Nadine Dorries (hearts) teenage sex

There is a lot to be said about Nadine Dorries’ attempt to pass into law a bill introducing compulsory abstinence ‘education’ for teenage girls (and girls alone). As usual (example), she is using a mainstream face farce to mask a deeply religious – some might say fundamentalist – agenda, and producing anecdotal, distorted or just plain invented evidence to support it… but, happily, there’s been enough shock and outrage over her blurtings today to pretty much guarantee that every point of her ridiculous premise will be shot down by someone, somewhere.

That leaves me free to make this single observation…

Nadine Dorries claims that Raspberry Beret by Prince is one of her all-time favourite songs. In fact, here’s a touching moment from her not-a-blog where she draws great comfort from this funk ballad:

“I will know I’m feeling happier when I flick onto the next track – Prince and Raspberry Beret – I can’t get there quick enough.”

Nadine Dorries (source)

In case there’s any doubt, it was her first choice when she was asked for her favourite song in the 2005 election:

(What is your favourite music/song?)

“Raspberry Beret by Prince and the second of Goretskis three sorrowful songs.”

Nadine Dorries (source)

If Nadine Dorries actually means it when she claims she wants to teach teens that it’s “cool” to say ‘no’ to sex (i.e. if this isn’t just a further attempt to halve the abortion rate for entirely biblical reasons), she may want to choose a new favourite song…. because Raspberry Beret is a song about a teenage romance that culminates in what is unmistakably a first-time sexual experience.

Raspberry Beret (lyrics excerpt):

Listen
They say the first time ain’t the greatest
But I tell ya
If I had the chance 2 do it all again
I wouldn’t change a stroke
Cause baby I’m the most
With a girl as fine as she was then

If there is any room for doubt about this, it is about the female character’s virginity… and this thought process leads us to a situation where she is the more experienced of the two, and possibly the instigator in this sexual adventure (i.e. if we are not reading it as the male character taking advantage of a none-too-bright teenage girl):

Raspberry Beret (lyrics excerpt):

I said now, overcast days never turned me on
But something about the clouds and her mixed
She wasn’t 2 bright
But I could tell when she kissed me
She knew how 2 get her kicks

To be clear, this favourite song of Nadine’s specifically celebrates the opposite of the position she pressed in the House today:

“We need to let young girls know that to say no to sex when you are under pressure is a cool thing to do…”

Nadine Dorries (source/video)

“My bill was about making boys wait being an empowering and cool thing for girls to do…”

Nadine Dorries (source)

To close, I invite you to make like our society and saturate yourself in sex. Let’s dance!


Raspberry Beret – Prince

UPDATE – The post has been edited to add two quotes from Dorries that further support my point.

UPDATE – Related linkage:

Heresy Corner – Boys, girls and Nadine Dorries
Liberal Conspiracy – Abstinence makes Nadine Dorries’ brain go softer
“Um… about that thing you just said…” – Women Who Hate Women: Nadine Dorries
We Mixed Our Drinks – Thoughts on Nadine Dorries’ abstinence crusade
Ministry of Truth – Dorries’ Abstinence Speech – The Fact Check








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Lynn Elson: The NHS Connection

[The following is the full text of a letter sent to Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. I’ll let it speak for itself.]

To: The Assistant Registrar, Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards
From: Tim Ireland
Subject: Lynn Elson

Dear Sir or Madam,

In the process of investigating payments to Lynn Elson through the office of Nadine Dorries (Conservative member for Mid Bedfordshire), I had cause to email one of Elson’s former business partners, who later stated that on Feb 4th 2011 he had sent a copy of my email (along with his reply) only to the two parties concerned; Nadine Dorries and Lynn Elson.

When checking the tracking data for the relevant email, I discovered that the first recipient of this forwarded email had downloaded it using an IP address that was one of a range used to connect the NHS private data network (N3) to the public Internet.

What this means in layman’s terms is that the person who downloaded an email sent only to Lynn Elson and Nadine Dorries did so using a network reserved exclusively for staff and approved personnel authorised by the NHS.

I suspect this indicates that Lynn Elson held a staff and/or consultancy position within the NHS at the same time as working as the “right hand woman” for Nadine Dorries.

As you are no doubt aware, this raises potentially serious questions on a number of fronts, especially given this member’s long standing interest in the NHS and other health-related matters:

In accordance with Resolutions made by the House of Commons on 17 December 1985 and 28 June 1993, holders of photo-identity passes as Members’ secretaries or research assistants are in essence required to register:

Any occupation or employment for which they receive over £329 from the same source in the course of a calendar year, if that occupation or employment is in any way advantaged by the privileged access to Parliament afforded by their pass

Further, I have looked through the Register Of Interests Of Members’ Secretaries And Research Assistants, and have found no declaration of any kind for Lynn Elson under Other Relevant Gainful Occupation or Benefit.

There is also the matter of the size of the payments made to this individual though Dorries’ office (£3,450/month over many months) which would at the very least suggest that her role under this MP was full-time.

While I realise that the staff member involved has already resigned (Feb 7th 2011), she has given an obviously false excuse for doing so (she accused me of ‘intrusion’ after I published an article studying the publicly-available data about her income/business, heavily implying that I had stalked her in some way), and the relevant MP is still a serving member who should at least be asked about her awareness of Lynn Elson’s role within the NHS at the time of her ’employment’ in the House.

(I put ’employment’ in scare quotes mainly because Lynn Elson was paid though her company, Marketing Management Midlands Ltd, and your records show her as non-payroll staff.)

I understand it is within your remit to investigate this matter, and believe it is in the public interest that you do so.

I look forward to your reply.

Regards

Tim Ireland
www.bloggerheads.com

Related links:
Nadine Dorries and Marketing Management Midlands Ltd
Nadine Dorries: Go Compare
Nadine Dorries excuses her stupid lies with dangerous lies

UPDATE (13 May) – The Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards will not be acting on this complaint. “Ms Elson is no longer working for a Member.” Pity. I thought they stood a good chance of getting at least some of our money back.








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Nadine Dorries: meeeeow

Just before the recent holiday break, Nadine Dorries posted the following statement* in reaction to these questions about her expenses claims:

“For anyone who cares to know, blogger, Tim Ireland, who chooses to write blogs which are malicious, un-founded and for the most part totally untrue, has been warned by Police not to enter Bedfordshire.” – Nadine Dorries (source)

Just in case you’re new here, I should explain that this time last year (May 4 2010), Dorries claimed that I had stalked her and several other MPs, and claimed quite specifically that a police investigation was in progress.

This was an outright lie, and Dorries was in a position where she could not even prove that she had made a formal complaint that might allow her to credibly claim that she was initially mistaken about this. So, using her magic time machine, Dorries sought to cover herself by making a complaint to police about my presence at the same public meeting where she made her entirely false claim that a police investigation was already in progress.

This complaint prompted an investigation so lacking in merit that no crime reference number has been assigned to it, because no crime (potential or otherwise) has yet to be detected, even among the distortions Dorries fed to police; I was invited to a public meeting, and even secured permission ahead of time to both record and broadcast the event.

Since this later/genuine investigation began, Dorries has repeatedly sought to politicise it by leaking privileged details that police have shared with her, which then appear in distorted form either through her blog or via anonymous comments made elsewhere on her behalf.

Here is an example of the latter, for your reference:

Comment by 'Rachel'

The claim that I was arrested is entirely untrue, and the accompanying details are a gross distortion… but this claim and others like it contain just enough privileged information to make it clear that Dorries is the source (even if she is not typing these anonymous comments herself).

What makes this situation even worse is that Nadine Dorries knows there are cyber-vigilantes targeting me who have been publishing these same lies and distortions alongside my home address and other details of my whereabouts (latest).

I am trying very hard to avoid leaking any details myself, and I hope to better explain my position in coming days/weeks, but there’s been widespread reaction to what Dorries has claimed/implied about my freedom to move in and out of Bedfordshire, and I have to publish something in the short term to address this, so please excuse my generics:

It is the role of police to not only uphold the law, but keep the peace. With two parties in dispute, they may choose to give advice to either or both parties in an attempt to avoid a potential breach of the peace.

Given Nadine Dorries’ reaction to my presence at Flitwick alone, it should not come as an enormous shock to anyone if police (or anyone else with a vested interest in keeping the peace) were to suggest that I may wish to avoid any future meetings in Bedfordshire where Dorries might be present.

But this advice might be portrayed in any number of ways.

If one wanted to support Dorries and her contention that I have stalked her and others, it could be interpreted as a warning with the weight of a court order behind it, or even the mere potential of arrest in entirely theoretical circumstances. This would at least imply that there is some weight to the repeated claims and implications that I have been following Dorries around and/or paying her undue attention. (I haven’t.) To those unfamiliar with the law and/or likely to trust a lawmaker making claims on behalf of police, it might even suggest that I am a stalker in the eyes of the law. (I’m not.)

However, if one wanted to highlight the risks to my family resulting from the web publications that follow Dorries’ outbursts (i.e. false claims that I stalk women and send death threats to MPs published alongside my home address) it could be interpreted as a measure I should take for my/our own sake.

Using a more aggressive distortion, if one wanted to portray Nadine Dorries as hysterical, one might liken it to being advised to stay away from Eleanor Abernathy (the ‘Crazy Cat Lady’ from The Simpsons) for the sake of my own wellbeing… and that of the cats she throws at her perceived persecutors.

Mind you, IF anything like the latter were the case, it is worth noting that we are talking about advice here, with no legal force behind it, or even an implied threat of potential legal action… so if Dorries were to decide to throw cats at me anyway, see if you can guess what that does to my motivation.

To close, I wish to make it completely clear that police have not claimed or even implied that Nadine Dorries is mentally ill or a danger to cats… but neither have they claimed or implied that I am a stalker, a danger to humans, or even at risk of breaking the law by blogging about this MP, attending relevant public meetings, or passing within the boundaries of Bedfordshire.

(*Psst! Dorries’ latest outburst is what is known as an ‘ad hominem’ attack, and the thugs who support Dorries often pretend to take a principled stand against such things when falsely portraying any criticism of this MP as a personal attack of this nature. Needless to say, they’ve not said a word against this attack from Dorries, just as they’ve turned a blind eye to the many other false accusations levelled at me because I dared to subject Dorries and/or her Tory mates to scrutiny. One of these people even attempts to excuse/minimise false accusations of stalking and death threats by equating these specific allegations of criminality to my use of the word ‘thug’ to describe the same people who carry on like this and/or publish personal details such as my home address and home phone number in order to intimidate me. It’s all political gameplay to these people; any claim of adherence to moral/legal principles is primarily pretence. Were it otherwise, they would spare some criticism for scumbags like Iain Dale and Anne Milton; people who have knowingly stood by and willingly allowed even smears of paedophilia to pass unfettered for personal/political gain.)








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CPS on Dorries: “insufficient evidence to proceed to a prosecution”

As you can see from the following statement released in response to a query to the London Met, the allegation reported by two newspapers and repeated on this blog was entirely true; an expenses claim submitted by Nadine Dorries’ was under investigation by police, and the matter was later referred to and considered by the Crown Prosecution Service:

“An allegation of dishonest parliamentary claims was received by the MPS on 20/5/10. As a result of a detailed assessment an investigation began. A file of evidence was submitted to the CPS on 9/12/10. As a result of further evidence, the investigation continued and the case was again considered by the joint MPS/CPS panel. The panel has now recommended that there is insufficient evidence to proceed to a prosecution and therefore police have decided to take no further action.” – London Metropolitan Police spokesperson

This is something that has gone unreported in Nadine Dorries’ local paper (Bedfordshire on Sunday).

Dorries herself has found time to heavily imply that the person making the complaint (a former employee) was guilty of misconduct, but she has yet to produce any supporting evidence and there is no word of her filing any kind of complaint. Meanwhile, Bedfordshire on Sunday editor Chris Gill has seen fit to publish an article portraying my investigation of this same story as intrusion or worse, based on nothing more than assertions by Nadine Dorries and/or Lynn Elson that phone calls had been made to police.

To remind you of the detail, here is an excerpt from the original story as it broke, just prior to the date in May when Dorries’ former employee Peter Hand made the relevant complaint to the London Met:

£10,000 claim makes Tory the first MP in an expenses row

Dorries, who last week retained her mid-Bedfordshire seat, claimed the money for an annual report in 2007 on her performance as an MP, and consultancy services, but Hand said he never saw the report or worked on it. Dorries claimed a total of more than £40,000 in expenses for services provided by Marketing Management (Midlands), owned by her friend Lynn Elson. They live near each other in the Cotswolds.

Dorries claimed £9,987.50 for Marketing Management in June 2007 for the design, layout and production of an annual report and for consultancy. She says she spent the money, and posted a copy of the report on her website. However, it does not appear to be professionally produced. The previous year, by contrast, she issued a glossy four-page professionally produced report with more than 25 pictures, news articles, an interview and a breakdown of her typical working day as an MP.

Hand, who now works for the charity Mencap, said: “The 2006 report was posted on her website and I was closely involved in its production.

“I was never aware a report was produced in 2007 and never saw one. Even if there was this leaflet, I don’t understand how the costs could be so high.”

Dorries said: “I’ve done an annual report every year since I’ve been an MP. We did keep a lot of stuff from Peter.”

She would not provide details of the printing firm which had been used for the work or a breakdown of what Elson’s firm charged for.

And here is a picture of the invoice for the work Nadine Dorries claims Lynn Elson undertook for her (PDF/source):

Dorries 2007 annual report invoice

And here is the only sign of any visible result to date; two photographs of the report that Lynn Elson produced (which appears to be nothing more than a two-page document created in Word):

Dorries 2007 annual report photo 01

Dorries 2007 annual report photo 02

There is no record of any payment made for distribution of this ‘annual report’, it does not appear to have been published on/through Dorries’ site at any stage (despite her claims to the contrary), and judging by these photos, pointed questions might be asked about the appropriateness its content… if we were permitted to read it in full and judge its worth for ourselves.

