Road charges boost No 10 website

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Anger at road charging proposals and interest in former PM Tony Blair's language skills have boosted visitors to the Downing Street websites.

The official site's monthly 6m average page views surged to 23m in February - the height of a road pricing petition.

Meanwhile Mr Blair's greeting to French president Nicolas Sarkozy in his native tongue has proved the most popular video on Downing St's YouTube channel.

It accounts for more than 370,000 of the channel's total 1m viewings.

The video, which starts "bonjour a tous" sees Mr Blair admitting it could be a bad idea to deliver the greeting in French, but deciding to press on anyway.

PAGE VIEWS Jan: 9,039,253Feb: 22,651,768March: 8,452,168April: 4,885,863May: 4,747,541June: 5,299, 123

It is easily the favourite with visitors to the YouTube page - launched two months ago - which is linked through to the main Downing Street website.

However what the French might think of the former prime minister's accent is not known, as the facility allowing people to add comments has been switched off for all the Downing Street videos.

The second most popular video, with more than 163,000 page views, is the English version of the greeting.

The main Downing Street site has been running since 2000, but in November 2006 it introduced e-petitions to encourage campaigners.

By far the most popular campaign, which was backed up with an e-mail petition, was that started by Peter Roberts from Shropshire, against plans to introduce "pay as you drive" road charging.

It was signed by 1.7m people, made headlines in the national press, and prompted an e-mail response from Tony Blair.

Downing Street, which says it will now publish monthly traffic figures for its website, said in January there were 9m page views from 2.3m people.

But that figure surged to 22.6m page views in February from 4.4m people as a result, it suggests, of the interest in the road charging petition.

That one month more than outstripped the 21.7m page views for the whole of 2005 and the 17.1m total page views in 2006.

It has also helped push the figures in the first five months of 2007 to 46,038,265 page views with about 1.5m visitors a month.