As part of a new, exclusive online feature, every week Total Politics will interview a key figure in the British blogoshere about blogging, politics and their lives. This week it is the turn of Conservative MEP and self-confessed blogaholic Daniel Hannan to step into the fray.

Quick-fire five

Favourite politician:

Alvaro Uribe in Colombia

Least favourite politician:

Chris Huhne

Favourite political story of the past year:

The election result in Massachusetts

In the film of your life, who would play you:

Michael Gambon

If you could change one thing about British politics, what would it be?

Open primaries

You are an MEP. How do you find the time to blog? Where do you do it?

Airline terminals, Eurostar, committee meetings that nobody has turned up to yet. It’s amazing how many free moments there are in the day which are otherwise pretty much dead time when you would be doing the crossword. I used to blog every couple of days when I started and then I got one of these very light and very small laptops that allow you to type quickly but are almost weightless. That was when I started using the spare time. There is a lot of travel involved in being an Euro MEP, between Brussels and Strasbourg. We have got huge constituencies. I spend an awful lot of time on trains because I am very Cameroonian about not driving if I can avoid it. So that’s no longer wasted time.

Do you think that the blogosphere will replace newspapers or is not as simple as that?

It depends what you mean by the blogosphere. The internet has already displaced paper as the main medium of news — massively. Ten times as many people are reading the Daily Telegraph on screen as on paper. That’s not quite the same as blogs but that gap is going to widen. The newspaper as a physical medium is in serious decline. There are only going to be two ways for it to go. There are always going to be free papers that people give out on the tube and there are always going to be glossies in Saturday and Sunday papers that people want to spread out at their kitchen table and read with a mug of tea. But the newspaper as your basic daily source of information is already being replaced by internet news.

You rose to prominence with a famous speech that got several million hits in two days. In it you described Brown as like a Brezhnev apparatchik. What historical figure would you describe Cameron as?

I don’t know what your favourite Gordon Brown moments are. There are lots of candidates - there’s the claim to have saved the world. But for me it was that extraordinary YouTube thing where he kept on grinning like the joker. I actually felt sorry for him.

In terms of Cameron, the figure I would like him to be like is Margaret Thatcher. That isn’t as surprising as it might sound at first. If you get back to how Margaret Thatcher was perceived at this stage of the electoral cycle, that is to say in the early months of 1979 when she had just taken over as leader of the opposition, people were saying very similar things about her to what they are saying about him now. Untested, not clear what she stands for, repository of all the anti-Labour sentiment but what concrete good is she going to do?

She had given an inclination that things were going to change radically and actually so has he. If even half of what he promises were done within the first 12 months of an incoming Conservative government that would be a revolution in Britain, in terms of the relationship between state and citizen

And Clegg?

I quite like the guy, I know him slightly. But he is unlucky with the time he has taken over in the sense that the ground that would naturally be his to occupy has already been bagged by other people. As a historical figure, somebody who is well-meaning but ineffectual, David Steel, maybe.

You mentioned that Cameroonism is about not driving, how far is that engrained in the average Conservative Party member?

A Conservative is a natural conservationist. He is a natural lover of the natural world. It was Marx who developed the idea that nature was there as a resource to be exploited. That idea found brutal realisation in the smoke-stack industries of the Eastern Bloc countries. So there is nothing new about a Tory appreciation for the rhythms of the green world. What I think is important is that it doesn’t follow from that that you support bossy, global eco-technocracies telling you what to do about everything. Environmentalism is too important to be left to the left.

Greenies traditionally say: "Think global, act local." They are very good at the first bit, setting up all their Kyoto, Rio, Copenhagen process. But they are often very bad at the second bit. Whereas Conservatives, who tend to have a natural relationship with the countryside around them, are generally very interested in how to preserve it. If you measured how I lived, I reckon I would come up as one of the greener legislators. Mrs H sources everything locally, our children had recycled nappies — the works. But if you judge my voting record and you were Friends of the Earth, you would put me on the other side. Not because I am against preserving natural resources but because I disagree with creating these massive bureaucracies as a way of delivering that. I think it’s really important that we make the argument that the way to clean up the environment is not just to give more power to international quangos.

I understand you are a massive fan of Shakespeare. What would you do if you found out he was a socialist?

That’s a meaningless question. If you are a socialist you will see a socialist in him, if you are a liberal you will see a liberal in him and if you are a patriot you will see a patriot in him. Everyone finds what they are looking for - that is the magic of the plays. That’s what makes them different from other literature. Goethe was convinced that Shakespeare was a spiritual German who had been born place. In a way, he was right. The bizarre quality of the plays is that whatever personal experience you take to them, they have more to tell you about your experience than your experience has to say about the plays. I can find loads of passages in Shakespeare that sustain my view of the world but so could anybody who read the plays open-mindedly.

Next week: Slugger O'Toole

Photo: Getty