Did Nadine Dorries present police and/or the CPS with a copy of this ‘annual report’? If so, then perhaps she would care to publish it at last. (This time last year, she claimed that she could not locate a copy, and implied that she would be perfectly willing to publish it otherwise.)

Did Lynn Elson offer a whole or partial refund for this fee? If so, when was this offered and why?

Did Nadine Dorries withdraw this expenses claim and pay back the money? If so, when did this happen and why?

Oh, and why is Bedfordshire on Sunday not asking these questions? They do not go away because of lack of evidence*. If anything, what little Dorries has published in her defence raises further questions.

Just to provide one single example; I seriously doubt that any opening argument about the strained budget of a local hospital can justify spending close to £10,000 of taxpayer’s money on what appears to be two-page ‘report’ promoting Dorries’ campaign to reduce the availability of abortion:

Dorries 2007 annual report photo detail

(*Similarly, Lynn Elson resigning does not erase the many questions about the tens of thousands of pounds Dorries has paid her over the years; quite the opposite once it is obvious that the reasons she gives for her resignation are an hysterical invention, or worse, a calculated lie.)

UPDATE (7pm) – Dorries has responded to these questions by once again implying that I am somehow guilty of stalking her**, and by accusing me of publishing “blogs which are malicious, un-founded and for the most part totally untrue”. She has been asked to identify any content in this post that is inaccurate so I might correct it, and I’ll happily extend that invitation to cover the rest of my website and anything else I’ve written, said or published about her. On that note, The Telegraph have reported this same CPS revelation within the past hour, but suggest the investigation centred mainly on Nadine’s ‘second home’ rental claims.

UPDATE (27 April) – ** Unity on the relevant allegation from Dorries (she claims I’ve been “warned by Police not to enter Bedfordshire”): “Dorries’ claim is not simply a lie, it’s a desperately bad lie; one so divorced from reality as to make its falsity obvious to all but the most gullible and credulous of her readers.”

UPDATE (27 April) – Jim Hamilton on that same allegation; “I worked for Bedfordshire Police for over 6 years, and this would be the first time that I’ve ever heard of such an instruction being given.”








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No to AV donors: a question for Charlotte Vere

I had to laugh when I heard David Cameron making a distinction between the ‘No to AV’ campaign and the Conservative ‘No to AV’ campaign, because while the ‘No to AV’ campaign may have a few useful idiots from leftish neighbourhoods on board, there is no question about it being a very Tory animal.

(Psst! Here we pause very briefly to look in detail at the evidence David Cameron presents against the Alternative Vote… which amounts to a gut feeling. My trick knee is telling me that this is a rancid pile of foetid dingo’s kidneys.)

After weeks of dodging questions about their funding with some bullshit pre-emptive promises, the ‘No to AV’ campaign were finally pressed into revealing a partial list of donors in good time prior to the referendum, but after days of polite questions to their previously chatty Finance Director, Charlotte Vere, they have refused to answer any questions about what the total amount donated might be (though they have implied that information will emerge after everyone has voted).

The ‘Yes to AV’ campaign team, by comparison, have not only published a similar list, but also the total amount donated, and the total number of donors.

When you look at this useful annotated list of the ‘No to AV’ donors, the reason for the secrecy becomes clearer; from what they have revealed to date, ‘No to AV’ appears to be funded almost entirely by Conservative donors.

Below is a pie chart based on the figures released by ‘No to AV’ and this annotated version of their list, breaking down donations between sources that are definitely Tory or almost certainly Tory, sources that are unclear at this stage, and £10,000 from a single union:

No to AV - Fig 1

What follows is speculation made necessary by the curious level of secrecy ‘No to AV’ insist upon…

Here is what the charts would look like if, as with the ‘Yes to AV’ campaign, just under half of the ‘No to AV’ donations were under the £7,500 threshold:

No to AV - Fig 2

And here is what the charts would look like if ‘No to AV’ pulled a fast one and had all 650 local Conservative associations donating amounts just under the £7,500 threshold:

No to AV - Fig 3

So, considering how bad it can look if ‘No to AV’ insist on these figures remaining a secret, I will ask their Finance Director Charlotte Vere again to reveal (as the ‘Yes to AV’ campaign have) the total amount of donations to date, and the total number of donors… now, and not after people have voted.

Those of us in the electorate have a right to know if electoral reform is being blocked mainly by the party (almost) in power and the ultra-rich backers and bankers behind them, especially if the ‘No to AV’ campaign claims to have a widespread grass-roots movement supporting the interests of the less-moneyed classes.

UPDATE (03 May) – It should also be noted that (via the Guardian) that “the No to AV figures do not include donations it received prior to the referendum bill passing in parliament”. There has been no response from Charlotte Vere to any of the questions raised in this post; Vere was awfully chatty (even boastful) about the ‘transparency’ of this unfailingly negative and dishonest campaign before these questions about the total amount donated. Now, not to so much. I’d say the cat’s got her tongue, but it’s busy elsewhere:








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Scaling

In the coming weeks and months, I am going to be writing quite a lot about a goal-oriented philosophy I have dubbed scaling. Several projects will be based on this same philosophy.

For reasons that should become clear to you almost immediately, I wish to begin with the modest goal of explaining this philosophy and the dual meaning of the word ‘scaling’ when it’s used to describe it.

‘Scaling’ is a term I first applied to a specific method in search engine optimisation where you gain immediate if modest returns via search engines, and then gradually build on this over time in a way that brings ever-present and increasing rewards with each incremental improvement:

Scaling Relevance

OK, so now you know enough about Page Titles and their importance/role to understand this key example; what follows is a Page Title that is descriptive, contains a call to action, and also contains a combination of keywords that might be of importance to a site selling chocolate. A brand new site with no reputation to speak of has no chance of being the top search result for ‘chocolate’ immediately, but the site owner might hope to immediately/quickly be a high search result for a more unique (but still potentially lucrative) query such as ‘buy chocolate online uk’. If they work on the link popularity of their site over time, the likelihood of them performing for more lucrative queries increases, (important bit #1) they are enjoying increasingly lucrative rewards on their journey to this goal, and (important bit #2) they do not have to pay some joker money to come in and fiddle about with their keywords on a monthly basis because all of the relevant keywords are contained within a single, unchanging Page Title.

