Tory Rascal

Shane Greer is the executive editor of Total Politics, which is fast becoming one of the most popular political magazines in the country.  A regular contributor to political discussions on Sky News, BBC News and BBC Radio, Shane rose to prominence as a presenter on the sadly now-defunct political video website 18 Doughty Street.  He has featured in the Washington Times and the National Review,  has written for the Yorkshire Post, and has blogged for the Daily Telegraph and the Centre for Policy Studies.  His own blog has been running since 2007.

In a sense you’re a bit of a political anomaly, as there aren’t many Northern Irish people who are engaged in mainstream UK politics.  How did you end up here?

It’s a funny one, because I actually wasn’t interested in politics until early 2006.  Before then, I knew that things called Prime Minister’s Questions happened, and I was aware that there were political parties, but I wasn’t in any way interested.  I was doing my Masters in International Law, and ended up reading more political current affairs.  I think I was reading an article in the Telegraph one day, and it mentioned ConservativeHome and Iain Dale, so I started reading them.

I always knew I was a conservative or a classic liberal because I’ve always believed in a small state and low tax, but I’d never taken the time to read into it in much detail.  It was around May 2006 that I finally realised how interested I was and that I wanted to be more active.

In Northern Ireland politics is a lot more combative in many ways than it is in mainland Britain.  How has that affected you politically?

I was once asked what my earliest political memory is.  Oddly, it was something that reinforced how important politics is in the widest possible sense.  I was in Belfast in a work van with my mother. We were driving along somewhere during the 12^th Season, and I noticed that my mother looked really worried.  I looked out of the window and saw that a riot was building up.  Obviously a white van is a nice roadblock in Northern Ireland as soon as you throw some petrol at it and put it lengthways across the road.  I was fiddling with the radio at the time, and I remember a politician coming on.  I can’t remember who it was, but he was talking about the situation and how we had to calm it down – de-escalate.  That reinforced the importance of dialogue and engagement, rather than the adversarial process I could see unfolding in front of me.

I’ve never really taken much interest in Northern Irish politics, or even Northern Ireland, necessarily.  But that event really reinforced the importance of dialogue and democratic debate.

Today we see a very high profile Northern Irish politician, Lord Trimble, talking about joining a future Conservative Cabinet.  Has Northern Irish politics been normalised?

I think it’s moved on tremendously.  Is it normalised?  No, I think Northern Ireland remains a bit of a political basket case.  But in the sense of how far it’s moved on, bearing in mind I was born in 1982, I remember waking up in the morning and listening to Radio Ulster to hear about such-and-such a shooting, or a punishment beating, or a bombing.  I remember going to one of my best friend’s houses; his dad was in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and I can remember them putting up special reinforced glass in the windows because his name had been leaked and he’d become a target.  I was always aware of how odd and extreme the situation was.

In terms of normalisation now, when I go back I can see huge glass buildings that would simply have been blown up a few years ago.  In terms of the actual politics, the fact that we’ve seen the likes of Martin McGuinness sitting down with Ian Paisley and even sharing a joke shows that things are a long way off from punishment beatings and bombings and indiscriminate violence.  There’s a long way to go, but I think that the Ulster Unionist Party’s link-up with the Conservatives is a good thing.  I think that the Lib Dems and Labour should be getting more involved as well.

Tell me about your time at the Young Britons’ Foundation.

I got into politics in early 2006.  I remember seeing some articles by Donal Blaney, YBF’s chief executive, on Conservative Home.  I knew nothing about the political establishment, had no links or family background in it, and I didn’t know anyone else around me who was into it.  At the same time, I knew I wanted to be involved in some way.  I read Donal’s column and thought the YBF would be good for me, so I phoned it and luckily got through to Donal on the first try.

He invited me to London for a chat.  I saved up and went down to London, and ended up in the States on an internship learning about fundraising, television technique, campaigning and so on.  I came back and returned to the YBF as its executive director, which gave me great exposure to Conservative and other right-of-centre activists.

And from there, you found a place on 18 Doughty Street…

Doughty Street was an incredible experience.  My time was split between YBF and Doughty Street, where I was mostly just helping with odds and ends.  One evening, they were about to go live and there were no presenters around – including the lead presenter.  We had to go live, and one of the production people asked me if I thought I’d be able to stand in.  I thought I’d give it ago – I thought it’d be a giggle.

I remember looking down at my tie as we were about to go live, and my heart rate was so fast that I could actually the tie moving.  I enjoyed it, and immediately after I became one of the presenters.  It was a fantastic experiment – trying to provide very niche content for a very hardcore political audience.

When you work in that kind of environment you realise that it’s very much a team effort – the presenter has to rely on the production people, and they in turn are relying on the presenter.  It’s a real team thing.  A fantastic experience.

