The Guardian’s news blog finds Tony Blair’s tips for being Prime Minister handily posted up to Youtube:

So now that Tony Blair is leaving and Gordon Brown is taking over, I went searching to see whether the new man’s on YouTube. And what comes up first? Brown picking his nose:

Tony Blair finally follows his conservative opponent David Cameron and answers questions from voters on internet video via John O’Farrell as a friendly interloper. The first hard-ball question: “What would you say the Labour party’s greatest achievement is?” Getting elected so much is his answer. What’s your greatest mistake? “Never answer that,” Blair answers.

In the second part, we finally get to Iraq. The question from a YouTuber: “Why didn’t you resign for taking the country to war on faulty information?” Blair says that we went to war over the breach of UN resolutions and that there’s “no doubt” Saddam violated them. He says that if he were still in power today “you’d have a different set of problems.”

“The judgment about Iraq,” Blair says, “will be made, in the end, in the longer term.” As opposed to the judgment being made in the shorter term? “For me, ” he says, “I can’t — and I’ve never been able to do this — say to people that I think it was the wrong thing to remove him, because I don’t. I think it was the right thing. I think what is happening in Iraq today is tragic and a huge challenge. But it is being deliberately created by people who don’t want the Iraqis to get their country on their feet when they do what to get it on their feet.”

Asked whether the lack of WMDs is a resignation issue, Blair says: “Well, I think if people thought they were being deliberately deceived, of course it would be. . . . We’ve had four different inquiries about that allegation and each has come to the same result. And they only could have come to one result.”

Blair concedes: “There’s no doubting about the political damage.” He says he has apologized “for the fact that the information was wrong” but that he will not apologize for removing Saddam and will not say that what was said about that was made up or a deception.

This is about as satisfying as sex on novocaine. Blair’s mood is uncomfortable and defensive and his answers incomplete. And this is hardly a grilling from the people since we don’t see all the questions on video and because we are not the ones asking the questions, in the end, but O’Farrell is. And Blair is not addressing as — as one can and should do on YouTube — but O’Farrell. They might as well have had his press secretary asking him questions: it’s less an interaction with the people and more of a video press release. But even given the controls they put on this, hand-selecting the questions and clearly prepping for him, it’s still an unsettling performance. It’s a good thing Blair is leaving office; he’s not made for the YouTube age.

Here’s my latest Guardian column, a buffed-up version of posts I wrote for Prezvid about Webcameron, 18 Doughty Street, and Nicolas Sarkozy and the conservative movement in small TV in the UK. (Nonregistration version here.)

In a video response to Webcameron, David Cameron’s new-age network of tiny TV, pioneering parliamentary blogger Tom Watson wondered why his fellow liberals don’t have an internet channel of their own. Why, indeed? While in the US, it’s the Democratic presidential candidates who are invading YouTube, in Europe, conservatives are leading with their lenses: Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy in France show their candid sides and answer voters’ questions via video. Even German chancellor Angela Merkel, hardly a LonelyGirl15, is podcasting and vlogging. And at 18 Doughty Street, UK conservatives have their own internet talk-show network. Is the internet providing the European right with its Fox News?

While in London, I visited the eponymously addressed 18 Doughty Street, a Georgian townhouse where founder Iain Dale and a staff of 20 produce five hours of live talk TV a night from a studio equipped with seven cameras and an expansive couch. Their programming day starts at 7pm with news summaries, interviews with politicians, and talk shows about politics, the arts and blogs. Because it is live, it is interactive; viewers can send in messages and join the chat. Next viewers will send in videos; Dale gave 100 cameras to contributors who’ll make a show of shows, a bit like a multimedia Comment is Free. And soon, they’ll expand to America with a rented studio and satellite time.

The audience is not yet huge - one to 2,000 viewers at any moment (more than 2,500, Dale says, and their technology would teeter). But he’s getting the audience he wants, including big media. And he drew a quite large crowd, more than 250,000, watching a commercial message they distributed on YouTube that asked us to “imagine a world without America”.

All this comes at an astoundingly low price. Factual programming on US and UK networks costs about £150,000 per hour. A US network executive recently bragged that his digital studio had reduced his cost to £500 a minute. Dale runs the network with a one-year, £1m investment from YouGov founder Stephan Shakespeare and I asked him to estimate his production cost. Subtracting bandwidth and internet, he calculated £70 per hour. So expect more talk online, much more.

Next, I visited Sam Roake, head of Cameron’s web strategy, to learn about Webcameron. Roake sees this as an opportunity to interact. Each week, the team follows Cameron out and about, and get him to answer five citizens’ questions, three of them voted on, Idol-like, by the audience. “To be genuinely candid,” Roake says, “you have to talk about yourself as a person.” Politicians, he advises, must switch “out of politician mode”. I ask whether Cameron would take his web camera to No 10 with him. “If it suddenly stopped,” Roake answers, “that would be seen as a very cynical move . . . You can’t stop communicating.”

