So I scraped the government meetings data and rescraped it as one-edge-per-row. And then, obviously enough, I tidied it up in a spreadsheet and threw it at ManyEyes as a proof-of-concept. Unfortunately, IBM’s otherwise great web site is broken, so although it will preview the network diagram, it fails to actually publish it to the web. Oh well, ticket opened, etc.
Anyway, I was able to demonstrate the thing to Daniel Davies on my laptop, on the bar of the Nelson’s Retreat pub in Old Street. This impressed him excessively. Specifically, we were interested by an odd outlier on the chart. Before I get into that, though, here are some preliminary findings.
1 – Clegg’s Diary
At first sight, Nick Clegg appears to be unexpectedly influential. His calender included meetings with NATO, the World Bank, the Metropolitan Police, the Gates Foundation, and oddly enough, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen. Not only that, he had one-to-one meetings with all of them. However, he also got The Elders (i.e. retired politicos playing at shop) and the leader of the Canadian opposition, one Michael Ignatieff, Esq. God help us, is Clegg turning out to be a Decent?
2 – Dave from PR’s surprisingly dull world
The Prime Minister, no less, meets with some remarkably dull people. In fact, he met quite a lot of people who you’d expect to be left to flunkies while leaving quite a lot of important people to Nick Clegg. He did get BP, Shell, Pfizer, Rupert Murdoch, the TUC general secretary, and Ratan Tata (twice!) as one-on-ones, but he also met a surprising number of minor worthies from Cornwall and vacuous photocalls with people from Facebook.
3 – Francis Maude, evil genius of the coalition
Secretary of State for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster-General, Francis Maude MP, is the surprise hit, as far as I can make out. He seems to have a special responsibility for anything that smacks of privatisation – therefore, the monetary value of meeting him is probably high. Of course, if your evil genius is Francis Mediocritus, you’ve got problems. No wonder we’re in such a mess. All these points are also true of Oliver Letwin.
4 – Communication and Strategy Management Ltd
This is our far outlier. Some of the least significant people on the chart appear to be government whips, which is obviously an artefact of the data set. The data release does not cover intra-governmental or parliamentary meetings, nor does it cover diplomatic activity. Whips, of course, are a key institution in the political system. Given their special role with regard to both the government and parliament, it’s not surprising that they appear to be sheltered from external lobbying – access to the Whips’ Office would be such a powerful and occult influence that it must be held closely.
So what on earth is Communication and Strategy Management Ltd., a company which had one-on-one access to the Government Chief Whip, the Rt. Hon. Patrick McLoughlin MP, and which according to Companies House was founded on the 11th of April? It has no web site or perceptible public presence. It is located in what looks like a private house, here, not far from Stratford upon Avon:
Evidently the hub of political influence, but those are the facts. The directors are Elizabeth Ann Murphy and Richard Anthony Cubitt Murphy*, ignoring a company-formation agent who was a director for one day when setting up the company. It’s not as if C&SM Ltd is a constituent of McLoughlin’s – he’s MP for the Derbyshire Dales. Actually, either the directors are related or else there was a cockup, as Murphy’s name on the books was amended from Bromley the day after the company was formed and both were born in 1963. The Companies House filing* doesn’t give any other information – accounts aren’t due for a while – except that the one share issued is held by Norman Younger, who is a partner in the company formation service that was used.
Anyway, the next stop is to learn how this works and put up a nice little dashboard page to help watch the lobbysphere. I’d be happier doing something with python – such as nodebox – but the diagram is already too big to be useful without interactivity, and you can’t stick a NodeBox window in a web page.
*Not the Richard Murphy, who is too young.
*WebCheck – it’s not an ugly website, it’s a way of life…
Other way round on the Murphys.
This one, the director of this company, is too young to be the Richard Murphy. The RM we all know and love is a few years older than me, not the same age.