Is there a 19 Doughty Street on the horizon?

I’ve not looked into it, but will we see something like it again?  I really wouldn’t be surprised, because with the way technology is coming together people are finding it easier to tailor their content to what they want – with things like Google Reader, for example – and I’m sure the same will happen for video.  Doughty Street definitely isn’t the last video content we’ll see like that, and certainly not the last we’ll see that’s run by the grassroots.

You’re known as ‘TV’s Shane Greer’, the Sky News pundit – but that springs from your position as Executive Editor at Total Politics.  How did that come about?

Well, I was at Doughty Street, and Iain Dale was one of the directors there.  It was clear that Doughty Street was moving in a new direction and evolving into something else, and one day Iain just came in and said “what do you think about starting a political magazine?”  I thought it sounded like a giggle.  That was in, I guess, September 2007, and we started on the business plan.  We had to work out everything about the magazine, right down to where the barcode on the front page comes from.  We managed to secure the venture capital we needed, and first went to print in June 2008.  It was a great experience throughout that period, working out all those little things that you’d never think about for a magazine.

Turning to your own blog – why did you start blogging?

Well, I had dabbled with blogging ages ago, when I first got into politics in 2006 and set up a blog called Tory in the Wilderness (so named because I was up in Clydebank and it wasn’t the best place to be if you were a Tory!).  I dropped that after a while, and then while I was at Doughty Street, in 2007, Iain Dale, my boss, was going on holiday for ten days and he asked me to take over the blog for him.  I remember thinking to myself, “you’re basically handing over the keys to the Ferrari – you want me to have unlimited access to the biggest conservative blog in the country”!  It was a fantastic ten days, and it gave me the blogging bug.  When Iain got back I started blogging at shanegreer.com, and it’s just continued from there.

Different bloggers run things in different ways – from Tom Harris and Nadine Dorries with their ‘warts-and-all’ approach, to the hard politics of John Redwood.  Where does yours sit?

I suppose it’s somewhere in between.  It’s not bare-all like some blogs; it’s a political blog.  I do stray from politics sometimes, but I wouldn’t call it a particularly personal blog.  With Twitter, though, I’ll be Tweeting about whatever.

Broadening that beyond blogging and Twitter, what online activities do you see the political parties doing in the run-up to the general election?

I think it’s going to be fascinating.  If I could move away from your question a little, I think if the Conservatives win – which looks pretty certain, but anything can happen – I think a lot of the real innovation will come from the left, lifting Web 2.0 to its next incarnation.  I think they’ll push the envelope.

In the run-up to the election, though, I think it’s really the centre-Right that ‘owns’ the territory.  When you see Labour attempt to do online stuff, with Gordon’s YouTube, for example, it all seems to fall apart.  They are doing some good stuff – [John Prescott's] Go Fourth is doing quite well, and Left Foot Forward, run by Will Straw, is also quite interesting, but that’s all grassroots stuff.  LabourList, after the utterly preposterous Derek Draper left it, is now doing very well – but, again, nothing compared with the centre-Right.

So, what are we going to see from the parties?  We already have a great sense of what we’re going to see from the Conservative Party thanks to myconservatives.com, which is really in its infancy but is already an incredibly powerful tool.  It takes lessons from the US presidential election cycle just gone, and builds on them.  It enables you to fundraise online very effectively, from people who aren’t necessarily party members.  My favourite thing about it is how it gives power to individual campaigners in an area.  Once someone is in charge in a particular area, they can give their teams phone numbers for tele-canvassing, so you don’t have to go to CCHQ.  You can get a bunch of people around to your house, get in some pizza, and canvass the area.  That’s incredibly liberating for the activists, and it also shows a lot of trust on the part of the Party itself.

I think something that could be very interesting, and it’s not led by the parties, is the ‘gotcha’ moment – people with video cameras catching the moment when someone slips up. I think we’re going to see more of that now because politicians are much more under the microscope of the blogosphere and new media in general.

Why is it that Labour and the Lib Dems seem to be lagging behind the Conservatives online?

For the Lib Dems, I can only put it down to a complete lack of professionalism internally.  The Lib Dems are an absolute basket case when it comes to doing something centrally.  They’re very good at doing things locally, but the central party is a joke.

Why isn’t Labour doing it?  Well, it’s in government and you’re dealing with people who came in in 1997.  It was a really slick media operation then, but it was very much about getting the message out on broadcast media, rather than the sort of engagement with the grassroots that we’re seeing now.  I don’t think it’s really Labour’s fault, per se, it’s just that they don’t have the benefits of being in opposition, where you can take risks.

The Conservatives have done really well, but we’ve done it without any sort of real online competition.  I relish Labour getting better at the online stuff, because it means we’ll have to raise our game as well.

