Today I am launching a new monthly list - the Political Performance Index, which gives you the chance to rate how the Top 100 Politicians in the country are performing. The list includes members of the Cabinet, Shadow Cabinet, LibDem front bench, minor party leaders and a few other political personalities. Essentially, all you have to do is mark them all out of ten for their performance over the last month.
Please don't just automatically give high marks to the politicians from the party you support - try to be as dispassionate as possible. Obviously I don't pretend that the readership of this blog is representative of the country as a whole - 55% of you vote Tory, after all! So if you are from another party and have a blog, please do link to this survey and encourage your readers to take part. I'd like to get at least 2,000 people taking part each month.
If I have missed off any leading politicians from the list who you think ought to be included next month, do let me know in the comments.
You should give marks from 1 to 10 (1 being the worst) for how you rate each politician's performance during the month of November.
Click HERE to take the survey.
Norman Baker is on there twice. He's good but not that good.
ReplyDeleteToque - I noted that too! But I still gave him high marks, because he's an individual thinker.
ReplyDeleteBut Iain, if you think that most people taking your quiz know the names of 100 politicians, you are misguided. Not everyone lives in your world. It's a false quiz. Even 50 names would have been too many for most. Twenty-five, yes.
Toque - I noted that too! But I still gave him high marks, because he's an individual thinker.
ReplyDeleteBut Iain, if you think that most people taking your quiz know the names of 100 politicians, you are misguided. Not everyone lives in your world. It's a false quiz. Even 50 names would have been too many for most. Twenty-five, yes.
wow. Very lengthy and yes, Norman Baker appears twice. A little favouritism, eh? jk
ReplyDeleteCopycat! I'm currently work on one of these, however mine is daily and fully objective like Todd And's Power 150.
ReplyDeletehttp://adage.com/power150/
This automated approach can run for years and never gets bored like my satiresearch.com site.. :-)
100 is too much. It doesn't work. 50 would be pushing it.
ReplyDeleteIt's just too long a list. But I did my best anyway...
You beat me to it ! This just looked like another Norman Baker conspiracy to get his name on the list twice !! He is certainly not worth a vote !
ReplyDeleteWendy Alexander is performing poorly at the minute, she's being engulfed in the McSleaze scandal too but for different reasons: http://thoughtsfromatory.blogspot.com/2007/11/labour-mcsleaze-scandal-engulfs-wendy.html
ReplyDeleteDrat and I thought I would be the only person sad enough to notice the duplication...
ReplyDeleteNorman Baker is 76 & 84 in your list.
The concept is good, the application is very poor. A little refinement in the poll wouldn't hurt. 100 is a lot for people to rate!
ReplyDeleteIan, If 55% of your blog readership vote Tory, then I think they are ENTIRELY representative of the country as a whole.
ReplyDeleteAn excellent idea Iain; however I think maybe 100 is too many people. I understand why you are doing it, but to expect people to think beyond 20 people....
ReplyDeleteYou might find that those on the latter part of the list, have similar scores as people might be tempted to put the same figure in for each person....
This could be a sort of FTSE100 for the political market. Would-be donors could use it as a guide to buying shares in politicians. Or selling them of course. Bit of a bear market in Gordon at the moment.
ReplyDeleteWhjat hapened to the 'media tarts' section? It is a great indicator of what our front bench team are up to. Bringit back please.
ReplyDeleteGood idea, its like a political stock exchange. It may be challenging to get an objective vote here.
ReplyDeleteHMRC really do seem to have a problem understanding how the post works. How many more cases like the missing discs and the below will happen before they improve their procedures?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.thisisbucks.co.uk/display.var.1867019.0.confidential_employee_details_sent_to_wrong_address.php
Digby Jones is now in the big tent (albeit that the supports are collapsing!) and was enobled as part of the process
ReplyDeleteI bet £10 this won't last 6 months. Boring.
ReplyDeletei would have put wendy alexander rather than danny alexander... and maybe nicol stephen too... there are, after all, local politicians at the end of you list ;-)
ReplyDelete55% of you vote Tory, after all!