This, he argues, is “a new stage of politics” that is about “sustained dialogue with the public.” Note that this is similar to the rhetoric about blogging I heard from Gordon Brown at Davos: “You cannot make political decisions now without people being included in the decision,” he said. “The age of the smoke-filled room is over.”

I asked Roake to give advice to the American presidential candidates now making small TV and he said they must not see this as broadcast TV. They should respond to voters by name: “See them as people who want to engage with you.” He recommends being “personal, open, spontaneous”. But most of all, he said, don’t script and spin your videos.

When I wrote this on PrezVid, my video blog that follows the US 2008 campaign through web video, Watson’s web producer Tim Ireland chimed in, saying that “Cameron’s early broadcasts were very much scripted affairs” and calling his family setting “window dressing”. It was that setting that Labour MP Sion Simon spoofed in a YouTube video that fell flat, forcing Simon to apologise and giving Webcameron more publicity. All politics is spin. Saying you don’t spin is, after all, spin.

I emailed Ireland to ask him the question I posed above: why are conservatives leading in small TV in the UK? He responded with four words: “Blair, money, timing and spin.” And then he added a fifth: Iraq. Yes, that might explain why Labour pols in the UK and Republicans in the US are rather camera-shy these days. But this, too, will change.

While in London, I went to the Conservative Party headquarters — new and sparkling white, with a view of the river just down from Parliament — to meet Sam Roake, who’s making his leader, David Cameron, a star of small TV. I wanted to hear his advice for the American candidates now dabbling in the TV of the people.

Roake is a personable, low-key, and smart chap in a suit with no tie, the uniform of our next leaders. He’s a veteran of Google AdWords. Yes, Google will take over the world. And then no one will wear ties.

2007, Roake says, is the year of video and social networking. He sees the two closely linked.

The web team — which so far is Roake and one colleague — have Cameron answer five questions a week from voters, three of them voted up by the public, Diggishly, and two he selects.

Then they have videos of him “out and about” anywhere in the world, talking to the camera with his thoughts and experiences. That happens about three times a week, but Roake said they’d do more with more resources — that is, one more staffer.

He says Cameron’s videos need little editing. Once they’re done, they go up on his site and on YouTube.

Roake argues that the videos enable their man to speak directly with voters and it helps them present their man in a candid, human way. “To be genuinely candid,” he says, “you have to talk about yourself as a person.” He says that to make this medium work, politicians have to switch “out of politician mode.”

The videos have been remixed and spoofed. But that hasn’t worked to the party’s disadvantage, Roake says. A labor MP made a parody of Cameron’s video and — I heard this tale from 18 Doughty Street’s Iain Dale as well — it was so far off the mark (like a cringeworthy late-night skit), he had to apologize. The people from the show This is a Knife also made a parody called Blind Dave. And see the video by pioneer Parliamentary blogger Tom Watson tweaking Webcameron but wishing Labor had its equivalents:

Not having snit fits about all this apparently makes it look as if Conservatives have a sense of humor. They also want the videos to show that Conservatives are open and innovative. Roake says Labor isn’t doing this because they are “more focused on control.”

Roake acknowledges when I ask that it’s a bit different for the party in power. But then I ask whether they would continue their video strategy if they took power and he says they’d pretty much have to. “If it suddenly stopped, that would be seen as a very cynical move,” he says. The form would “evolve as the job evolves…. You can’t stop communicating.” This, Roake says, is a “new stage of politics” that is about a “sustained dialog with the public.” This was the kind of talk we heard from Gordon Brown about blogs at Davos. Once Brown ascends to power, I suspect they’ll be tripping over themselves to seem web-cool. As a head-of-state vlogger, Germany’s Angela Merkel already beat them all to the punch (though with a characteristic and militant lack of flair); she, too, is answering citizens’ questions online (here, auf Deutsch). Coming soon: Fireside vlogging. The White House Show with ___________.

But Roake emphasizes that vlogging isn’t the same as old TV though the American candidates are still treating it as if it were. They are broadcasting. The audience is different, he says, and the medium is different. His advice for our vlogging pols:

Don’t make the videos scripted and spun. Involve the voters: respond to them and address them by name. “See them as people who want to engage with you.” He says they need to be “personal, open, spontaneous.” Have someone with a camera along as much as possible to capture “off-the-cuff moments.” If you just have someone come 15 minutes a week to get one video, it won’t work. If you show events with lots of people, he says, balance that with more personal videos. Don’t sweat the production value.

Now, of course, it’s hard to believe that everything in politics isn’t always spun. Saying you’re not spinning is spin. But I take the point: don’t shrink-wrap the message and the candidate.

I ask why he thinks that the leaders in small TV in Europe tend to be conservative — Cameron, Sarkozy — while in the States, it’s the liberals who’ve taken the lead. Roake acknowledges that “a lot of it has to with being in opposition” and not immersed in the business of government (the podcasting, vlogging Merkel excepted). Then he spins just a bit: “The conservatives are less of a top-down government.”