NomNom (UK) – Buy chocolate online

Contains:
– chocolate
– buy chocolate
– buy chocolate online
– chocolate uk
– buy chocolate uk
– buy chocolate online uk

Coordinating Relevance

Of course, the example above only takes into account a single page and Page Title, as it is designed mainly to help you appreciate the point (i.e. it is not a strategy in itself). What you need to do is scale your relevance on a site-wide basis, and it is here I hope you will understand how it is possible to generate a commanding search result for your entire product/service range without attempting to list every product/service on your front page, and how it is possible to have every Page Title on your site working towards your main keyword strategy without having the same damn Page Title on every single page. (I still see this on some sites. It makes me want to cry.) At the top are three Page Titles, one for the front page and one for each of the main categories, and under that is the keyword query pattern that should help you appreciate how scaling works on any scale:

NomNom (UK) – Buy chocolate online
NomNom (UK) – Buy dark chocolate online
NomNom (UK) – Buy milk chocolate online

chocolate
chocolate uk
buy chocolate
buy chocolate online
buy chocolate online uk
dark chocolate || milk chocolate
dark chocolate uk || milk chocolate uk
buy dark chocolate || buy milk chocolate
buy dark chocolate uk || buy milk chocolate uk
buy dark chocolate online || buy milk chocolate online
buy dark chocolate online uk || buy milk chocolate online uk

(read more)

This method is unpopular among SEO providers who seek monthly cheques from their clients, as it rules out any earnings from constant keyword shuffling and focuses investment on long term goals instead of short term gain through various shortcuts/sidesteps such as AdWords. However, for you to learn about the philosophy of scaling, you need to appreciate this choice of paths from the client’s point of view; if the client wishes to generate an immediate high search result for ‘chocolate’ or bypass the need for an organic result and instead place ads adjacent to the highest results, then a hefty investment will be required to either generate a sufficient number of inbound links to the site and/or pay for advertising bills.

This kind of journey involves a threshold that most of us could not hope to meet immediately, as it requires an enormous monetary investment of one form or another before any results/rewards come in:

Now compare this to the philosophy of building your site with a scaled generic keyword strategy (as outlined above) and making modest, ongoing investments designed to improve your site’s reputation:

When used to describe this philosophy, ‘scaling’ does not just apply to the increasing size of the goals and rewards at each step of the way (i.e. the measurement of amounts and dimensions); it also describes the journey you take on the path to your ultimate goal (i.e. your means of ascent via these same steps).

One thing that has put people off political blogging in recent years is the entirely false sense of scale pushed by ‘leading’ bloggers who have not only been cheating by lying about their traffic statistics for years, but responding to criticism by sniffily rejecting the author(s) as insignificant according to this scale, and asserting their authority over them using these same (fabricated) traffic numbers. It is in this way that they set themselves up as gatekeepers of information in a field where they themselves insist that information should be allowed to flow freely. (One of them even had a widely-understood policy of withholding link-love from anyone who dared to be critical of him. I’m sure I do not need to name names for people to understand the way this might be used to force an agenda on a false premise/mandate.)

Party politics involves a similar deceit that convinces not just candidates but voters that the only viable path lies through assimilation with established parties.

To give other examples outside of politics, until recently, the threshold one had to cross before you could hope to make a living from the music or video production industry was enormous; you were going nowhere fast unless you had a deal with one of the monster-sized organisations, who had a vested interest in maintaining that same threshold and associated illusions, seeking to justify it with the same flawed ‘quality’ argument I describe in relation to political blogging. A similar false threshold persists in the world of print.

I hope to awaken you to the possibility that in the 21st century, with the advent of the web especially, you do not need to scale impossibly steep inclines or beg for favours from the wazzocks manning the cliff-tops.

The rewards of this awakening are potentially immense; think about all the people who sold out their values and/or surrendered a great deal of personal power just so they might hope to secure a seat, gain a record deal, have a script produced, write for a newspaper, have a book produced, or get a product made and/or on the market. See Dragon’s Den especially on this last point, and the impossibly large amounts of expenditure retailers/supermarkets require before they will even stock your goods; this path leads only to stagnation, and dross, and the joy of eating out of a trough.

Scaling is about your right to realise your own potential, and making it happen through realistic and manageable means.

The philosophy not only allows for success in line with your potential, it allows you to halt, change direction*, or even fail part-way while still enjoying rewards… and without crashing disastrously to the ground.

Most importantly, it destroys the illusion that stops some people from moving toward their goals at all until it is far too late.

(*Sometimes a journey is required to help us learn more about our potential, and/or to offer us the insight that drives our goals. It is much easier to change direction gracefully when you are not falling off the side of a cliff.)








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Gavin Whenman: malignant force

In late 2009, Dominic Wightman was desperate for ammunition that would help him explain his shameful conduct and gain the support of right wing bloggers after I discovered what he thought to be his secret role in my being smeared as a paedophile (and an alcoholic with mental problems likely to have invented this same smear for sympathy).

Wightman found what he was looking for in a rare but prominent 2008 attack piece by Gavin Whenman where that former blogger describes me as an “internet bully” and makes quite specific allegations about my targeting Conservative bloggers such as Iain Dale for no good reason.

It is my understanding that Gavin Whenman was an employee of Iain Dale’s at the time, but yesterday Whenman refused to even confirm or deny if this was/is the case, claiming it to be an intrusion into his personal life.

We pause at this Dorries-esque outburst just long enough to consider the following information from Whenman’s public website

Whenman is a journalist, writer, former law student, fan of alliteration and Liberal Democrat, although not necessarily in that order. He works for Total Politics, a monthly political magazine that puts the “fun” in “fundamental shift in the balance of power”. He recently completed an LLM in Public International Law at King’s College London. Until last year, he worked for 18 Doughty Street, a sadly now defunct political internet TV channel.

… before finding a more complete answer via his public profile on LinkedIn:

Current employment:
Script reader (freelance)

Past employment:
Production Assistant at Total Politics
Researcher / Producer at 18 Doughty Street

I should also point out that while Whenman could not find the energy to deny working for Total Politics, he did take the time to resent any implication that he is so corrupt and/or weak-minded as to be manipulated into attacking me on behalf of Iain Dale (a man who is as fond of having his associates do his dirty work for him as Wightman is).

Gavin Whenman also offered a private apology for maligning me (see relevant text below), but he refuses to update the relevant entry because – he claims – he finds the whole affair too “tedious”.

He further claims he is unwilling to help me reverse any of the damage he has done because he thinks my energies are better spent focusing on other matters, a position that completely ignores the capacity of smears and harassment to interfere with this or any other activity, regardless of my choice to attack what Whenman considers to be the right kind of target (presumably someone who isn’t/wasn’t a key source of income).

Gavin Whenman also offers in mitigation the irrelevant fact that his blog is no longer active, as if this makes his article any less visible and/or negates any of the fallout from it. In doing so he brings his position neatly into alignment with Shane Greer, who attacked me at the same time with a similar accusation, describing me as “obviously unbalanced” while grouping me with a convicted stalker (more). Shane Greer was then and is now an employee of Iain Dale’s through Total Politics, but he insists that both he and Whenman acted independently at the time. Much like Whenman, Greer has also refused to offer any retraction or even any defence of his outburst, despite being privy to the worse of the fallout from it.

Dominic Wightman’s use of the article is barely half of the matter; there is worse to come, and Whenman probably expected he would at least have some breathing space between now and sometime in the future when I might hope to reveal any of this.

Wrong.

