unoriginalname38 – the blog of Dave Cole

Guido Fawkes, Paul Staines and the bottom of the barrel

I don't often post about Guido Fawkes/Paul Staines, but his latest post is so poor it deserves mention. He says that he has

got his hands on a private campaign briefing prepared a few days ago for supporters of Hilary Benn's campaign for the deputy leadership. It details how popular Benn is polling with activists (pdf version here) and how they should use this information to pressurise their MPs to nominate Benn

which is rubbish. The pdf is a poll from YouGov that anyone can access from their website, and not the purported document. This seems to be the online equivalent of distraction - but then Paul Staines wouldn't be out of place as a petty conjurer at a circus. In any case, it would mean that someone in Benn's close campaign team who is seen as safe enough to be allowed to discreetly lobby MPs is leaking documents to Paul Staines - which alone beggars belief. As to having 'just spoken to McDougall', I do wonder how. I'm pretty sure it wasn't through it wasn't through the Number Ten switchboard. I'm hoping that Tim Ireland will do a sock-puppet video version of the call.

In any case, just because Paul Staines says so does not make it so. Prove the crime. If you have the document, give it to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.

I have heard Tim Ireland, the person behind Bloggerheads, described as a loon and an obsessive for his criticisms of Guido Fawkes/Paul Staines and Iain Dale. Neither of them did themselves any favours by putting little snippets of code into their pages that prevent deeplinking from certain sites - that is to say, preventing links to specific parts of their sites from Guido 2.0 and Iain Dale's Dairy (these two links are to satires of the originals). Dizzy Thinks It is the academic equivalent of citing an author, but not the year of publication; it is the journalistic equivalent of citing a newspaper but not an edition; and it doesn't do them any favours by making them look either as if they have something to hide or as if they're afraid of criticism. Either way, it confirms my opinion of Paul Staines and it makes me have serious doubts about Iain Dale. They must be the first bloggers to turn away links.

xD.

Links to this post: