Following the General Election 2010: the views of… Andrew Sparrow

Andrew Sparrow is the senior political correspondent on the Guardian website. He trained as a journalist on the South Wales Echo. Since joining the parliamentary lobby in 1994, he has worked as a political correspondent for Thomson Regional Newspapers, the Western Mail, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph. He has also written a book - Obscure Scribblers: A History of Parliamentary Journalism.

During the last General Election campaign he has done a terrific job running the blog General Election 2010 Live with Andrew Sparrow, from where he has followed the campaign live, minute by minute, providing the readers with tones of information not only about the candidates’ actions, but also about what the media said about them.

We thought we couldn’t find a better way to close this blog of ours than with a short interview to Andrew. We asked him about his job with his blog and what does he think about the campaign. We would like to thank Andrew and everybody else who has taken part in this blog for their collaboration.

How did you manage to work in such a quick an intense manner?
I've been doing live blogging for some time, so I've had lots of practice. We have good live blogging tools at the Guardian, which allow you to launch a fresh post very quickly. I'm used to writing quickly. And it was all very exciting, so it was not hard to keep going.

You've been gathering most of the information from TV, colleagues and the Internet. Did you miss talking to people in the streets?
A bit. In the past I have done election reporting on the ground. I enjoy that, and I think you can learn quite a lot from talking to voters. But I definitely learnt more by looking at the "big picture" and concentrating on what was being said on the TV and on the internet.

Do you think the campaign has been interesting from a communications perspective?
Not as much as we expected. There was a lot of speculation before the campaign started about the role of the internet. But in the end an old medium - television - dominated the campaign.

In your opinion, what have been the keys of the campaign?
Labour had been in power for 13 years, and voters always get tired of a party in power. The economy was very important, and Gordon Brown did not persuade voters that his approach would be better than the Tories's approach. Brown himself was unpopular. With a different leader, Labour may have won. And local organisation made a big difference in particular seats.