This entry was posted on
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010 at
10:57 am and is filed
under Tories! Tories! Tories!.
To: Webmaster
From:
Jessica Freeman
jessica.freeman@totalpolitics.comMessage:
Dear Mr Ireland,Each week Total Politics interviews a top political blogger. Would you
be available for a phone/email interview (it’s only about ten
minutes) sometime this week?Kind Regards,
Jess Freeman
Sent from (ip address): 81.136.230.228
Date/Time: August 11, 2010 2:22 pm
Dear Jess,
I must politely decline on the grounds that your publisher, Iain Dale, knowingly allowed me to be smeared as a paedophile, and was refusing to cooperate with the relevant criminal investigation while simultaneously libelling Tom Watson (as a smear merchant, no less) when he further smeared me as a stalker in order to mask his embarrassment.
Had you read my blog in any detail, you would know that.
Had you merely scanned the front page, you would have noticed that I also recently described your executive editor Shane Greer as an “amateur propagandist and professional bullshit artist”.
But thanks for revealing how poorly researched these invitations are. Perhaps it will make other recipients think twice before pouncing on your sincere generous exclusive ordinary offer.
Tim Ireland
PS – Ask Iain Dale why he didn’t call Patrick Mercer as he agreed (and promised) to do. He tells some people he did and gives others an excuse for why he didn’t.
By Daniel Hoffmann-Gill August 18, 2010 - 11:12 am
How bland they are. Fools.
By ian August 18, 2010 - 11:13 am
Why not accept his invitation, then when he phones you, accuse him of stalking?
By bobofinch August 18, 2010 - 11:17 am
Top Class, Tim. Top Class.
By sim-o August 18, 2010 - 11:59 am
The only appropriate response.
Still, it would've been a nice experiment to see how much of an interview with you they would've published given the amount of time you've had to spend blogging about Iain Dale and his involvement in your err, experiences over the last year.
By scotch August 18, 2010 - 2:45 pm
I'm seeing how this goes: https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=6214838&…
By Scotch August 18, 2010 - 10:58 pm
Wow. I think I may have angered it.
[link fixed] http://j.mp/doUTI7
By Tim_Ireland August 19, 2010 - 8:55 am
Iain knows full well that he includes calling him on a lie as ‘abuse’, and even if we were to believe his ‘no swearing’ rule is in any way sincere, we also know he’s in the habit of calling people a “sack of shit” and telling them to “piss off” when it suits him . We also know that his cut-price lawyer, when pressed for an example of the libel he claimed existed on my site, gave “you called him an ‘expletive liar'” as his only answer, even though I hadn’t called Iain an expletive anything.
I had earlier called him a liar, though. Proved it quite conclusively, too. Iain Dale libelled Tom Watson *knowingly*; even if he believed in his heart that Tom Watson must have been guilty, there is no escaping the evidence that he he willingly gave his readers a false impression about the facts, and then gave conflicting accounts about the circumstances in which he (finally) withdrew the libel.