics here, which are well worth unpicking.

Dizzy starts out with ‘No website you say? Well I guess it all depends on how one defines “website”.‘ -which is telling us both that Dizzy thinks he’s found something but that whatever is it he thinks he’s found, the evidence is far from being conclusive. Now that’s fair enough, let’s just see where he goes next.

If you mean he has no textual presence on the Internet putting out his stall for leadership then yes, arguably he doesn’t.

Well, if you do mean a visible on-line presence then there’s nothing arguable in the assertion that he doesn’t have a website at the moment - the equivocation ‘arguably‘ here is in entirely the wrong place in Dizzy’s argument but, to be fair, we’ll put that down to a bit of ropey semantic construction of the kind that comes from typing as you think through the argument - its a simple error that a sub-editor would correct were he writing for a newspaper and bloggers, of course, don’t have that particular luxury.

Still, Dizzy’s erroneous equivocation does further emphasise the point that the evidence he does intend to present is going to be a bit ‘thin’ at best.

And so we come to the ‘payload’, which is:

However, if by website we mean the back-end preparations such as registering domains and putting the infrastructure in place to build it, then actually he probably does and the work for it appears to have started between October and December last year.

Well, yes. That is admitted a possibility and evidence of such preparations would certainly satisfy Dizzy’s point about the potential malleability of the idea of what actually constitutes a website. However, if one go back over Dizzy’s starting point for his inquiries - i.e. the Times article - then its apparent that to get from even the existence of concrete evidence that a Brown campaign website is in preparation to a breach of electoral law requires rather more than mere proof that such preparatory work has been taking place.

Remember, the Electoral Commission is concerned only with the registration and recording of campaign donation in this, and any other, party leadership contest - it has absolutely no brief or authority to register, record or investigate campaign expenditure unless it believes that expenditure has been met from the proceeds of unreported, registrable donations. Even if a campaign website is being prepared in readiness for Brown’s leadership campaign - and that’s by no means certain - then if it is being paid from from Brown’s own pocket, developed on an entirely voluntary basis or even funded by means of one or more donations of sums less that the registrable limit (i.e. under £1,000 from a permissible donor) then the development of such a website in of no consequence whatsoever to the Electoral Commission or, indeed, Parliament, as the code of conduct covering registration of members’ interests comes into play at the same level (£1,000) as electoral law.

By this point, ‘thin’ is well on the road to ’size zero’ and looking distinctly anorexic, and we still haven’t got to Dizzy’s actual evidence.

Gordon Brown’s leadership campaign website, should there actual be a contest, will - on the balance of probabilities - be located at “gordonbrown4leader.[insert tld here]”. How would I know this? Well it’s rather simple. All the most obvious permutations for the domain have been being registered since October last year by the assistant producer Rachel Bull at the political campaign production company Silverfish TV.

And that’s it? Dizzy’s evidence amounts to the registration of a total of four domains (.com, .org, .co.uk and .org.uk) by a media company - at a total cost to the company of £70+VAT, according to the website of Discount Domains, which is where the domain names were registered.

Mmm… surely there must be more that that?

Silverfish TV are the people behind the Dave the Chameleon advert, whose client list includes errr…. HM Treasury, as well as the Labour Party and lots of other Labour Party connected organisations such as Progress and the The John Smith Trust. John Prescott is quoted on their website saying they are “bloody brilliant”.

Okay, so now we have the ‘connection’. Silverfish TV, the company that registered the domains has done a bit of work for the Labour Party (and HM Treasury) in the past and John Prescott (apparently) thinks they’re ‘bloody brilliant’ - I say ‘apparently’ because a visit to their ‘website’ current shows only an ‘under construction’ page and their old website, which used to reside at this URL - http://209.151.80.230/silverfish.tv/ - now returns only a garbled HTML header, even in Google’s cache. I’ve also tried Wayback Machine, just for completeness, and got no matches on either URL, so the site was never cached there either.

There is, in this, good news and bad news - the good news is that Silverfish’s website was cached by Google up to last week, when I started looking into this, so I did manage to glean a fair bit of information about the company from it. The bad news is that I didn’t think to take screenshots - most remiss of me, I know, but then I didn’t expect that the cached site would vanish over the weekend, so you’ll have to take my word for its contents.

Let’s look at Dizzy’s final conclusions, and then we’ll get on to the evidence that he’s missed and look at how that might alter your perceptions of his ‘exclusive’.

The Electoral Commission may not think there is a website visible but there are certainly domains, ready and waiting with holding pages, and the website that is presumably being built by someone will no doubt be an all singing and dancing new media web 2.0 love-in too be sure.

Update: As per my post here, Channel 4 News have followed this story up and Silverfish TV say they are cybersquatting.

So, on the strength of nothing more than the registration of four domains by a media company that’s done a bit of work for the Labour Party in the past and a highly speculative article in the Times that amounted to no more than a bit of idle lobby gossip, Dizzy thinks he’s found the Brown campaign website-in-the-making - and an ‘all singing and dancing new media web 2.0 love-in‘ to boot and, by implication, some measure of validation for the Times’ speculation that Brown has been bending, if not breaking electoral law…

But…

What about the other evidence?

