SOMETIMES it’s easy to forget that people who comment on blogs are only a tiny proportion of the total readership. And unless you remember that, it’s easy to imagine that the comments left are representative, not only of your readership, but of the public at large.

David Cairns, with a mixture of amusement and resignation, regularly asks me for the latest example of the entirely inappropriate and humourless comment in response to an entirely non-political item I’ve posted. And there are always plenty. If I write about Doctor Who, or something personal about me or my family, or any other subject utterly unrelated to politics, the usual suspects emerge from the woodwork to have a go at the government.

What is wrong with these people?

They’re clearly very angry. All the time. And they crave some form of outlet for their anger. Blogs – their own or other people’s – are, of course, the ideal medium, especially since their local newspapers stopped agreeing to publish their regular diatribes.

They will claim (perhaps even in this thread) that their anger is caused by the Labour government which has been so inept/corrupt/cynical/dishonest/evil that anger is the only possible response.

Now, it’s dangerous to analyse an individual from his comments on a blog. But since it’s all I’ve got to go on, I can’t help drawing my own conclusions. And it seems that these very, very angry people will always be angry at something, and probably always have been angry. And unhappy. They can’t understand the world around them and they don’t understand why the only people they encounter who are as angry as they are about the same things are others who dwell in the blogosphere.

They all claim that “everyone” they know is as angry (at Labour) as they are, but they’re not. For instance, take the Lisbon Treaty. If you read the comments on this blog, you get a picture of a nation on the verge of violent revolution, of a nation about to take its revenge on Labour by utterly destroying us as a party at the first electoral opportunity. Labour faces not just electoral defeat, they claim, but permanent oblivion.

Yet despite media mythology, MPs are generally in touch with what their constituents think. It’s in our interests to listen to the people whose support we’ll be asking for in a few short weeks. And in all the doorsteps I’ve been on in 2009, not a single voter has mentioned either the Lisbon Treaty or the smoking ban.

There are two types of those blog commenters who spew out an uninterrupted and mostly irrelevant stream of poison: those who use the anonymity of the internet to exaggerate their views, almost as a release mechanism, and who would never say such things to my face because they were brought up properly and, like most people, have a basic concept of decency and civility.

And then there are the others who, I have no doubt, speak in their private lives in exactly the same way that they write on blogs. They’re the scary ones. They’re the ones who genuinely believe everyone around them is as utterly obsessed with the EU, the smoking ban, and the imminence of Labour’s police state as they themselves are.

Their families worry about them. And they don’t get invited to dinner parties.

I write this because I’ve had to close down a thread on a post I wrote yesterday. It was a short piece about some Normandy veterans to whom I’d presented the Normandy Bar in recognition of their service to both Britain and France in June 1944. I had hoped (naively, it turns out) that readers might take the opportunity to leave their own tribute to such men.

Instead, after reading more stream-of-consciousness bile about (yes, you guessed it) the government, I took the rare but inevitable step of closing the thread altogether. Ironically, the people who left the vicious and inappropriate comments are the same people who would probably claim that they believe it’s important to honour our veterans!

I try not to let this rubbish get to me, but I was sorely disappointed that even this subject was seen as fair game to the obsessives and cranks. But I suppose that’s what defines them – they’re obsessive and they’re cranks.

It’s enough to put you off blogging. I do value the comments that are left here. I accept that, as a blogging Labour MP I invite criticism, and the overwhelming majority of even the most critical comments are published. But it is soul-destroying to have to plough my way through so much guff and nonsense every day, especially in response to non-political posts. Maybe that’s their aim – to destroy my soul (“serves him right for writing a blog which supports this evil government…”).

Maybe I’ll have to introduce a new rule: only comments relevant to the original post will be published. Except that would mean deleting 90 per cent of the comments…

But I will cling to my belief that the people who read this blog and who choose not to leave comments are just like the general populace: normal, moderate, sensible, decent, and holding political views which may or may not be vindicated at the next election, but which aren’t worth falling out with anyone over.