Blogger Guido Fawkes, aka Paul Staines: 'I still hate politicians'

Back in 2006, when his blog was still quite new, Paul Staines forgot he had been invited to a lobby lunch by a journalist at Westminster. He was renovating his house when he got the call. "Paul, where are you? The first course is coming any minute." The blogger rushed over to Westminster, walked into the room, "and there's an intake of breath from the old guard". He had paint in his hair, was wearing flip-flops, shorts and an Ireland rugby shirt, "and the whole room went, what the fuck's that?" It's an anecdote that helpfully burnishes a fond self-image – that of a scrappy upstart bursting into the closed and cosy world of Westminster journalism, ruffling feathers. Which was exactly what he wanted his blog to do, and the reason why he called it Guido Fawkes.

He is wearing the same (now somewhat battered) shirt when we meet, but the circumstances are different. His readership has increased massively in size, and political blogging has long since come of age – in fact, despite years of inveighing against the "dead tree press", Guido Fawkes now has a column in the Sun on Sunday, thus reaching a potential readership of four million, on top of the 50-100,000 readers the blog gets every day.

This week, at prime minister's questions, Ed Miliband used the column as ammunition: "Doesn't it speak of how out of touch [the prime minister] is, Mr Speaker," he hooted, "that last week he attended the Conservative ball and auctioned a painting of himself for £100,000 and then declared without a hint of irony the Tories are no longer the party of privilege!" The hall jeered and howled. Cameron's reply, it quickly became clear, contained a leak obtained by the Guido Fawkes website: "He [ie Ed Miliband] is making a major speech on the economy on Thursday. It won't have any policies in it!" And he sat down, to thrilled baying from his benches, looking inordinately pleased with himself. "The Guidoisation of politics continues," crowed the blog, immediately.

Was Staines watching? "Yeah. I was only half paying attention, but Harry, who works with me" – he now has two co-writers, Harry Cole and Alex Wickham, and says that these days he aims to spend only 20% of his time blogging – "went, 'Ah! that's ours!' It's not the first time we've seen things we've done turn up in PMQs, but it's bit unusual that we get two hits" – and one of them verbatim, from the prime minister.

How did that feel? "We just laughed," he says, not laughing. Staines is often said to have a highly developed sense of mischief, which is no doubt true, but he is in person far less playful than one might expect. He is serious, and seriously prepared. He's also coldly watchful: his left eyelid droops a little, which gives the impression that while half his face is engaged in the conversation, the other is standing sentry.

His online persona is relentlessly mocking; it is also, compared to many online offerings, strikingly concise. Few entries, unless they contain a leaked memo or email, are more than 300 words long; you may object to their point, but there is never any doubt what it is. In person, however, he speaks in a quick mumble that often requires repetition and clarification.

And while his "bread and butter", as he puts it, is taking a politician's actions or promises and rooting about for proof of hypocrisy or lying (he has named an alleged mistress of John Prescott; embarrassed William Hague by revealing that he had shared a hotel room with his driver; forced the resignations of cabinet minister Peter Hain and of Damian McBride, a key aide of Gordon Brown; and last year was hauled before the Leveson inquiry for publishing a draft of the witness statement Alastair Campbell was preparing before his own appearance there), any attempts to discuss certain youthful indiscretions of his own are met with a distinct lack of humour.

His history reveals a man with an instinct for retribution and vendetta. He talks of a run-in with Jeremy Paxman and the Guardian's Michael White (in which the latter named him on air) as a "spit-roasting", and an unfavourable profile in the Telegraph as a "punishment beating"; "I detest Suzanne Moore and Julie Burchill" ran a recent tweet (he has more than 94,000 followers, and the comments on his posts, about which he has distinctly inconsistent opinions, are often strikingly misogynistic). When I ask whether he regrets anything about the terrible familial fallout from Chris Huhne's trial he says, "No. He was a bastard and I hated him and he deserves everything he gets."

The day before Damian McBride was exposed in the papers, Staines reportedly sent him a text quoting Conan the Barbarian: "What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women." He says that, while he regrets the fact that some of his actions – and the resultant press coverage – have given his wife, a solicitor in the City, "some pretty awful Mondays in the office" (after the Telegraph profile, "she closed the door and cried"), it's not going to make him any more charitable. "No. I'm just Irish, and that's the way we do it. Fuck with me, and I fuck with you."