If Whenman has any regrets about his attack as he claims, I would ask him again, this time publicly, to update the relevant post in line with thoughts he will only share privately because of some new-found desire to avoid being drawn into the matter.

I do this because what Gavin Whenman presents as an “opinion held without malice” is being passed of as fact by someone with a malignant intent that is made crystal clear in this communication with Adrian Morgan, in an email sent when Wightman was trying to convince that man to attack me on his behalf:

Tim Ireland lives 3 villages from me and my local supporters (including the MP) want Ireland downed. He has already admitted to me I am the sole reason he’s not written on hs blog for 2 months. He is a vicious bully and I will not sit back and get slaughtered by him without telling the world how to silence a big bully, how I did it, that I am not particularly proud of how I did it but that yes I did it. There MUST BE a mix here of eating humble pie and sabre-rattling or I will be walked over. I must also bring the right wing blog alliance on my side and to do this I need to show that I have been capable of bringing down the most famous left wing blogger, albeit temporarily, that ever existed in the UK.

At the time, Dominic Wightman also planned to ‘out’ me as a stalker while publishing what he claimed to be a psychiatrist’s report on my mental health; a further smear that I’m sure you will note is entirely in line with Shane Greer’s previous attempts to poison the well while claiming that it was my criticism of Iain Dale that amounted to an ad hominem attack.

I’m sure I risk being called a bully (again) for daring to object to this kind of thing, but I’m not left with a lot of choice at this stage, and I certainly don’t plan to intimidate Whenman by publishing his home address or distorted/fabricated revelations about his personal life and state of mind (i.e. like some of the people he chooses to align himself with).

I choose instead to defend myself by revealing publicly what Whenman will only admit privately.

When I’m at liberty to share any of the rest of this, I’ll be sure to update this post with the further information that Gavin Whenman is privy to, but refuses to act on, because he claims to be too bored to move either way:

“I appreciate you’ve sent this email in good faith and it must take
particularly vast testicular fortitude to send it to somebody who has
maligned you in public (and for which I apologise sincerely). However,
I’m going to decline answering any of your questions for one simple
reason: I don’t want to be drawn into whatever it is that is going on
here. This is partially because I don’t care…” – Gavin Whenman, via email

“I do not want to contribute any
more to whatever is going on here…” – Gavin Whenman, via email

“I do not wish to be
drawn any further into this matter and I honestly care so little about
whatever is going on I might just pass out*. As for the apology,
you’ve had it and maybe, if I ever get around to updating my blog
after almost two years dormant, I will update the relevant post, but I
don’t feel the imperative to do so today because … well, as I just
wrote, I don’t really care. Is this a passive or active decision on my
part? It could be argued either way and we’ll just have to disagree on
the matter…” – Gavin Whenman, via email

I’ve sat back and let Whenman’s perverse attack go for years because the conversation underneath it should make it obvious to the casual reader that he is either having his readers on or having himself on, but his comments being blown out of all proportion by others and/or presented minus any context changes things considerably. The headline alone is actionable, and far more likely to be taken at face value in the current climate.

And, as I have already said, you ain’t heard the half of it yet. There is worse to come. Whenman has been made aware of it, but refuses to act on it.

If there’s a shred of principle left in the man, he might feel a pang of shame that it took an outing like this to finally prompt action. If there isn’t, he will simply use this as an excuse to continue his inaction and in doing so maintain a public attack on me that he privately claims to regret.

UPDATE – It was the latter. In fact, Whenman went further than any of you might expect. Even further than that thug Hendren dared to. After claiming he was too bored with the matter to make a simple update to an old post, today he created an entirely new post, publishing material that he knows will put my family at risk. He now claims he was too bored to make himself aware of these risks, when they were spelled out to him in the same correspondence he published. Total bastard. No wonder he gets on with Dale so well.

UPDATE (20 April) – Just in case there was any doubt about his intentions, last night, Gavin Whenman tried to use the safety of my family as leverage in an attempt to get this post removed… while claiming that my being upset about that justified his original ‘bullying’ smear. Class act, all the way.








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Dominic Wightman: denials and lies

Dominic WightmanIn the summer of 2009, my life ground to a halt and publication on bloggerheads.com ceased for several weeks while police tracked down the origins of a falsified interview with Glen Jenvey that sought to smear, damage, implicate and/or intimidate that man alongside myself, his former working associates Patrick Mercer and Michael Starkey, and the moderator of a leading Muslim website.

When it appeared, Glen Jenvey had just been through a stage where he had been convinced by a then-unnamed third party to smear me as a convicted paedophile, and only just pulled up short of publishing this claim alongside my home address (an ex-directory address provided by this same unnamed person). Jenvey was subsequently interviewed by police, and later reported by them to be a vulnerable adult capable of suicide, if not self harm.

The author of the falsified interview with Glen Jenvey that appeared at around this time also sought to exploit my show of support for a close friend who had sought to combat alcohol addiction by openly blogging his attempts to manage his addiction, and at this stage it was not known if the article had been uploaded to one of its locations before or after Poons took his own life. (A minor saving grace for the publisher: it was before.)

While all of this was happening, a rival blogger Iain Dale was heading his own smear campaign against me using distortions he could not justify and assertions he could not substantiate. Dale could not explain circumstances in which he appeared to take advantage of my being smeared as a paedophile, and he was knowingly peddling a different but equally serious libel against Tom Watson at the time. Plus (and this is rare for his site) Dale was holding a thread open so anyone would be able to publish anything they pleased immediately on his site (i.e. to better enable his libelling of Tom Watson, occasionally by ‘accident’). In these circumstances he sought to avoid any discussion of his appalling conduct by portraying himself as a victim of stalking and me as a danger to others. Dale later deleted the relevant claims, though he refuses to retract them and even repeats some of them from time to time. There have been various ongoing consequences of these lies and distortions, but at the time my primary concern was that it generated a cloud of hostile sock puppets that served as cover for a single unknown and potentially dangerous operative.

So, to be clear on this point:

Publication ceased on bloggerheads.com at the time because of this high risk to others; there was an unknown player on a poorly-policed field who was willing to go to extraordinary lengths to damage almost everyone involved in the story I had been investigating.

(*Emphasis on the ‘unknown’. If it was not someone with a vested interest in the story, for example, then that made them even more dangerous.)

At the time I had a serious interest in defending myself against the different (but soon to be intertwined) smear campaign initiated by Iain Dale, and I even held evidence that showed the concerns I sought to contact him about were entirely justified… but I couldn’t publish it. The only responsible course of action was to leave the matter in the hands of the criminal justice system, at least until the police had attempted to determine who the author was.

