The past twelve months (and prior) have seen several very popular blogs either shut down or change editorial hands. As the year draws to a close, what better opportunity to reflect on those bloggers “no longer with us”. Starring Iain Dale, Tom Harris, Derek Draper and others, we’ve finally completed our end-of-year video.
This is our tribute to those who have bought their site a one-way ticket to Zurich.
UPDATE 10:06 D’oh! It seems Devil’s Kitchen had this yesterday. Slowly, slowly catchy monkey?
UPDATE 10:11 This tweet from Hilton confirms it. But, seriously, what an odd name for a children’s entertainment group.
Like the reformation of a once-beloved band, Recess Monkey wasn’t quite the same after returning from a hiatus of several months. It seemed Alex Hilton, the enfant terrible of Labour blogging, was ever busy with other projects and was too often deputised by lesser diarists, one of whom had undergone a funny-ectomy courtesty of Cowley Street.
Ever inquisitive as to what Irfan Ahmed Liberal Monkey Mr. Monkey is up to, Scrapbook’s visit to Recess Monkey this morning offered compelling evidence that the left’s favourite primate has finally been dispatched to the big parliamentary estate in the sky:
The recessmonkey.com domain now redirects to recessmonkeytown.com, the website for “the acclaimed children’s music band from Seattle, WA”. However Alex Hilton has promised members of the Recess Monkey Facebook group that he would start blogging again soon and recently appeared on Sky News opposite Tory Bear.
Is that an Iain Dale style ego-blog on the horizon?
UPDATE: Tom Miller has been in touch through the comments to say that he intends to start a new WordPress blog which will be “very different in terms of content“.
After seeing its post-rate drop to life threateningly low levels for several months, Recess Monkey may have finally been dispatched to the great jungle in the sky by Alex Hilton, who has founded Game Changer, a Labour aligned PR consultancy, with David Prescott. Visitors to what was once a barnstorming gossip blog are now presented with the following:
But Hilton isn’t the only member of the startup who has offloaded a blog. Tom Miller, formerly an editorial assistant at LabourList, has dumped his ‘Newer Labour’ site after his appointment as a consultant with the same company:
If Hilton, Prescott et al have designs on becoming a serious public affairs outfit (and some have suggested otherwise), is this a move to keep their staff away from personal attacks by Tory bloggers?