The blog runs on a clearly defined timetable: a story by 9am, to get people as they sit down at their desks in the morning, another at 11am or so; then lunchtime, sometime in the afternoon, "and at 5pm we try to have something funny – the 'and finally', something light." How much involves trawling the archives and how much involves actual calls, meeting contacts, basic legwork? "Oh, to get hard news you can't just sit there watching Twitter, as I tell the guys all the time." His aim, when the blog began in 2004, was a combination of the gossipy tone and insider knowledge of Popbitch, mixed with the news sense and populist instincts of Kelvin MacKenzie's Sun – "that old [MacKenzie] thing of 'Amaze, amuse or anger' – if they say, 'I don't believe it,' you've got 'em; if they laugh, you've got 'em, and if you make them angry you've got them – so we try to do all three. I bumped into him at a party recently, and told him he was our ethics adviser."

At the beginning, he says, his sources were lobby journalists, who "would go, 'No, it's really like this – and draw back the curtain a little bit. That never happens now. It's too competitive. And the tone of reporting has changed. They're pulling back the curtain on themselves now." Their main source now is "the bag-carrier class – advisers, press officers obviously – and you know, Harry drinks with them, sleeps with them, whatever, and Alex – Wiki, as we call him – same thing. And I'm kind of less out night after night" – although, two small daughters notwithstanding, he was out till all hours on Monday, singing karaoke with "a gang of Westminster people".

So you're really part of the Westminster bubble, aren't you? "Oh, the days of us being able to say we're complete outsiders are long gone. When you're on first-name terms with cabinet ministers it's very hard to say you're on the outside. The one thing we are outside is the lobby system – we don't play by those rules, which I think are bad rules." And they are? "A politician can tell you that this policy that his party has come up with is rubbish. That politician will then go on Newsnight and say this policy is the best thing since sliced bread, and the journalist, who was told on lobby terms, is going to have to attribute it to 'a senior Downing Street source'. And that, I think, is unhealthy for democracy."

Has he found things harder now that the Tories are in power, and he is harrying people he theoretically agrees with? "I still hate politicians. My contempt for them is undiminished. I mean, we've got a coalition. People screw up quite a lot. The government isn't really doing things I'd like them to be doing." Except for Michael Gove, and perhaps Iain Duncan-Smith. Cameron is not anti-Europe enough for Staines, and "not going to deliver on anything"; Boris has a decent amount of popular appeal, "but he's not very right-wing".

Staines has, in his time, been a member of the Young Conservatives, and at college in Hull, the Federation of Conservative Students, who, he once wrote, "spoke a language I could understand – Thatcher on drugs … anti-Communist, anti-Wet and mainly reactionary … I never wore a 'Hang Mandela' badge, but I hung out with people who did … We were so obnoxious the Conservative party decided to close [us] down"; he was a member of the now-defunct Progressive Democrat party in Ireland (socially liberal, economically neoliberal) and of the SDP. "When I was younger," he says now, "I was "anarcho-capitalist, [then] libertarian, then pragmatic libertarian." He is now, he says, closer to the Tories and Ukip.

Staines's father was a Fabian who went to work for John Lewis because it was a cooperative; he is Anglo-Indian, from Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh; his mother is from working-class Dublin. Staines himself grew up in Sudbury in Suffolk. "My dad is a kind of moderate Tory now, but when I was a YC, in my teens, he just went to me – 'Enoch Powell?'" And what did you say to that? "I didn't know who the fuck Enoch Powell was." He went to Catholic school in Harrow, and although he lost his faith at 13, he and his wife intend to raise their daughters with all the rituals of the Catholic church.

Staines has had what a counsel to the Leveson inquiry drily called a "diverse career": student politics was followed by work for Tory fixer David Hart, which involved, as he tells it, spending the last years of the cold war chasing around Angola and Central America "firing off AK-47s. It was bloody exciting." Some of the funding, he says, "came from the American taxpayer; we were involved with the kind of anti-communist rebels Reagan's people were pushing – the kind of Ollie North end of the business." And now? "I'm still pretty gung-ho. We were on the right side of history. I don't have any problem with having raised money to kill communists."

His work with Hart began to overlap with helping an old friend who organised acid-house raves. "I spent a couple of years going around the M25, playing merry hell with the cops." This was followed by work as a professional blackjack player, a futures broker, a bond dealer, a hedge fund manager in Hong Kong and Tokyo, and then two years suing his main backer and finally bankruptcy. It was during the two years of resulting litigation that his blog, Guido Fawkes, was born.

He once said that his aim was to be an unignorable right-wing voice, like Rush Limbaugh in the US. "Like the Rushies [Limbaugh fans], I want the blogs to be a constituency politicians have to factor in." These days he goes further. "I think the internet means you can raise funds online in a different way. Labour goes to the union barons to get big cash-flows; the Tories go to the City. But I think the internet means they can get thousands of small donations. I know a lot about people online – you can raise money. If you raise money, have a parallel organisation, you can have much more influence. And that's where I see us going."