ERO: Stump up (please)
It's time to do your bit for Tory reaction
About a month ago now, as some of our sharper readers may perhaps remember, ERO vanished from its accustomed home in cyberspace. Its departure was sudden and mysterious. One minute it was there, the next it had gone. Eventually a forlorn and badly laid-out holding page (sorry about that) appeared in its stead. And then, a week or so after the mysterious disappearance, the site suddenly appeared again. Hurrah! Britain’s leading High Tory webzine was back, and indeed remains back, its vigour undimmed, serving up that strange yet powerful cocktail of irony, geniality and malice our growing band of readers has come to expect.
Where, though, you may perhaps be wondering, had ERO gone in the meantime? The week in which it vanished was not a very propitious one for the present Conservative leadership (that helps to narrow it down, doesn’t it?) and unsurprisingly, conspiracy theories were in the air. The first anxious little enquires came from inside CCO itself, where several of our readers there feared, poignantly, that someone had finally decided to block access to ERO on CCO’s internal server. Others, farther afield and less focused in their paranoia, feared that ‘someone’ had actually managed to ‘shut down’ ERO. This, if accurate, would at least have had the twin advantages of being (a) very exciting and (b) in some ways the most profound tribute any webzine can be paid.
A technical tragedy
Alas, however, the truth was a good deal duller — and more technical, too, so bear with us for a moment here. It turns out that the company who built the ERO website not only charged us a sizeable sum for installing antiquated freeware, but also managed to install this freeware in a novel fashion that discouraged the archiving function — one of its few discernible attractions — from working properly. And of course they weren’t backing the site up, either, in the way that normal web engineers advocate doing.
So one day in late October, our archives broke. We discovered that just under half the articles ever posted on the site were no longer there. Many tens of thousands of words worth of copy were lost, few of them easily replaceable given our bad habit of editing online. This is the stuff over which future historians of Tory reaction will weep — and we weren’t too happy about it, either. But with their characteristic attention to detail, our site architects took their time in responding to our increasingly bemused emails. The first sign that they were doing anything at all came when the site completely disappeared. Was this just incompetence once again, or was there a hint of tracks being covered? This is a question that skilled legal minds may one day wish to contemplate, yet in the short run it left us with a simple and urgent problem — how best to get ERO online again?
Salvation for our much-loved if eccentric High Tory website appeared in the unlikely, if inexpressibly welcome, form of an American anarcho-capitalist who’s involved with antiwar.com, and who pointed us in the direction of his marvellously capable colleague, who in turn managed to clear up the damage done by our previous site engineers — on time and on budget, too. (Do email us if you want the full gushing testimonial about this lovely, lovely man.) But to cut a long story short, we are no longer working with our old site engineers, ERO is up and running again, and we are all getting on with the serious business of living happily ever after.
Still, the legacy of that articulus horribilis is with us still. During those dark times the ERO editorial soviet wasted days and days doing nothing but trying to rescue your webzine of choice, with all the tranquil purposefulness that this implies. Not least, in order to make sure that our old site would henceforth keep their bumbling hands off our site, we had to move to a new server even though the contract on our old server had two more months to run. We also had to pay to have the site re-built, more or less from scratch. And now we have to contemplate having a better and safer architecture for the site than the one with which we have been left after all of this.
The question you were too polite to ask
People often wish to know how ERO is funded. Indeed, MPs have often engaged ERO’s editorial vanguard in casual, spontaneous chats about this very subject. Well, here’s the answer. Although we have had a tear-inducing series of cash contributions via that ‘support us’ button just over there, that’s right, up a bit, to the left, yes, go on — well, we’re hugely grateful for these, but essentially this enterprise is, obviously, funded the way all the best eighteenth century follies are — off the back of Donegal ground-rents (we torch on average a cottage per article), and the profits gleaned from experimental livestock-rearing schemes in the wilds of, err, Soho, and that sort of thing. Modern capitalism being what it is, alas, this is a diminishing income stream and perhaps not ultimately the way forward for the future of Tory reaction.
True, the cost of running is site isn’t enormous. It’s cheaper than trying to produce something along the lines of the Salisbury Review (have you seen that amazing retro-chic layout?), let alone the glossier heights of the Spectator. But at the same time, it isn’t as cheap as all that, either in terms of time or money. Up to now, the most significant cash expenditure has gone into site construction and engineering. Thus it’s a bit of a blow that we’ve now had to do this part twice. And this, in turn, puts a squeeze on ERO’s commissioning and editorial work, since the editorial team have had to throw our formidable energy into dismal fiscal matters, rather than devoting ourselves entirely to the site. Worse still, however, lack of cash puts a check on plans for the future. Before disaster struck, we gearing up for an exciting rebuilding of the site (think the Adam brothers remodelling your seat — that exciting, that traditional) whereas the funding for that has been hoovered up by the need simply to have any site at all, no matter how unwieldy. We’d also like to get to the point of posting three or more articles per day, rather than the meagre if rich fare on which you’re subsisting at the moment.
What you can do to help
So here, finally, is the serious point. If you’ve read this far, chances are, you are someone who follows ERO with some interest — perhaps even with enthusiasm, admiration or faintly scary obsessiveness. Perhaps you find high-grade candidates’ list intelligence delivered with a sinister slither and sibilant hiss — you know who I mean — oddly stirring. Or perhaps you’re here for the political comment or even the arts coverage. Or perhaps you simply have noticed that ERO provides a consistently and unapologetically Tory voice in a world where such a thing is all but unknown.
Well, if so, now is the time to demonstrate your interest in a slightly more tangible form. Obviously we realise that some of our readers already contribute massively to ERO — for instance, by writing articles for us — or by sending us the many messages of support that have often encouraged us in what might otherwise have seemed a somewhat lonely enterprise. Other readers may not have the ability or inclination to shell out on our behalf. Fair enough.
But for the rest of you, the time has come to consider making a cash contribution to ERO. A sum like £10 would buy you, say, three Spectators or slightly less than a pair of New Criterions — but if even a relatively small proportion of our readers gave us £10 each, then we would have enough money to pay for the recent repairs to the site. Don’t stop there, though. The more money there is in ERO’s coffers, the more time we can devote to repairing those archives, improving the site, commissioning and writing new articles, matching up more books and events with more reviewers — and, of course, collecting more scandalous gossip of the sort you keep coming back to read. It’s as simple as that.
So if you’d like to make a financial contribution to ERO, you can do so, online and securely, via Pay Pal. Alternatively, if you wish to send a cheque, unwanted livestock, old Russian railway bonds or priceless jewels and rare spices of the orient, please contact us for further details. It goes without saying that all contributions will remain as anonymous as you want them to be — we’re good at keeping secrets — but that our gratitude will be profound and lasting.
And remember what happened last time our supportive voice vanished — how much more of that can any of us take?
ERO, November 23, 2002 09:00 AM