At one worrying stage, police felt unable to continue because of the usual difficulty/expense in compelling foreign web providers to reveal user data such as IP addresses, so I went out and secured this data myself and presented it to police as follows (in two parts):

The document was uploaded to – http://www.scribd.com/doc/15448951/Interview-May-11th – and the properties of the downloadable versions tell me that the creator of the original Word .DOC document was ‘Adninistrator‘ (note spelling), and that it was created on 12 May 2009 23:09:00, the fourth and final writing task involving 66 Minutes of editing time. It was not uploaded until approximately 2132 GMT on May 14 2009

The second version published on articles-heaven.com went live on June 21, however, the profile used to publish it (also under the name ‘J Reynalds’) was registered on May 13, 2009. There is little doubt that both uploads were the work of the same person, and the IP data surrendered by articles-heaven.com relates to that May 13 registration event:
IP address: 86.163.241.90
Datestamp: Wednesday, 13 May 2009, 09:21:49 [UTC+1 hour BST]

The police traced that registration event to a broadband account at the home of Dominic Wightman, a man who had for months previous to this been posing successfully as an informant concerned about the conduct of Glen Jenvey and another man who happened to be a former associate of his; Michael Starkey.

Dominic Wightman was the person who ‘found’ the falsified interview, and he even asked me if I had written it when he first arrived with his ‘discovery’. Wightman then tried to blame authorship on a series of people, including Michael Starkey.

(See the article by Tom Mills and David Miller that alerted me to the truth about Dominic Wightman and his many vendettas against former associates – The British amateur terror trackers: A case study in dubious politics)

But even though I was later asking police if Dominic Wightman was involved when they were preparing to visit his home (!) the investigating officers denied his involvement and did not make the connection themselves because the relevant broadband account was in his wife’s name.

Subsequently, the police were poorly-prepared when they interviewed Wightman in September 2009, and they all-too-readily bought his story that he had not authored the falsified interview, and had instead merely uploaded it.

In his defence, Wightman claimed to have acted foolishly/hastily in not reading what he had uploaded, and so pretended to have no idea at the time about content in it that might harm or alarm me or anyone else.

Wightman later expanded on this same story for the benefit of the right-wing blogging audience:

“… my local supporters (including the MP) want Ireland downed. He has already admitted to me I am the sole reason he’s not written on hs blog for 2 months. He is a vicious bully and I will not sit back and get slaughtered by him without telling the world how to silence a big bully, how I did it, that I am not particularly proud of how I did it but that yes I did it. There MUST BE a mix here of eating humble pie and sabre-rattling or I will be walked over. I must also bring the right wing blog alliance on my side and to do this I need to show that I have been capable of bringing down the most famous left wing blogger, albeit temporarily, that ever existed in the UK.” – Dominic Wightman in an email from September 2009

And here is the guts of the story he eventually settled on:

“This tale is ripe for comment on ‘once and never again’, as other commentators will try and slur and blur the facts. What some would call ‘smear’, and my lawyers shan’t be having any of that. The fact is I am being blamed by an Australian blogger, who regrettably lives over here in England, of putting an article not written by me on a couple of other sites. Not once have I claimed its authorship, and its contents have been checked by the authorities, and are not considered by any means abusive. What I did by forwarding this work to a few article databases, there is no law against, and something that happens a million times a day online. Incidentally, this is something the blogger in question is accused of doing himself many times by other users of, and commentators on, the internet. But let’s focus on my actions, not his.” – Dominic Wightman, from an audio recording intended for publication, September 2009

In this audio, Wightman seeks to deny something the article is not accused of doing (it contained far worse than mere abuse) while denying authorship of the article.

Wightman also hilariously minimises his actions as ‘uploading some words to a site’ (in much the same way that another Tory excused his publication of my unlisted home phone number on his site as ‘just sharing a series of numbers’) while accusing me of the same dastardly act.

At the time I asked Wightman many times if he had written the falsified interview. At first he was merely evasive, then he accused me of being paranoid and a bully, but he did at one stage dare to deny it (while pretending he had already done so):

“No, I didn’t write that piece as stated clearly in the past.” – Dominic Wightman, in an email to me, September 2009

Then, after many demands from Wightman that we arrange a meeting so he could explain himself in person, he accused me of stalking him, effectively refusing all contact while publishing what he knew to be damaging lies about me on his website.

(A carbon copy of Iain Dale’s position; the only differences being that Dale had a cut-price lawyer sign his ridiculous letters off for him, and he has a lot more people flocking around him willing to sock-puppet/echo on his behalf.)

Wightman continues to deny writing the fake interview in question; his position is that he found it and uploaded a copy of it to other sites, without really looking at it in any detail, merely to get Michael Starkey’s name and his past association with Glen Jenvey into the public domain.

This was an outright lie, and yesterday I happened across evidence that will help to establish it as such once and for all.

In 2009, Dominic Wightman had convinced a man named Adrian Morgan to help him with his website. Morgan immediately parted ways with Wightman when he found out what he was up to, and he has since shared with me a series of .DOC documents sent to him by Wightman, involving multiple emails across a series of dates before and after the period when the falsified interview with Jenvey was written and uploaded.

The properties of Wightman’s .DOC documents repeatedly revealed an otherwise-generic username rendered unique by the cack-handed way it is spelled:

Adninistrator

As I told police early in 2009:

the creator of the original [falsified interview] Word .DOC document was ‘Adninistrator‘ (note spelling), and that it was created on 12 May 2009 23:09:00, the fourth and final writing task involving 66 Minutes of editing time…

66 Minutes of editing time.

Dominic Wightman didn’t quickly copy and paste this article as he claimed to the police; he authored some if not all of it over more than an hour on his own computer.

Paul Wheeler (Farnham CID) told me that Wightman claimed not to be the author of this fake Jenvey/Reynalds interview that led police to his door; that he claimed to have merely uploaded it and genuinely thought it to be the work of a former ally of Jenvey’s named Jeremy Reynalds. Wightman said this knowing that Reynalds denied it vehemently at the time, and that he (Wightman) had instead repeatedly tried to blame Starkey for it (while pretending to have ‘found’ the article on a site when he himself had uploaded it). Wightman knew I was deeply concerned about the fake interview, who was behind it, and what they might be capable of, and he chose not to confess or even alleviate my concerns in any way. Instead, he not only alerted me to it and repeatedly enhanced any concerns I may have had about it, but repeatedly tried to suggest that Starkey was behind it.

Wightman also pretends that he was not reliably informed of Jenvey’s vulnerable state until after he spoke to police, but this too is a lie. Wightman knew, and after he found out that Jenvey had attempted suicide once and was likely to harm himself again, Wightman continued this charade and others, even taunting Jenvey directly by email at times.

Wightman also flaunted needlessly cruel revelations about Jenvey’s personal life and state of mind on his site while feigning concern for the man’s condition. In one such article, Wightman contended that Glen Jenvey confessed to acting alone when smearing me as a paedophile, but Wightman knows that Jenvey confessed to police that another unnamed person was involved; he even tried to suggest it was Michael Starkey at the time. It was only after Jenvey’s claim about Wightman’s role went public that Wightman began to contend that Jenvey acted alone and part-base his denials on this ‘fact’ he invented.

