Across London tonight, as last night and tomorrow night, will be clumps of activists meeting outside pubs, or tube stations or constituency offices or sitting rooms going off to campaign for Boris Johnson to be elected Mayor of London. Perhaps a ward will have its own small group of four or five people covering its own bit of territory. There will be four or five familiar faces, veterans of past triumphs and disasters. But there will frequently be a newcomer or two. So far 9,148 people have registered their support on the backboris.com website and these people have started to exist in real life.
Rather than merely a statistic in cyberspace they are appearing on the ground - to help canvass and leaflet and hand out balloons to children. Of course Ken Livingstone could be getting an equivalent influx of supporters, but he has been much slower off the mark.
Previously, I don't think the internet has really made that much odds to election campaigns over here. "What is a blog?", the then Tory leader Michael Howard asked me at a fund raising drinks party hosted by the Ealing Acton and Shepherd's Bush Conservative Association in a Church Hall in November 2003. I had suggested to him that the Conservative Party should have a blog on their website. In fact by the time of the 2005 election his wife Sandra was writing a blog and very jolly it was too.
But I think this election for Mayor of London will be the first British election where the internet will really matter.
