What this is about

I used to have a blog called 'Swing Voter'. It was set up to be a way of collecting my thoughts as they - hopefully - coalesced around a political affiliation. I have long been the sort of political nerd who stayed up through all of election night, gambled on it intensively, read Bagehot and Lexington and the more thoughtful commentators whenever I could, as well as a smattering of the giants from the political canon: Smith, Burke, Paine, Mill, Keynes, Hayek, Popper, some Locke, some disciples of Marx, hosts of small libertarian articles, modern writers like Martin Wolf, Samuel Brittan, Anthony Giddens, John Kay, and so forth. Light reading means the diaries and biographies, from the lightest (Lance Price) to the magisterial (everyone should read Lord Blake's biography of Disraeli - and find out where Roy Jenkins got most of his material). I should have done most of this on my PPE course, but preferred philosophy, foolishly.

Apart from colossal self-importance (my vote really matters), the blog was intended to help me work out my next career direction, as the City life had provided a rather extreme example of extent of inequality and enabled me to give it up young. I wanted to do something that involved thought as well as decision, and the general area of policy making/government/perhaps journalism/political helping struck me as having this combination. People were surprised, however, to find that I was embarking on this without a firm political affiliation. Most of the people trying to work as an MP's researcher, say, have spent long periods at university lecturing their fellow self-0bsessed student layabouts about how the world should be run, and assembling a CV filled with those pointless posts ("third year graduate soup administrator, defeating the Fascist candidate narrowly"). In other words, the main qualification for being in politics was no longer questioning how you voted.

I thought this daft, and reckoned my value higher for actually having considered the options rather than tribally painted my face red/blue/green/orange and stuck by whatever the Party had said ever more. But I recognised at the time that I would surely prefer one party to another, enough to want to help it or work for it, and use my recent ambivalence as an asset ("when I was thinking of voting Tory this is what I thought of Gypsies, you see").

I was surprised to find the period of swinging ended quite quickly, and my partiality would render the very title of the blog mendacious. It is very difficult to remain impartial in this game. Clear, defining difficulties with either 'main' party became quickly obvious - in fact, I sometimes suspected a conspiracy by their so-called Stars to find and trumpet objectionable policies and attitudes to make my decision easier (only today, on immigration, the Labour party showing how scared they are of the Tory immigration dog-whistle). I read exhaustively the policy documents, think-tank reports (Civitas, Adam Smith, IPPR, SMF, even some nonsense from Demos) to try to get under the skin of the parties.

I thought blogs would help too, and in a sense they did. I knew from past experience that the standard style of the Vanity Publishing Web was infantile, breast-beating, foul-mouthed, favouring extremist poses ("If I say so and so is an utter c*** and the worst thing to ever happen to Britain, they will surely understand that I am right") - in fact, all the things you'd expect it to be.

(Editors Do a Job. That is why the novel your best friend has mysteriously failed to get published for 10 years is such rubbish, and why the Blog that Attempts to be a Wise confection of Richard Littlejohn and Friedrich Hayek reads like a zitty Etonian schoolboy's soapbox election rant. Insert links to any number of Furious Tory Doughty Street stars' blogs here)

So all I learnt from most of the blogs I read was what the slightly dimmer but resoundingly self-confident and under-researched tribalists were like. This is useful, and the different styles they coalesce around told me something about what it would be like working with them. The only blogs where there is reasoned debate are those hosted by Liberals, like QuaeQuam, LibDem Voice, and the Conservative Home Tory Diary, although you get your fair share of foaming loons there too.

The swinging ended, which will be covered in more depth later. I have joined the Lib Dems, helped Nick's campaign (at time of writing, no idea if my 35 phone calls made a difference), even helped stuff post and canvas. This has not brought my political speculation to a total end; the vast difference between the realm of Noble Liberal Ideas and the dirty laborious local political stuff inspires all sorts of posts. But I am absolutely certain of the rightness of my choice.