For starters, there’s Silverfish TV itself? Is it, in fact, the kind of business that Gordon Brown, or anyone for that matter, would contract in to develop the kind of all singing and dancing new media web 2.0 love-in that Dizzy suggest will be his campaign website.

No, it isn’t.

Silverfish TV are a small video production company - their site listed no more than 4-5 staff; a creative director, scriptwriter and a couple of production assistants - and their portfolio of work included rather more than just political campaign videos, in fact most of their work looks to have been fairly conventional promotional material for corporate clients - all video-based.

What Silverfish aren’t, by any stretch of the imagination, are a web design company, let alone web 2.0 specialists - in fact they didn’t even design and develop their own website, that was done by a Ukranian company called Webcreator, as you can see from their home and portfolio pages.

Silverfish are certainly the kind of company you’d consider contracting in to produce campaign videos to be shown on your all singing and dancing new media web 2.0 love-in, if you were planning to commission one, but not where you’d actually commission the website itself from - they don’t have the background, experience or technical expertise for that kind of thing…

…which should be perfectly obvious if you look that the domains they registered, allegedly for the Brown campaign.

To dispose of one thing straight away, Dizzy points out that each the ‘gordonbrown4leader’ domains registered by Silverfish has a ‘holding page’, as if to suggest that that, itself, is significant. Well, of course they have a holding page - its the default holding page provided by their domain registrar, Discount Domains, the one to which any domain registered with that company points if all you’ve done is paid for the domains and left it parked with them while you sort out what to do with them.

In other words, the ‘holding pages’ are a complete irrelevance - if you were to register ‘davidcameronisatwat.com’ with the company and then do nothing, you’d get the same holding page.

Silverfish’s explanation for the registrations, which Dizzy finds implausible…

Personally I don’t buy either of the lines that were put out, as Cathy Newman pointed out, we know they have a campaign team in place which Jack Straw is leading, it makes perfect sense that they would have a website at some point.

… is in fact a perfectly reasonable explanation of Silverfish’s actions.

Any professional web design company of the kind that could develop and deliver a full-on web 2.0 campaign website for Brown - or, indeed, any halfway competent cybersquatter - would have done a far better and more exacting job of registering suitable domains for a Brown campaign website than the effort put in by Silverfish, which, no disrespect intended, is rather amateurish and supportive of the fact that the company really has no real background or experience in the technical aspects of website develop, i.e. it is exactly what it appeared to be from its website - a video production company.

Problem number one here are the domains themselves.

What Silverfish have actually registered is the .com, .org, .co.uk and .org.uk TLD for the name ‘gordonbrown4leader’, domain names which run contrary to what passes for standard [professional] practice on the interweb.

When looking for a good domain name, what one should be looking for - and will look for if you know what you’re doing - are three qualities; ‘obvious’, ‘memorable’ and ‘as short as possible’ and ideally what you want is the kind of domain name where even if someone doesn’t know what it is for certain, or can’t quite remember it, they can put into their browser what seems most obvious and find themselves at your website.

Well, ‘gordonbrown4leader’ is fairly obvious and fairly memorable but it isn’t particularly short - its not the kind of first choice domain name that a web professional working with or advising the Brown campaign would go for - not when the much shorter and much more obvious ‘brown4leader’ is available in all its most popular TLD variations.

Then [problem number 2] there’s the TLDs themselves - Silverfish not only have a ’second best’ domain name on their hand but they only registered it for .com, .org, .co.uk and .org.uk - a professional web design company would also, at the very least, register the .net, .me.uk, .info and .biz - in fact as the domain registrar, in this case, provides for the registration of fourteen different TLDs from the same page, a professional company would most likely register them all as a mean of protecting their main domains. In the case of a Brown campaign website this would be even more likely (and important) than usual, given that the website would be an all too easy and obvious target for spoofs - anything ranging from a full-blown spoof campaign site to the oldest, and simplest dirty trick in the book of registering a related TLD and setting it to redirect to anything from the Tory Party website or Webcameron to a hardcore porn website.

Any professional web designer or design company would make a much better job ot protecting a client’s main domain that Silverfish have made of their own registration, which is, again, exactly what you’d expect from a video production company trying out a bit of low level cyber-squatting - but not from the kind of company you’d contract in to do your website.

The domains that Dizzy’s found do not look like domains registered specifically for a client on the basis of a contract for work, or even the expectation of such a contract. What they look like, and almost certainly are, are speculative registrations made by a company that hopes to use their prior contact with Labour as a basis on which to pitch for work as and when the Brown campaign decides its needs a website - if it indeed does. The scenario here is that of a media company that considers itself to have a fair shout of picking up some work from the Brown campaign in its main line of business - video production - and hoping to give itself an edge on any competition with a bit of a ‘can do’ sales pitch…

Yes, of course we can do a campaign video for you Gordon and, if you’d be interested, we could even get the people who did our website to do yours for you as well. We even have a couple of domains registered that might suit you…

Like I said, a speculative bit of business.

