BBC's Nick Robinson on Parliament,the lobby system,blogging and of course Mandelson

It is not very often that the BBC's top notch political commentator Nick Robinson gives a interview.

However he has opened up to Iain Dale on his Total Politics site.

In the piece,he tells Dale that politics and parliament have become more significant since we have been in coalition

Parliament is beginning to debate the things that anger, upset, inspire our audience. And the select committees are gradually building their power.

He also tells the magazine that he was probably the first political blogger,starting in 2006 and credits the rise of online as having massively increased the speed of accountability.

He also talks about that famous encounter with Peter Mandelson days after the election as well as commenting on the Westminster lobby system

 I just find the whole debate about the system of reporting in Westminster terribly anal, self-obsessed, tedium. There was a big scandal, and Michael Cockerell, to his enormous credit wrote a book about the lobby system in the early 80s. There’s basically a conspiracy of secrecy, a secret briefing, the very existence of which was an offence against this closed shop to reveal. It could be used to trash a minister’s reputation without anybody ever telling the public where it stemmed from. This just isn’t the case any more