Political Scrapbook

» see politicalscrapbook.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

British political blogging in 2009 had a hole in it shaped like Guido Fawkes. Paul Staines had spent five years proving that one person with good sources and no editor could set the Westminster news agenda from a laptop, and he was aggressively on the right. Laurence Durnan started Political Scrapbook to do the same job from the other side, saying plainly that the point was to make life difficult for the right.

It worked better than the people being needled wanted to admit. By 2011 Wikio had it as the seventh most influential political blog in the UK and Total Politics voted it the second best left-wing blog of the year. The format was short, fast posts about what a minister had actually said versus what the press release claimed, usually with a photograph of the leaflet or the document somebody had left sitting on a public server.

I read British political blogs the way you read somebody else's local paper, which is to say occasionally and without much stake in it. The specific pleasures of this genre are parochial by design. A post about a shadow Scottish secretary misquoting a figure lands on you very differently depending on whether you have ever voted in that country.

~ the case file ~

~ the job it did ~

The useful thing a blog like this does is cheap, fast correction. A national paper needs a story to be worth a reporter's day. A part-time blog with two or three people on it can publish four hundred words at nine in the evening about a factual error in a press release, and the error then follows the politician around forever because it is the top search result for their name plus the claim.

That was the economy Scrapbook ran on for nine years. It stayed a small operation and made no claim otherwise. The output depended on a handful of people doing it alongside other work, which is also why its influence curve looks the way it does: a sharp rise through the 2010 and 2015 election cycles, then a slow fade as the people who wrote it got older and acquired jobs.

Guido Fawkes, inevitably, was keeping score. A 2016 post on that site refers to the managed decline of a part-time Labour attack blog, which is both a cheap shot and basically accurate about the direction things were going.

~ the break ~

In April 2018 the site posted that the Scrapbook team were currently taking a break from the site to work on a number of other exciting projects. The projects were never named. The Twitter account stopped the same day and never started again. There is no shutdown post and no last word about what nine years of it had been for, because at the moment of writing that sentence nobody involved believed it was the final one.

~ three more years of serving nothing ~

The interesting part is what the server did afterward. The site stayed up, intact and reachable, serving the whole archive to anyone who arrived from a search result. The Internet Archive has clean 200s on the home page through 15 May 2021, three years and a month after the last human touched it. Somebody was still paying for hosting and nobody was writing.

Then on 19 May 2021 the captures turn into 522s, the Cloudflare code for an origin server that will not answer. Those run through July, after which there is nothing but redirects. The domain gives a DNS failure today, so even the error page is gone. A break that outlasted three years of hosting fees ends a thing without anybody having to decide to. Nobody pulled a plug here. Somebody stopped renewing.

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