At first I thought it [blogging] was quite unlike anything else I'd done in my political life, but after a while I realised that it is really rather like an old-fashioned political public meeting of the kind that has melted away since television took politics away from the grass roots in the constituencies and concentrated it into the TV studios. It is a pity we can't have real-time heckling.

blog, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news, 13 January 2010