Problem number three is simply one of context.

Currently, Gordon Brown does not even have a personal MP’s website - aside from official information posted to the Downing Street and Treasury website, his entire on-line presence amounts to single page biographies on the Labour Party and Scottish Labour Party websites. Gordon may be many things but, as yet, web 2.0 he isn’t.

Nor, indeed, are any of his possible rivals in the leadership contest - or potential future deputies, actually up to much in the high-tech communications stakes…

Jon Cruddas looks to have some straightforward PHP pages knocked up with a free editor plus a Wordpress blog tacked on to his site

Harriet Harman is using the free TYPO3 CMS.

Hilary Benn and Michael Meacher both have static sites shot through with out-of-the-box Dreamweaver javascript - these are most likely updated using Contribute.

What Peter Hain’s using I have no idea apart from that his Deputy Leadership site is identical (source code-wise) to his normal MP site - and whatever it is there’s no RSS feed, so its hardly web 2.0 material.

Hazel Blears has a Wordpress blog and a few videos hosted by a free hosting service…

…and John McDonnell’s campaign website runs on Blogger.

At the moment, Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn’s 2020 Vision website is about as web 2.0 as the Labour Party gets, at least as regards its elected members, and this rather dictates that we ask the question as to just exactly why it is that the Brown campaign would need the kind of all singing and dancing new media website that Dizzy seems to think will inevitably emerge to support the Brown campaign.

There are only two possible explanations for this - the first and simplest is that this is no more than another sign that Dizzy has been following the same ‘bum steer’ given by the Times article right at the outset - he expects Brown to have a high production value, high cost campaign website simply because that’s exactly what you’d expect from someone who is [allegedly] concealing his campaign funding from the Electoral Commission - he’s bought wholesale into the suggestion that something dodgy is going on and matching his assumptions about what Brown’s campaign website will look like to that suggestion regardless of what little evidence there is actually has to say.

The second explanation is more complex but no less interesting as it suggests that Dizzy, and the Tory Party generally, more or less accepts that Gordon Brown will be the next leader of the Labour Party and the next Prime Minister and that the real focus of his campaign website - if he does get one - will not be be on the Labour leadership contest itself but on competing with David Cameron for an on-line audience.

What makes that particularly interesting is what it implies about the Torys’ own campaign strategy for the next general election as it clearly suggests - if its not obvious already - that they’re banking on running a presidential style campaign around Cameron and expect Brown to follow suit. Cameron has Webcameron, and so Brown must be in the market for a personal web presence that mirrors that provided to Cameron by the Tory Party so the two can slug it out, head to head.

Quite what happens if Brown takes a different route and focusses on policies rather personalities, is another matter entirely - in fact one almost has to wonder whether the Tories either haven’t considered that seriously at all or simply assume that their own new media operations have got enough of jump on Labour that they’ll inevitably set the pace and force Brown into competing - on-line at least - on Cameron’s terms.

Now I should stress that this is not to suggest that Dizzy is personally in the know about Tory campaign strategy or blogging to order from Tory Central Office - he’s almost certainly just following in the wake of the general tone of the Tories approach to the internet set by people like Iain Dale and Tim Montgomery and falling into line pretty much by osmosis. What it does suggest, however, as some possibilities for disrupting the Tory’s strategy, however, you’ll forgive me if I keep my own counsel on that and save it for a private discussion or two with other Labour bloggers.

The upshot of all this is that there is, in reality, precious little evidence to support Dizzy’s contention that a small number of domain names registered by a video production company amount to even a Brown campaign website in the offing, let alone to evidence of unregistered campaign donations, and rather more evidence to militate against any such a conclusion.

Dizzy, ironically, has the kind of technical background that should have ensured that he knew better than arrive at such a conclusion on the back of such cigarette-paper thin evidence, although my feeling is that there is nothing more to his error here than a bit of misdirection from the Times article and a lack of detailed research. He started out with a preconceived notion of what he’d find and stopped looking as soon as he found something that seemed to fit the bill without going that extra mile to verify that what he’d found actually stood up to close scrutiny and, in mitigation, he does have to good sense to equivocate sufficiently on his discoveries as to leave some reasonable room for doubt and a graceful retreat should he be proven wrong.

Dale, on the other hand, hasn’t got a clue, which is why in his hands, Dizzy’s collection of if, buts and maybes becomes:

Dizzy begs to differ and proves that he already has a backend website up and running through Labour’s marketing agency Silverfish. In fact, it’s been there since last October…

In fact Dizzy’s proved nothing of the sort, he’s provided only an interesting if overstretched conjecture about which even he’s not 100% sure if you actually read what he’s written and not what, if you’re Iain Dale, you wish he’d written.

If, by any chance, you’re a friend of Iain Dale’s and looking for a suitable birthday or Christmas present for him for this year can I make a suggestion - try this…

(Hat Tip: Bob Piper)