Looking at the really influential bloggers like Guido, Iain Dale, perhaps even John Prescott, they’re all middle-aged men…

Yeah, the blogosphere is a very male-dominated arena – I’d even say there’s quite a lot of sexism in the blogosphere as well.  Not on the part of mainstream bloggers, but if you look at people like Nadine Dorries, like other female bloggers when she blogs you can see people wading into the comments saying things they’d never dare say in a crowd or to someone’s face.

There really aren’t many really big female bloggers.  You do have Charlotte Gore from the Lib Dems, who is a very popular blogger, but she’s by no means of the scale of a Guido or Iain Dale.  I do think that it will change, though.

You’ve managed a very rapid rise to a prominent position as a mainstream media commentator.  We can’t all hope for the same, but if you could give a 17-year-old startup blogger three top tips, what would they be?

Firstly, you have to have a strategy.  Not in a Machiavellian sense, but you have to know what you want to achieve.  Do you want to reach tens of thousands of people?  If that’s your goal and you manage it, then you’re a successful blogger.  If it’s just two very specific people that you want to reach and you do, then you’re a successful blogger.  Know what you want to achieve, and don’t just write for writing’s sake – unless that’s your objective.

Secondly, engage in the wider blogging community.  Share links, ask for a place in a blogroll – but the bigger bloggers, like Iain, tend to keep blogrolls that only show what they read, so you might not get on there.  When I was starting out I also found it useful to get involved in comments.  If you’ve written something that’s interesting, then, without spamming, you can share the link in comments.  Drive traffic by getting people from that bigger site to find yours through those links.  If someone links to me from Iain Dale’s Diary or Political Betting, the effect can be quite phenomenal.

Thirdly, a lot of times people get caught up in how their site looks, with loads of widgets and so on, but content is king.  You can have the worst-looking site in the world – Drudge Report – and still have a gazillion readers because you’re putting up very good content that an audience wants to read.  Your audience won’t come back to your site because it’s got lots of shiny things on it, they’ll come back because it has good-quality blog posts that actually add something to the discussion.

Who would you choose as your top three bloggers?

I guarantee you, a year from now Harry Cole, the guy behind Tory Bear, is going to be one of the biggest bloggers in the UK because he is fantastically, phenomenally, almost indescribably good and a pure natural at blogging.  I think he is intuitively a better blogger than almost anyone else out there.  From basically nothing, he’s launched himself into the top ten most popular blogs in the Total Politics directory this year just off his own back, working very hard at it.

Iain Dale, obviously.  Iain’s blog brings fresh content all the time.  He speaks his own mind.  In fact, if I could go back to your previous question and give a fourth piece of advice to a young blogger, don’t just toe the party line.  No-one wants to read someone who is just relentlessly on-message – it’s dull.  If you disagree with the party, say it.

Guido Fawkes as well, but I’d also put in Paul Waugh.

Thanks for that – but now I’d like to throw some trivia questions at you.

This is where I fall apart!

Who is your political hero?

Probably Margaret Thatcher, simply because, whether you like her or not, she’s a woman who knew what she believed and was willing to stick to her guns and fight for those beliefs.  She delivered this country from socialism, doing away with the idea that the Tories were just there to manage the decline.  The obstacles that she had to face … when you think about today’s all-women shortlists, she was a woman who overcame incredible obstacles to achieve what she did.

Political villain?

Gordon Brown.  I don’t mean to be predictable about that, but if you look at Tony Blair, I disagreed with him on many things, but I respected him because he was a conviction politician.  Gordon Brown is just the worst kind of politician – it’s all about short-term tactics, getting headlines. It doesn’t matter what happens to the country, it’s just a desperate cling to power.  I think he’s the most reprehensible individual.

Is that down to the lack of people who will stand up to him, or is it the man himself?

It’s the man himself.  At the end of the day, if you’re a political leader or anyone in a prominent position, you’re going to have staff and hangers-on.  A lot of them will be yes-men, and they’ll just tell you what you want to hear.  A real leader is someone who realises is that sometimes those people can be useful to get things done, but that you have to have people who are prepared to say, “listen, that’s just stupid”.

Your top political journalist?

Paul Waugh.  He’s very, very, very good.

What is your favourite political quote?

I don’t know if it’s strictly political, but my favourite quote is from Justice Jackson at the Nuremberg Tribunal.  He had these people who were being given a trial, and not just summarily executed, and he said: “that four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stayed the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgement of the law is the greatest tribute that power has ever paid to reason.”  I think that’s a tremendous statement about democracy, liberal values and tolerance – you live under the rule of law, you don’t live under the rule of some dictator.

A fine note to end it on.  Shane, thanks for talking to me.