Here we turn fully to the matter of the unnamed party who initially convinced Jenvey that I was a convicted paedophile and what Wightman has recently said in denial after I have repeatedly spoken of his involvement in this dangerous smear:

“So, where has Ireland got it in his bonnet that I called him a paedophile? Possibly from the vulnerable adult Glen Jenvey who admitted to creating a paedophile smear about Tim Ireland back in 2009 all by himself? (Repeat – all by himself – I wasn’t even in touch with the man back then and certainly didn’t pull his strings as Ireland claims). ” – Dominic Wightman, published on his site, April 2011

These are more lies from a man who tells the most reckless and dangerous lies without hesitation. Dominic Wightman was in email contact with Glen Jenvey before, during and after the paedo-smear event and I can prove it. I can also produce evidence of Wightman furnishing Jenvey with my home address prior to his outburst when he repeated the accusation on dozens of websites.

(Once again, a big ‘thank you’ to Rachel Whetstone at Google for refusing to remove these.)

Despite his denials, Dominic Wightman was in touch with Glen Jenvey back then, and knowingly exploited a vulnerable adult, even after he discovered that man was regarded by police to be at risk of suicide and other forms of self harm.

Hilariously, Wightman now pretends not to have believed this privileged information until police told him themselves, when this does nothing to excuse the way he conducted himself afterwards.

Here’s an example of his conduct and contact with Jenvey in late 2009, after he had been reminded by police of Jenvey’s vulnerable state:

“Well that is odd you freak. I met [police] about you last week. We are all discussing ways of getting you cut off from your computer. Get some medication. ” – Dominic Wightman, in an email to Glen Jenvey after being interviewed by police, September 2009

At more or less the same time as writing this, Wightman was trying to project responsibility for Jenvey’s agitated state onto me, through the false identity of ‘Dick Walker’, in the form of some laughingly loaded questions from someone claiming to be doing “research on bloggers”…

“How do you feel about the victims you create by attacking your targets? Would you plead guilty for manslaughter if you pushed one of your victims to suicide?” – Interview questions by Dominic Wightman (via the identity ‘Dick Walker’), September 2009

… before publishing a more overt version of this smear on his website, this time under his own name:

“Pushing blog victims often into a suicidal state is nothing to be proud of and something the Internet could really do without… How long before Ireland’s venom actually kills someone?” – Dominic Wightman, published on his site, September 2009

Wightman/Walker also sought to use some of these loaded questions to excuse his conduct in the falsified interview (while at the same time denying authorship):

“You publicly have admitted to once being an alcoholic, correct? Is not your success in overcoming the addiction to alcohol a success you should celebrate publicly and share with others who might be going through the same kind of addictions?” – Interview questions written by Dominic Wightman (via the identity ‘Dick Walker’), September 2009

But there can be no question now about Dominic Wightman both writing and publishing the falsified interview with Glen Jenvey, and the following is just a small sample of the lies he originated, then published and attributed to his former associates Jenvey and Starkey though this method:

(Please note that this is only a sample, and it has been edited in places to protect a series of targets.)

JR: Glen, in England you are now known as the man who makes up stories about Muslims. What is your side of the story?

GJ: Basically there is a lot of fuss about nothing. A website run by Islamic extremists altered its posts to entrap me into making it seem that I fabricated evidence which was negative towards Muslims. They know that they published a hit list of Jewish assassination targets in Britain and that I caught them red handed publishing the list. Basically they are friends with other extremists from the political left including a stupid blogger Tim Ireland and they together have tried to smear me. But they have failed miserably to smear me because the press in Britain has continually ignored them and their story about me while continuing to accept the validity of my stories.

JR: So Tim Ireland is someone who smears those who expose the wrongdoings of Islamic extremists?

GJ: Yes. Basically he is just a small-time carping Australian blogger and self-confessed alcoholic who lives in a council house in the South of England who likes to hassle people who go about their daily business so he can make a name for himself. He is someone who will get into bed with anyone for any small story even people who carried out 7/7. He has upset a lot of people and has lots of enemies after him including the cops and some members of the press.

JR: How has Ireland’s smear affected your work and relations within the counter terrorism community in England?

GJ: All my actual contacts are intact and I still inform the cops and my security service links and diplomatic contacts are the same as before here and abroad. But now I basically try to avoid journalists and politicians because they do make stuff up for a living; their whole lives are founded on a bed of lies.

JR: Do you still work with Patrick Mercer, the Conservative politician?

GJ: No.

JR: Is that something you regret?

GJ: No. I used to respect Patrick actually but now I just see him as a fair-weather friend, like all politicians he is self serving and he lacks knowledge in the area. He has amateurish people around him like many backbenchers do. I feel that he has never been told that he is actually very average and he has shown that by the mistakes he has made.

JR: Like what?

GJ: Patrick was an actual racist which is why he resigned as a minister. I think privately he is a racist whatever he says or does publicly. That is what David Cameron thinks which is why Mercer has no future in the Conservative party when it comes to the next government. There are other actual reasons too but I’d like to keep quiet about them for now.

JR: Are you Richard Tims?

GJ: No, not as the Ummah website made out that I was Richard Tims.

JR: So who is Richard Tims as on the recording made by Tim Ireland it was clear that you used the name Richard Tims as an assumed name?

GJ: Basically I never denied using the assumed name Richard Tims for emails or as an ID on the Ummah website. But I do deny allegations that I fabricated evidence and that is why I had my hard drive checked soon after the allegations appeared and that is why I am taking Ummah to court and have lodged complaints with the police and the PCC relating to the allegations. Ummah knew that I used the name Richard Tims before the posts went up on their site.

JR: Is it true that you posted material on the Internet suggesting Tim Ireland was a paedophile?

GJ: No there is no proof of that. Tim Ireland has a history of being unstable and he probably posted that sort of material himself. He even calls himself Manic. Manic by name – manic by nature. The man is a loser. If he didn’t post the material himself it was the idiot who runs Ummah called [name snipped] who is well known to the police and has a history of criminal activity as well as a dysfunctional family.

It’s worth noting that even though Wightman denies authoring this, he has repeatedly returned to the same accusations it makes against me, often publishing them under his own name (e.g. that I am an undesirable alien sponging off the state, that I fabricate these attacks against myself in order to gain sympathy, that I am a substance abuser, an associate of Islamic extremists, etc. etc. etc.)

Basically, Wightman’s denials are contradicted by his own behaviour, as well as the new evidence tying him to authorship of the falsified interview that threatened to do so much damage to so many people.

Further, I now have the email you have already seen, where Wightman actually spells out why he later pretended on his site to have done all of this by accident rather than design*:

(*It should be obvious why he maintained this pretence with police. )

“I am not particularly proud of how I did it but that yes I did it. There MUST BE a mix here of eating humble pie and sabre-rattling or I will be walked over. I must also bring the right wing blog alliance on my side and to do this I need to show that I have been capable of bringing down the most famous left wing blogger, albeit temporarily, that ever existed in the UK.” – Dominic Wightman in an email from September 2009

Dominic Wightman is engaging in an ongoing smear campaign against me and others because… we caught him engaging in a smear campaign against me and others.

