Eye Spy Telegraph Shy

Issue 1295 of Private Eye arrived on the Zelo Street doorstep this morning – demonstrating at least that Crewe’s abysmal postal service is getting back to the level the rest of the UK calls normal – with an interesting item on blogging in the Street Of Shame column.

Someone from the Telegraph website appears to have been leaking information to the Eye about the way in which the occupants of the bear pit that is Telegraph blogland are encouraged to compete with one another for the attention of those drifting around the comments sewer.

According to the Eye, “Every writer is rated according to the number of hits their blog gets each month. Anyone who stays in the lowest 25 per cent for three months running is put on warning. Linger in the bottom quarter for a further three months and you get dropped”.

George Monbiot observes a Del Boy sneerfest

As the Eye points out, this tends to encourage the ranting and generally attention grabbing contributors. The article reveals, unsurprisingly, that top performer on Telegraph blogs is none other than James “saviour of Western civilisation” Delingpole.

And equally unsurprising is the assessment of Del Boy by one of his fellow bloggers: “He’s always number one, because he really is batshit mad”.