In the course of this morning’s webchat on the No10 website, David Miliband has promised that his blog will be back. I asked:
The new Foreign Sec’s fondness for new communication methods – blogging, YouTube videos, and so on – is well documented. Restarting his ministerial blog was famously his top priority when he took over at Defra: but there’s been nothing out of FCO so far. Has the more conservative (small ‘c’) atmosphere of the Diplomatic Service changed his view of such transparent, direct channels? How can the FCO, whose centralised methods changed little over the course of centuries, respond to the ‘I can’ society he described earlier this year?
His response:
I promise not! I am completely committed to the idea that diplomacy needs to engage the public as well as diplomatic elite and also to the notion that I need to lead that in the Foreign Office. So the blog will be back, supplemented by other tools for discussion and debate.
Responses
Nice scoop!
As seen at the BBC, but remember, you heard it here first:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6976382.stm
[…] But even that mindset has been overtaken. Today, the talk was about exploiting the range of tools and online communities to promote, explain and involve citizens in government policy initiatives. I don’t want to steal others’ thunder before anything gets released but there is some really exciting stuff just around the corner. I’ll let you know when it finally sees the light of day, but I’ll give you a hint: everyone’s favourite online politician and is involved. Simon Dickson will be so pleased he asked the question first…. […]
[…] that David Miliband may be about to restart his blogging activity… in fact, I may even have generated one or two of them myself. Well, after a little detective work, I can exclusively confirm them. The […]