The Devil’s Kitchen has been considering shutting down recently. Charlotte Gore ‘accidentally looked up the mountain‘ and it gave her writer’s block. Alix Mortimer, in her singularly wonderful way, considered throwing in the towel recently, too:

It is this: that there comes a time when the Sparrow of Opinion, having flown into the Great Hall of Blogging through the Window of Inspiration, must fly out again into the Night of Doing Something Else, as the Venerable Bede nearly said. I have said all that needs to be said, my best tales are all told that can be told here. Oh! better to close the gates on the Republic now before they rust where they stand.

Now, I know that’s only three blogs, and I know plenty of others are still going strong. I know Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes are still churning out 8 posts a day (although both have slowed, and neither are making major scoops). All three of those, however, are in the Top 50 political blogs – and I wouldn’t be surprised if their new-found silence is indicative of a wider trend. A definite calm, I would say, has come across the blogscape.

There’s a few good reasons that this could be happening, of course. Charles Arthur has had a pretty good go at blaming Twitter for the increasing decline of the ‘long tail’ of the blogosphere, and I certainly agree with him there. Comment (if not analysis) has begun to move away from blogs and onto Twitter – and indeed I am guilty of linking to things on Twitter and forgetting to mention them on here. He also quotes some New York Times research which suggests that 95% of blogs are withering on the vine – although I’m not convinced that this is something new. In my experience few new bloggers have the tenacity (or at least the belligerence) to make it past a few weeks of blogging.

I’d like to think that there’s an even better reason, though: I’d like to think that perhaps, just perhaps, everyone’s gone quiet because they’ve won.

Think about it: the driving force behind the success of the blogosphere in the UK has been the desire to break open the Westminster bubble; to force our Government, and our national press, to listen to the people, rather than endlessly circling around themselves. To expose the lies and the scandals at the heart of our political system.

And now we have1. Victory is ours. The bloggers are being taken seriously, and the Government is on the run. What’s more, even the Opposition are scared of what’s happening. When If David Cameron becomes Prime Minister, he’s going to have a whole bag of hurt waiting for him, and the only response he can give is openness and transparency.

Reading between the lines of ‘Smeargate’ (can we really not have a better name) and the expenses scandal, we see Maximus Decimus Meridias removing his helmet and standing up to Commodus. We saw “a slave become more powerful than the Emperor of Rome”. We saw a few people sat at computers turning the Government into an object of ridicule.

I’d like to think that perhaps, just perhaps, the reason so many people have gone so quiet is that they know they’ve won, that they’re being listened to, and all we have left to do now is wait.

  1. The royal ‘we’, of course [↩]