Big Sticks and Small Carrots

This new strategy is truly ingenious and deserves a wide audience. It’s a master class in political accountability and honest debate. Watch and learn children.

To recap, yesterday, several people, myself included, attempted to highlight a particularly ridiculous accusation in the minority report of Nadine Dorries MP by submitting comments to her “blog“. Nad’s minority report demands an enquiry into how the Guardian’s Bad Science columnist had got his hands on information which was already in the public domain. The report suggests that this “leak” may have been “a serious breach of parliamentary procedure”.

Unfortunately for Nad, Ben Goldacre has explained that he got the information by deviously downloading it from parliament’s website. Being a scientist, he has also provided clear evidence for this. Commenters at IDD and Ben’s blog noted that they would attempt to bring this to Nad’s attention.

During the afternoon, no comments referring to Dr Ben’s response were published on Nad’s blog. Early in the evening, a researcher posted a new entry - “Hiding in the Long Grass” (aka “Night Owl”) - explaining that Nad would probably be too tired to blog tomorrow. Two comments appeared under that post almost immediately, the second a response to the first. That’s some fast moderating going on there. Still no sign of the comment I’d submitted earlier in the day or the comments of anyone else attempting to mention Goldacre’s response.

Sometime late in the evening, I noticed that three more comments had been added to Nad’s original post. Mine, alas, was not one of them. None of the approved comments mentioned Dr Goldacre’s response.

And then, at the witching hour (check the time stamp), the previous entries disappeared and Nad posted this instead:

No More Comments
Posted Thursday, 1 November 2007 at 00:00

I am no longer going to post comments on my blog.

Please don’t send any more comments - It’s a time thing, I don’t have any.

I have to rely on the patience of others to read and post the comments for me. I am never in front of a computer for more than a couple of minutes at a time and this has now made reading the comments before they are posted impossible.

Knowing that there are comments on my site which I may not even have had time to see, makes me uncomfortable.

If any one wants to contact me you can still do so via the email facility on the home page.

I will continue to blog each day as I can do that on the run!!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the end of that.

You can’t deny that it’s an ingenious solution. Now, of course, she can continue to claim some sort of conspiracy where none exists. She doesn’t know any better because she didn’t have time to read the comments pointing out that she’s talking complete Nads. Inspired!

It is clear that the Tories really are leading the way with this whole accountability on the interwebs malarkey. In their efforts to avoid it, they really have come up with some genuinely innovative solutions.

As a footnote, it may interest you to know that there’s some talk of setting up a Downing Street petition in support of Nad’s enquiry over at the Bad Science blog and Ben seems rather taken with the idea.

“Nero” has put forward one possible text for such a petition:

We the undersigned demand a know how a credible scientific reporter gained information held within the public domain…