I have enough evidence, I am sure, for a rock-solid civil case covering damn near everything Wightman has set in motion against me, right up to and including Wightman’s repeated use of smears of paedophilia and worse as political weapons.

The only reason this is unlikely to proceed is that I will almost certainly be left footing the bill, as Wightman is also the type of person who will declare himself bankrupt in order to avoid debts he does not agree with.

Meanwhile, a series of Conservative MPs (and one wannabe) are allowing Wightman to trade off their ill-deserved credibility, and I am left wondering where the limit is for these people, and what lengths Dominic Wightman has to go before they will take a stand against the man, or even dare to contradict him.

Hell, Nadine Dorries has actively endorsed Wightman’s accusations of stalking because it suits her needs, and I hope to reveal a lot more about that can of worms very shortly.

UPDATE (21:30). – Some passages have been amended to make it clearer to the casual reader that at no time did Adrian Morgan knowingly contribute to Dominic Wightman’s smear campaigns.








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Leave Boris Johnson a message

It’s recently become clear to me that Boris Johnson is lacking in the personal standards one should expect from a public servant. He is, in my experience, prone to taking the path of least resistance when he encounters the stench of corruption among his allies, regardless of potential risk to innocent parties.

I’ve decided to share that information with a few people by publicising the 1990 phone call with Darius Guppy.

Londoners are encouraged to print and display the poster below and/or call (0207) 0963708 to listen to their mayor. They can even leave a message if they like. Selected messages will be published at the brand new blog at http://boris-johnson.blogspot.com/

[For those who are wondering: No, I have no been sitting on that Blogger.com address for the better part of a decade :o) I checked only this morning and was amazed to see it was still available.]

Boris Johnson poster: click for A4-sized

Click to open in new window and print 2 x posters onto A4 paper








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Patrick Mercer, Dominic Wightman and the public interest

Yesterday I revealed that Dominic Wightman had claimed to be acting against me on behalf of the Conservative MP, Anne Milton. Milton has been keen to avoid an admission of any relationship with Wightman by avoiding comment on the matter altogether. It is a day after she was presented with evidence that Dominic Wightman claimed to be acting on her behalf, and she has not yet deemed it necessary to contradict the man.

Another class act in the school of keeping your head down is Conservative MP Patrick Mercer; Mercer has a documented professional association with Dominic Wightman through that man’s amateur anti-terrorism initiative, VIGIL.

Dominic Wightman and Patrick Mercer

Patrick Mercer (right) with Dominic Whiteman, Oct 2006

Mercer also has a long history of turning a blind eye to Dominic Wightman’s conduct, and it was after the collapse of VIGIL that Mercer learned that Wightman had claimed to be funded by none other than Lord Ashcroft, but was unable to produce any of the money he claimed he had access to and was refusing to pay someone he had recruited as an employee (Letter #1). Even if we put aside the way Wightman treated this person (who was awarded over £14,000 by an employment tribunal and never saw a penny of it) and all the other warning bells about a range of improprieties, it should have been obvious from the Ashcroft cash claim alone that Wightman was a conman, and yet Mercer turned a blind eye to this and even continued to maintain a professional relationship with Wightman because the material he provided served his personal/political agenda (Letter #2).

Even after Patrick Mercer learned how Dominic Wightman was treating other people he had lied to about VIGIL’s funding, the most the man earned was a mild rebuke, most accurately paraphrased as ‘leave me out of it’ (Letter #3).

All of this happened before I encountered Dominic Wightman, and apparently the two finally parted ways at some point, but Mercer still refuses to say when this happened and why, and he made no attempt to advise me of Wightman’s history or warn me of what he was capable of, even after I ended up getting smeared as a paedophile*.

Worse; Mercer has been relying on Wightman’s smear campaigns in order to avoid discussion of that same man. Through an informant I learned that Mercer has been responding to private questions about Wightman and the evidence I have published by claiming I am an electronic stalker* and not to be trusted… so, apparently, he won’t say a word against Wightman because he is worried about the cost to his reputation, but he’ll make serious and damaging claims about others** for the same damn selfish reasons.

Publication of these letters will have far deeper resonance for Dominic Wightman, but I’ll leave the relevant analysis of measures used by Wightman to avoid the relevant debt for a later post. For now, the priority is to (again) press Patrick Mercer to finally take a public stance against this conman.

(Regular readers will note a delicious twist to the correspondence that is, I am sure, pure coincidence; in Letter #2 Mercer has the audacity to refer a victim of Wightman’s cons back to her own MP, who just happens to be…. well, I’ll let you read the letter and work it out for yourselves.)

Letter 1 re: Dominic Wightman

Letter 2 - reply from Patrick Mercer

MINI-UPDATE – Wightman has claimed he was “working as an intelligence adviser to Mercer” at the time the above letter was written, and disputed some of its content, but the relevant page has been removed. I hope to bring you the detail in a later post to do with VIGIL finances, employment tribunals, debt and what have you.

Letter 3 - email from Patrick Mercer to Dominic Wightman

As you can see, as late as 2008, Patrick Mercer was still playing footsies when he should have been kicking arse.

Patrick Mercer is aware that Dominic Wightman has shown a consistent pattern of deceiving people in order to convince them to do what he wants, and then attacking anyone who dares to complain through intimidation and further deceit. Currently, we are at a stage where Wightman is mostly deceiving people so they might help him to attack the people he has previously deceived (i.e. it’s collapsing in on itself like some demented form of the classic Ponzi scheme) but it would be a mistake to hope that this downward spiral will bring us to a satisfactory conclusion.

So, today, I ask Patrick Mercer (again) to stop helping Dominic Wightman in his ongoing smear campaign, and to finally take a public stand against his deceits full-stop.

Patrick Mercer has been in constant pursuit of publicity in line with a narrow political agenda, and it is only within strict security-related parameters that he appears to recognise any duty to the public. Beyond that, it is self interest and his narrow political agenda that takes priority.

Still, it should not surprise us if Patrick Mercer has forgotten to some extent that his duty is to the public, and not himself; he does, after all, appear to think that constituents are answerable to MPs (i.e. and not the other way around).

[Note – I have blurred some of the more sensitive/irrelevant details in Letter #1. The hidden information has no immediate bearing on anything asserted here, and certainly doesn’t threaten to undermine or contradict it. Sorry to bore you, but I need to leave notes like this because Wightman likes to pretend that such edits are undertaken for the purpose of deceit, when he is the only person to have published falsified correspondence in this affair. If you’re new to this issue or this type of conflict in general, this is called ‘projection’, and it is typical of Wightman.]

(*This may be more Iain Dale’s fault than Patrick Mercer’s, but I can only guess at this stage, as they are both refusing to discuss the matter; Mercer may have got the idea from Dale or someone else that I am the type of person likely to work in league with Wightman despite knowing what he is like. Or, he simply may not have cared enough to protect anyone but himself.)

(**Not just me, either: Mercer is also using a ‘trial by media’ method to repeatedly accuse his former mistress – to whom he owes money – of stalking him.)








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