Pints and Political Venom

After last week’s show on Tony Blair I posed the same question to bloggers Rachel North and Iain Dale that I posed in our post-game. Does the British political sphere (on and offline) differ in some crucial way from what we see in the states? How do they explain their mutual respect across political affiliations and party lines?

Rachel replied:

Iain is an urbane charmer, and sensible enough to realise that having silly blog spats is daft when chances are you’d happily have a pint in real life. I prefer to reserve my venom for politicians, (who don’t read my blog). It’s a grand British tradition, after all.

Rachel North, in an email to Open Source, 9/17/06