David Miliband has gone into more detail on the costs of running his Defra blog, but it’s short enough to quote in its entirety:
Contrary to the repeated falsehood that this blog costs £40,000, here are the facts. The initial start up cost of the blog at ODPM was £6,000. The changeover to Defra cost £1,250 and ongoing technical costs amount to £900 pa. Since I write my own blogs, read comments, and don’t have a shadow blogger the admin costs are low: one valiant official spends part of his time posting blogs and comments. It is estimated that this takes around 10 hours per month at an estimated cost of £300.
This is public money, so it’s David’s responsibility to make it as useful and revealing a resource as he can, but as regards the costs, these sound completely reasonable and not at all extravagant. Suppose you were commissioning a branded blogging system for your organisation, designed and laid-out, and backed by a suitable database: would you object to paying for development, installation, and testing that equates to, what, 10 man-days at a UK-based web development company? Annual running costs are also, without going into too much detail, not a million miles from what is paid for this site.
P.S. There is a Budget-oriented post coming – maybe later today?
And no comment on the party political post he made (and later retracted) using public money?
It’s a bit hard to comment given that he was forced to modify it, though what remained – especially given his familiarity with the rules – didn’t hint at the original being very controversial.
Of course, if it weren’t for party policies he wouldn’t be a politician, he wouldn’t be a Minister, and ministerial policy would have to be set by someone else (who?). You can’t allow Ministers to use public funds overtly for a particular party’s benefit; all the same, the idea that you can detach that Minister from party politics is incredible, rules or no rules.