ReplyDeleteONLY 55 % That’s disgraceful. It shows how badly you have slewed off into Liberalism Iain that you are the preferred watering hole of so many doctrinally impure hell hounds. Perhaps you should re-think that social Liberality which has been troubling you
Oh I see someone is mentioning Norman Baker. If anyone could direct me to a good source of damning information about him I would be grateful. WE are going to be doing our best to remove him and replace him with the excellent Jason Sugarman and I want to play my part.
Verity I am shocked to see you flirting with this traitorous hypocrite . No doubt you appreciate his lucrative literary cash in on the Kelly Scandal but he has to be beaten
Please tell me all the dirt on Norman baker IT IS YOU DUTY. Is he so good they named him twice or is he , I hope , a dreadful man hiding a history of child abuse behind a plausible exterior ?
ReplyDeleteI scored the ones I know. Many unfamiliar names - just scored them all at 5. The list is too long.
ReplyDeleteI agree - too many names on the list. Also performance scores will depend on perceptions, and perceptions depend on
ReplyDeletea. profile
b. media reporting.
This ignores the impact that opportunity provides (i.e. all current focus on Treasury cok-ups, so no opportunity for David Davis and Jacqui Smith to do battle); and the effect of party bias.
This whole voting thing is far too complex and will disappear up its own fundament....
Iain,
ReplyDeleteI have to agree with Mitch. it is boring. As another option if you really feel you must stick to 100 people. Could we not just tick our top five or ten who had a good week; and five or ten who had a bad week?
I like to think of myself as somebody who knows a lot about politics, even I found myself scratching my head over some of the names. So I put 5 down for them, incase I missed them on newsnight!
Norman Baker there twice and no Brian Paddick?
ReplyDeleteCould have been fun but far too many and several names have no relevance at all.
ReplyDeleteI gave marks to the ones I recognised. I suspect non-entities will get no votes at all.
ReplyDeleteIt's a fun exercise but it'll be difficult to know how representative our votes are.
Where was Lord Darzai? As a doctor I wanted to give him minus ten.
Norman Baker should not be there at all, after all he is an author now and very much a part time MP for Lewes.
ReplyDeleteIain - this is great idea, but needs a bit of work. The list is just too long to work through, and includes too many nonentities.
ReplyDeleteA development of it might be to limit it to 30 or so (any more and we simply won';t have the time to fil in the form), and every three months or so, refresh it on the basis of a scratch poll of who ought to be included and who dropped.
best of luck making it work!
Sorry about the double posting above and don't know how it happened, given the controls.
ReplyDeleteI see many agreed with me, Iain, that 100 is far too many for ordinary people to have an opinon about. Some of the names, I'd never even heard of, so I gave them a 1, even though, had I known them, they might have deserved a 6 or 7. And I suspect others reacted similarly. So it's going to produce a false result.
I think even 50 is too many. People coming to this blog love politics, but not as much as you do.
I just don't think there are 100 - or even 50 - nationally recognised politicians in Britain - or the United States, or anywhere else, come to that.
I think 30 might be manageable.
You ought to to have Martin McGuiness as well as Paisley. Although his title is deputy first minister they are in effect joint First Minister - a bit like Rome having two co-equal Consuls.
ReplyDeleteperhaps one way of making the leist more managle would be to split into several lists the develved institiutions - London, Scotland, Wales and NI could have thier own lists that could be ignored by the english majority and Westminister list (which could be broken out by party or seniority)
I'm quite smug about how many I recognised and there are a fair few who perhaps should have been there - woolas, ivan lewis, ladyman -not the most exciting of junior ministers but all have had an impact from time to time, although with two of those being local I would say that
ReplyDeletethe problem is that not all of them will have meaningful exposure in any given month. I'm sure that if there's a major housing debate Grant Shapps name will come up and he may even get some press coverage on a couple of days but he's never going to trigger any general public recognition otherwise - no matter how well he does