Twenty-five months and 834 posts later, it's time to stop the charade.
I've done my best to disguise my identity all this time - pretending to be Jules Pipe, later Chris Evans, then a disaffected member of Hackney Labour Group and most recently Derek Hatton. I think I gave it a pretty damned good go.
To understand this blog, you need to go right back to the beginning and see why I set it up. Back in May 2006 we'd just celebrated a fantastic event. "Labour had an amazing victory in Hackney's council elections on 4 May - Jules Pipe re-elected as Mayor and 44 Labour councillors elected vs. 9 Tories, 3 Lib Dems and 1 Green", I wrote at the time. All I got for my troubles was a single comment - and that was referring me to someone else's blog. My second post wasn't much more successful, either. I set out my credentials in the world of political journalism by proudly publishing links to my writings in The Guardian and New Statesman - only to receive not one single comment.
By now I'd realised how pathetic my efforts were looking. Wanting to move up from boring Hackney to the bigger political stage, I wrote a lengthy analysis of the 2005 General Election results and, my hopes raised, sub-captioned it "Third time lucky". But it wasn't. Of my two respondents, one blamed the Tories for Labour's success and the other blamed the LibDems. Things were getting desperate and I knew that if I wasn't to suffer the same ignominy as a blogger that I'd experienced in my earlier attempts to become a Member of Parliament, I needed to do something. And it needed to be something radical.
That was the moment when, as a PR guru, I was struck by the metaphorical blinding light and this blog was born. It didn't work perfectly on day one because I still hadn't formulated the right approach at that stage. But once I started to synchronise the two publications, towards the end of June, the readers started to pour in. There's nothing like a good political scrap - and I gave my readers nothing like a good political scrap. I gave them war and, as with my heroine Maggie in the Falklands and my hero Tony in Iraq, it worked brilliantly. Best of all, I replaced the miserable, boring character of reality with the lovable, sexy Luke Akehurst that made readers simply beg me to uncross my legs.
I did occasionally get a bit carried away with myself, laying into the real me while pretending to be the fake Akehurst. With the benefit of hindsight I wouldn't have said so much about the local election vote rigging, paedophilia in Hackney Labour Group, dirty tricks campaigns, millions of pounds in wasted council tax, conspiracies against the PM, the destruction of Hackney's heritage, fake disabilities, corruption in the police, my apartment in Spain, back-stabbing on Hackney Council, John Prescott, cash for honours, bankruptcy, abuses on the Planning Committee, bookmakers, alcoholism, nepotism, Hazel Blears, cannabis, Boris Johnson or the Olympic Games. And nor would I have wasted my time writing blog posts about the little, irrelevant people of Hackney. But then hindsight is a wonderful thing.
It all worked brilliantly well. My readership is at an all-time peak, with virtually everyone who's still in the Labour Party coming regularly to my blog for comfort. OK - I get slagged off a bit in the comments - but what the hell, that's just the price of fame. I wish I'd thought of Tourette's syndrome before Big Brother came up with the idea. Then I could say "Fuck off to the fucking lot of you", without having to put those damned asterisks in.
So - what's been achieved in those two years?
The Labour Party is at an all-time low in the opinion polls. We've replaced the most popular leader in our history with the most unpopular in our history. The Party is on the verge of bankruptcy and several major trades unions are threatening to pull the funding plug. The Tories run London, the ScotNats run Scotland and we're wiped off the map in Wales. Nobody wants to run for the NEC in case they are liable for the Party's debts, several prominent Party members have resigned after major scandals, Labour has no policies for the future and the Cabinet is such a hotbed of conspiracy it makes the Rome of Claudius look like a garden tea party with Rowan Williams.
But look on the bright side. I got a massive 66 comments on my real blog over the past two days alone - and that was a weekend when the richer Party members were out of the country for a break and the poorer ones were getting pissed on London Underground to celebrate the alcohol ban. I've achieved my goal. I'm the BBC face of Labour blogging and I'm becoming more famous, more successful and richer by the day. And, after all, that's what I set out to achieve.
So, from Miranda and me... that's all folks! See you back on my real blog.
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I'm Luke Akehurst..... aka. "Luke The Nuke".