Roake plans to help small TV spread in his party, getting more MPs to join the fun, joining a few leaders, including blogging Boris Johnson and vlogging Grant Shapps. He says that “any party serious about engaging in social media could do it.” And will.

The YouTube election is by no means a strictly American phenomenon, though we tend to assume everything is. In fact, other political scenes are ahead of ours and our candidates have a lot to learn from them about how to run YouTube campaigns. I did an interview for Japanese TV yesterday about PrezVid and pointed to what’s happening in France (an interview about that here) with candidates showing their more candid moments and creating a platform for the voters to speak as well. And then I made my hourly visit to the invaluable TechPresident, where Micah Sifry pointed to the amazing video effort of British Tory leader David Cameron.

Says Micah, from column he and Andrew Rasiej wrote for Politico:

Picture this: Every day, a major candidate for the highest office in the land spends a few minutes talking into a video camera held by an aide. Then the recordings are posted, with very minor editing, to the his Web site. On some days, they show him on the street, talking casually about the visit he’s making to a local business or a day care center. On other days, he’s sitting in his office, giving candid responses to the top five questions that have been posted to his blog, as chosen by visitors to his site.

The videos are all generally unscripted; the settings are unencumbered by props; and the camera work is about as good as any tourist’s visiting the zoo.

If you think this is a fantasy, don’t. This, in a nutshell, is how David Cameron, the youthful leader of Britain’s opposition Conservative Party, has been taking advantage of online video since he launched his “Webcameron” site last fall. . . .

For all the talk of this being the “YouTube Election,” however, none of the current candidates for president of the United States is doing anything close to what Cameron is doing. Yes, they know they can use their Web sites to broadcast video to potential supporters. But so far, not one presidential campaign has demonstrated that it understands the difference between video online and video on TV. That’s because they all apparently think video online is just television on a smaller screen.

In the old world of televised politicking, broadcast time is expensive and scarce. Because of that, politicians learned to speak in sound bites to get their message across quickly. On-camera “gaffes” are feared for what they might reveal. Campaign commercials are rehearsed and scripted as much as possible. The voter gets a carefully packaged view of the candidate. Spin rules, and media consultants get rich from their commissions on buying TV time.

But this approach deprives voters of a real “unscripted” view of the candidate. We pounce on gaffes, believing, as Michael Kinsley memorably said, that a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth — “or more precisely, when he or she accidentally reveals something truthful about what is going on in his or her head.”

In the new world of online video, broadband is cheap and plentiful. Instead of sound bites, a candidate can speak in full paragraphs. He or she can do a daily video blog, or even several, because digital storage is practically unlimited and bandwidth costs are minimal. Like Cameron, he or she can talk to us in the context of their actual lives in relation to the issues at hand. . . .

Micah wonders whether we agree. We do. However, I do think that American candidates are beginning to break away from their big-TV roots. McCain didn’t, with his overproduced, overlong commercials. Obama is spending too much time showing himself in front of big crowds and too little time just talking to us (I’ll have a vlog on that a bit later). Hillary is more casual but not candid. Yet they are all reveling in their ablity to make their own soundbites instead of being subject to the clipping whims of some network TV news editor.

So Micah’s right, none of them has the casual humanity that Sarkozy in France and Cameron in the UK try to present — and our candidates would be smart to follow their lead. (And isn’t it fascinating, by the way, that in the U.S., the liberals are leading on YouTube but in Europe its’ the conservatives who are ahead?)

Micah says it comes down to the question of how much our candidates are willing to risk being human. Yes, but as I said below, that horse is over the horizon. The more these candidates get out on the stump, the more vlogging voters will be taping their every syllable and the more they’ll have to get comfortable with showing a less shrink-wrapped version of themselves. But we, the voters (and pundits) will also need to learn that every gaffe and slip of the tongue isn’t a gotcha moment and a news story. It’s just a moment of being human. If we want to see the more human side of our candidates, then we will have to accept their goofs.

So Micah and I agree that the more we are able to see of the candidates and the more candid they are, the better we will be able to judge them. In an exchange in the comments on his post, he said to me:

I would love a stream of videos from those living rooms and coffee klatches (assuming they are still happening; some of the stories out of IA and NH suggest that there’s such demand to meet the top candidates that they can’t schedule such intimate events). It used to be that only the lucky voters of those two states got a chance to meet the candidates face-to-face in a personal enough setting to take their measure and perhaps ask them a tough question and get a real answer. But someone with a video could now capture that moment and instead of giving us another “macaca” we might get a revelation about a candidate’s character or vision that is positive and affirming. Recall the photo of Bush hugging that girl whose father died on 9/11. It was taken spontaneously by an onlooker and showed up real emotion; arguably it was Bush at his best. I just wish the current candidates would allow themselves the possibility of a similar moment…

To Micah’s point, here’s a video of Hillary Clinton visiting a home in Nashua, New Hampshire, and another of Barack Obama in a house across town. But when you have boom mics and press caravan’s it’s hardly casual: