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What Lua Cooper did to JimmySparkle was totally unacceptable. It was also very human.

Though Lua Cooper is formally employed by an auto industry trade/lobbying group, she also works (or perhaps worked) as a significant figure in the campaign team for the Conservative Party. She even starred in this video showing people how to become an active off-site member of the campaign team for the Conservatives. Her boyfriend, Sam Coates, had just recently been appointed ‘co-ordinater’ of Tory online campaigning and until very recently she was up there in the lights, rubbing elbows with important Conservatives and sitting in the front row while David Cameron spoke inspiring words about ‘change’.

On Monday, both her boyfriend and a cause she believed in were under assault, and many people around her (including Sam) were speaking of the dark forces of Labour at work. Events also unfolded very quickly, and I think things should at least be considered from her point of view and in the context of the moment:

– I sincerely doubt she used a false name, and ‘Lua’ was probably just misheard as ‘Laura’. There appears to be very little point in changing her name so little to disguise it, especially when she was claiming to operate on behalf of CCHQ at the time.

– Any claim or implication Lua made in the heat of the moment that she was acting on behalf of CCHQ is completely understandable, and IMO easily fixed with an apology to both parties. Lua simply overstepped her bounds while overestimating her authority/importance, as campaign volunteers sometimes do.

– Any false claim that JimmySparkle had been involved in redirections to porn/shock sites can be attributable to the confusion of the moment and/or Lua’s judgment being influenced by those Conservatives around her, many of whom still cling to the delusion that his actions (and most everyone else’s) were part of a Labour conspiracy. Again, this can probably be addressed with a simple apology.

– The bullying of JimmySparkle by going through his employer and using spurious legal threats as leverage is a little harder to explain/apologise away, but sadly we’re robbed of the context of Lua Cooper’s testimony, I suspect for much the same reason we’re forced to go without any kind of apology from her;

A [Conservative] Party spokesman said:

“This person is not a member of staff and her actions were not authorised by the Party. She is a friend of a party worker and felt strongly about the way this website had been hijacked and took it upon herself to make comments on the issue. She did this without our knowledge and we do not condone her actions.”

There are several misleading elements to this statement, but there’s no question about CCHQ making visible attempts to distance themselves from Lua Cooper.

On Monday afternoon, the Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter/etc. pages for Lua Cooper (i.e. the web pages showing just how close she was to key Conservatives and editors of certain ‘unbiased’ magazines funded by Lord Ashcroft) were all quietly disappeared. I doubt this was an entirely voluntary act of self-censorship. I further suspect that Lua Cooper was issued with strict instructions to keep her mouth shut.

CCHQ may be retaining her as an informal campaign contributor or some such nonsense and using that as leverage, but it’s pretty bloody obvious that her loyalty to the Party and her boyfriend (who is still employed by the Party) are the big levers here; even if the threat of severance went unspoken, it is there.

So while I sincerely hope and trust that Lua Cooper is a good person who wants to apologise, I doubt very much if she feels free/able to.

(Sure, the possibility remains that Lua Cooper is such a highly focused Conservative that she refuses to accept reality and therefore cannot discern right from wrong, but until I see evidence of that I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she would make amends immediately if the potential personal consequences weren’t so great.)

Sam Coates, on the other hand, does not get off quite so easily as far as I’m concerned:

Even if we put the cock-up of the #cashgordon campaign to one side and accept without question the notion that Lua Cooper acted without his knowledge/approval, Sam Coates was confronted publicly with the name ‘Laura Cooper’ after the fact, pretended not to recognise it, and – acting like a child in a playground – even had the temerity to throw the question back in JimmySparkle’s face, as if any deceit were his, and not the other way around:

JimmySparkle: Apparently the woman who phoned was a Laura Cooper, no idea if she was genuine. Claimed I hacked their site. Fail fail fail #cashgordon

Niall Paterson (SKY News): Cheers @chrismou. So @samuelcoates, anyone called Laura Cooper at CCHQ?

SamuelCoates: @niallpaterson @chrismou nope! Anything like that would have come through our team as it’s our thing – and I can guarantee that it hasn’t.

Niall Paterson (SKY News): @samuelcoates Just checking – there’s absolutely nothing in @jimmysparkle’s comments?

SamuelCoates: @niallpaterson no – why would we do that?!

JimmySparkle: so do you know Laura Cooper?

SamuelCoates: @jimmysparkle no, do you?

It was not only a deceit, it was a pathetic and stupid deceit… from the head of Tory online campaigning who then went into 24-hour tweet-silence (in the middle of one online campaign and at the start of another) and still refuses to discuss the matter, despite there being dozens of valid calls for an apology from a variety of interested players/observers.

That’s one hell of an embarrassment for a man who’s supposed to be leading the charge in online engagement, but still Sam forges on like the Black Knight of comedy legend… which brings us to the heart of the matter today:

Sam Coates may have been largely blameless (if a little clueless) right up until the point the name ‘Laura Cooper’ was mentioned, but it’s primarily his conduct from that moment on that’s the issue here. To remain silent and deny error is to deny reality, and if Sam manages to hold out any longer, his delusion/collusion in favour of his beloved Conservatives will be on par with that of the Iraqi Information Minister, and I really can’t see that working for him or any other propagandist* with a job to do.

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(*For example; not only will he be unable to praise the success of any campaign with any credibility from this point on, but crucial denials will be mocked, and he’s going to look like a damn fool the next time he demands an apology from someone. All of this puts to one side the difficulty of Coates looking like a bit of a powerless cad by favouring the Party’s concerns ahead of his partner’s.)

[Psst! Sam & Lua, you can count yourselves lucky; if the boot were on the other foot, you know damn well that Lua would’ve been labelled a bullying bunny-boiler within minutes of her outburst and rabid, mostly anonymous Tory bloggers would be relentlessly reinforcing this notion for days if not weeks afterwards, purely for political gain.]

A few days ago, a Conservative campaign site titled ‘Cash Gordon’ emerged. It was a continuation of their tellingly empty, negative and dishonest response to their difficulties with Lord Ashcroft (recent example of this titanic struggle with the truth here), and it was found to be even less impressive when it turned out to be a not-inexpensive but hastily carved ‘cookie cutter’ job done by designers in the US who mostly stick to issues/views the Conservatives are somewhat divided on and would rather not mention this side of an election.

Sam Coates (more), acting in his role as co-ordinater of Tory online campaigning, was busy countering this with some spin, while at the same time hailing any negative publicity as a win for his campaign; it mattered not that his campaign was being criticised and ridiculed, so long as his magical, mind-altering hashtag ‘#cashgordon’ was reaching eyeballs.

Coates continued to maintain this position beyond the point most of us would consider credible… or wise:

I can’t possibly improve on the remaining documentation by Meg Pickard, and I shan’t try.

Sam Coates found out very quickly that you can’t run an open channel on a faulty premise, but continued to miss the point by claiming victory while simultaneously blaming dark forces for any failures that were in fact further victories. Meanwhile, his site was being toyed with via the open door he was bragging about just minutes earlier; soon after it was discovered that images could be posted to the site in this way, text Coates was vacuuming into his site was suddenly successfully issuing JavaScript-based instructions to redirect people to another site… then another, then another, as more and more people discovered the game of banging Sam’s open door about.

It wasn’t long before someone cried ‘hacker’… and one of the people who did that was Lua Cooper.

Lua Cooper looked up the details of one of the people who had published one of these redirects (this one, to their own site) and called their employer, claiming to be acting on behalf of CCHQ, while falsely accusing this person of being associated with some of the redirects to more colourful locations (i.e. ‘shock sites’ which she described as “porn sites”) and threatening legal action.

You should read the following Twitter-based exchange knowing that Lua Cooper is Sam Coates’ girlfriend… it’s far more illuminating that way:

JimmySparkle: conservative party phoned my workplace claiming they may sue me for supposedly hacking their website… tweeting != hacking. lol #cashgordon

SamuelCoates: @jimmysparkle er, no we didn’t… #cashgordon

SamuelCoates: One of the guys behind the #CashGordon hacks (@jimmysparkle) is now falsely claiming that we’ve rang him about it. More evidence of malice?

Niall Paterson (SKY News): @jimmysparkle Any chance you could clear this up? Who called, when, what did they say? Cheers.

Chris Mou: @niallpaterson Girl called claiming to be from Tory party. Threatened to sue for “hacking” and redirecting to “horrific” pictures. (lie)

Chris Mou: Boss told her to call back tomorrow if she wanted to speak to him. Assume if it *was* real they won’t be calling back now.

Chris Mou: Incidently, she said her name was “Laura Cooper”.

JimmySparkle: Apparently the woman who phoned was a Laura Cooper, no idea if she was genuine. Claimed I hacked their site. Fail fail fail #cashgordon

Niall Paterson (SKY News): Cheers @chrismou. So @samuelcoates, anyone called Laura Cooper at CCHQ?

SamuelCoates: @niallpaterson @chrismou nope! Anything like that would have come through our team as it’s our thing – and I can guarantee that it hasn’t.

Niall Paterson (SKY News): @samuelcoates Just checking – there’s absolutely nothing in @jimmysparkle’s comments?

SamuelCoates: @niallpaterson no – why would we do that?!

JimmySparkle: so do you know Laura Cooper?

SamuelCoates: @jimmysparkle no, do you?

Note – it is at this stage that JimmySparkle is tipped off by an anonymous ‘single purpose’ account, and the jig is up.

yeppyfd: @jimmysparkle It may be conicidence but Sam Coates has a gf called LUA Cooper….. or it may not

JimmySparkle: wow @SamuelCoates did you get your girl friend to call up threatening legal action? #cashgordon

JimmySparkle: #cashgordon @SamuelCoates where did Lua Cooper’s twitter account go? http://bit.ly/bZG2j2

We’ll get to Lua Cooper’s hurriedly-removed Twitter account in a moment. First, this follow-up tweetage from Niall Paterson and the CCHQ Press release that followed:

Niall Paterson (SKY News): But even in the cab home, i’m working – Tories confirm tonight that Lua Cooper DID contact @jimmysparkle but is not a member of staff

Niall Paterson (SKY News): Ms Cooper is a “friend” of party worker, her actions were neither authorised nor condoned by CCHQ. She “felt strongly” abt hijacking of site

A [Conservative] Party spokesman said:

“This person is not a member of staff and her actions were not authorised by the Party. She is a friend of a party worker and felt strongly about the way this website had been hijacked and took it upon herself to make comments on the issue. She did this without our knowledge and we do not condone her actions.”

She did a little more than make comments on the issue; she attempted to bully someone through their employer with false accusations and baseless legal threats.

CCHQ also fails to claim anything about the call coming from outside their offices, but I guess we’ll find out more about that if/when the relevant call logs become available

In the meantime, feel free to browse for remnants of the Twitter/Facebook/etc. accounts for Lua Cooper that were cleaned out so suddenly late yesterday afternoon; this cache dating back to 5 March reveals that Lua Cooper is indeed very close to Samuel Coates, and worthy of (and excited about) front-row seats to David Cameron speeches.

As has been pointed out by Unity, she also appears in a CCHQ instruction/recruitment video. (That it’s for telephone canvassing is not only funny, but one good reason to suspect that when Lua Cooper made that call, she did so from a HQ-provided phone.)

There are also old tweets from Lua Cooper where she messages The Conservatives’ ‘Communities Editor’ Craig Elder about his concerns he may have packed too lightly for an away day; “if you need anything I can bring some of sam’s thing for you and drop it to cchq?”

In short, Lua Cooper appears to be very close not only to Samuel Coates, but to the campaign and the cause and many key people at CCHQ.

For CCHQ to pretend otherwise is to be expected. For Sam Coates to pretend that he doesn’t even know her or recognise her name is an insult to our intelligence, and he can’t pretend to have done it out of gallantry given the way he’s cowering under his desk today while his better half is left with her arse hanging out.

Many people are owed an apology here. Will none of these Conservatives step forward and take responsibility for their actions?

Perhaps Lua can start the ball rolling with a simple explanation/apology for her targeting a man through his employer in this extremely dishonest and unfair manner… assuming she’s her own person and not under any pressure from Sam/CCHQ to keep her mouth shut.

Though Cowards Flinch – We’ll huff and we’ll puff and we’ll blow their house down: It has come to our attention that the magazine ‘Total Politics’ is planning to publish an interview with Nick Griffin, the racist leader of the British National Party. Before we forget, therefore, we thought we should announce that, in the event of the publication of this interview, TCF will withdraw from the annual voting process to rank the popularity of UK blogs, run by Total Politics magazine, which once we welcomed and which made itself relevant to the internet through the annual UK blogging guide (pictured)

Though Cowards Flinch – Boycott; the saga continues: But what really matters is not whether Griffin flounders on Dale’s questions or not. It’s about the long-run effect of having Griffin feature in a mainstream publication. Long after the specific questions that Dale asks are forgotten, people will remember that Griffin was interviewed by an (allegedly) respectable, mainstream publication. It will help to normalise Griffin and his party. It will encourage him to be seen as a legitimate politician with legitimate views to be considered a reasonable political option by reasonable people.

Iain Dale has a clearly stated (and quite notorious) policy of not linking to blogs/bloggers that are critical of him. He has stated quite clearly in the past that he refuses to do so because he does not wish to legitimise them.

But he will give a platform to Nick Griffin, a known racist and fascist, and now appears to be claiming that this doesn’t legitimise him or his party.

(Nick Griffin may hate people who are coloured/foreign/different, but at least he hasn’t criticised Iain; that would be beyond the pale!)

All we’re left with is the depressing situation of Iain Dale doing this for political reasons, or (far more likely in my honestly-held opinion) to sell more copies of Total Politics, because shoving it down the throats of elected representatives as junk mail and counting this as ‘circulation’ isn’t making enough money or shifting enough units to please advertisers.

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UPDATE – I should point out that I already boycott the Total Politics poll of weblogs, because it is flawed from the ground up (the two main points being it is rigged in favour of Iain Dale and his mates to begin with, and the votes are counted by a known cheat).

During the filming of Tower Block of Commons (in December last year), one of two sisters Nadine Dorries was staying with was so incensed by the MP’s conduct that she began broadcasting on Twitter. The two tweets from that account that are most relevant to this post are highlighted below:

After the first episodes were broadcast (in February of this year) those same sisters went on to accuse Nadine Dorries of not only offering to share the extra £50 she had stashed in her bra, but also a share of a secret stash of temazepam, an addictive sleeping pill with a reputation for recreational use:

A pair of single mums have told how Tory MP Nadine Dorries offered them the prescription drug temazepam when she lived with them for a reality TV show.

Sisters Rena Spain and Nisha Young… (say) she waited until the cameras were off, and then offered the tranquillisers around. Mum-of-five Rena, 40, said: “She went into her suitcase and pulled out this big plastic bag with all different types of pills in it. She asked, ‘Does anyone want one of these?’ She said they were temazepam and were really good to help you sleep. I said, ‘You can’t just hand them out like Smarties’.”

The sisters say mum-of-three Dorries, 52, offered them the pills on the first night of her stay on the South Acton estate in West London. The controversial Mid-Beds MP was there as part of the C4 show Tower Block of Commons, and last week we revealed how she stuffed £50 into her bra when she was supposed to be living on benefits. Yesterday the MP denied the allegations. (source)

Yes, Nadine Dorries denied the allegations. But not the possession. Dorries even went on to reinforce the matter of possession by making this vague accusation against her accusers on her Twitter account:

The tweets by ‘ihatemp’ (above) are the only visible record in the public domain that match this description. What this leaves us with is Nadine Dorries going into a council estate to face the ‘reality’ of poverty with £50 stashed in her bra, her tummy tucked into £120 worth of denim, and an unknown quantity of prescription-only medication hidden in her washbag.

(Nadine spoke of a thorough search of participants before going in, so it is unlikely that the drugs were initially hidden in her washbag. It is more likely they were hidden somewhere on her person and/or in her intimates… like the £50 was.)

It is at this point that today’s thought experiment begins.

Imagine for a moment that I have a single unnamed source claiming that Nadine was also carrying illegal drugs at the time. This hypothetical source didn’t get close to Dorries at the time, and doesn’t even live on the estate, but they have an accusation that suits my agenda so I rush forward with it anyway.

Imagine also that I am not a campaigner against tabloid scum, but that I am tabloid scum, and, at this stage, so far up the arse of certain right wing newspapers that I can see through their blowhole. This being the case, I have no trouble getting my claim into print, and it’s a whopper; a killer ‘fact’ with added stickiness. For the purposes of effective illustration, I have chosen possession of crack cocaine; it is a ‘dirty’ drug with mostly negative associations, it is the more plausible choice in Dorries’ case (because a lot of the time she carries on as if she’s off her head on the stuff), and it permits the tabloid-friendly jest that Nadine Dorries hid fifty pounds of cash in her bra and eighty pounds of crack in her knickers.

(See what I mean? Sticky!)

Finally, instead of running my blog responsibly (with comment registration and pre-vetting for new users) let’s assume that I host my main site on Blogger.com, and run comments like an open sewer when it suits me. Most days the moderation wall is up, but today I have chosen to leave comments wide open for some reason; anyone can come in and submit anything they please, and I have no method/will for tracking the author(s). Further, even if I delete ‘offending’ comments immediately, what has been submitted will still be visible to an unknown number of subscribers.

Later, I’ll broadcast contradictory accounts about why I withdrew the claim and when, but for now what matters is that I have informed the newspaper of my 180-degree turn too late to avoid my claim going to print, and by the next day it’s in front of over 2 million people.

Thousands of those people descend on my website, doubling my audience overnight. I have since withdrawn the main part of the claim from my website, but I leave in place a sentence that gives the impression that my claim stands. There is certainly no hint that the claim of illegal drugs made in the newspaper has since been withdrawn. In fact, it is in this climate, among these thousands of people, that I speak of Nadine definitely being in possession of ‘the drugs’ or ‘those drugs’. Of course, I’m referring to the prescription drugs when I say this, but what everyone hears is “crack cocaine”

I’m not stupid enough to allow any comment repeating the specific claim I have withdrawn, but instead of correcting anyone who repeats it publicly, I have the claim withdrawn quietly. Privately.

Similarly, comments declaring the crack cocaine claims to be false are swiftly deleted. (Comments accusing that author of being a mental-case on par with and/or in league with Dorries, and possibly a drug addict themselves, I will allow.)

Eventually I huffily issue a correction within my post, but in the days that pass before that happens I will have repeatedly used the means at my disposal to maintain the illusion that Nadine Dorries went into the council estate carrying crack cocaine.

What I am describing here, ladies and gentlemen, is the exact same method that Iain Dale used to libel Tom Watson, and he can’t deny it, because I have dated copies of the relevant thread as it unfolded, and there are still remnants of his libel live in that thread.

Nadine Dorries isn’t* on crack cocaine. End of thought experiment.

Iain Dale is a lying bastard. End of story.

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(*For the record, the only evidence of Nadine Dorries taking crack cocaine is the counter-clockwise rotation of her eyeballs, but she has yet to issue any denial about her alleged possession of slimming/’amphetamine’ pills and temazepam and has instead moaned about people going through her stuff.)

Finally, it’s out in the open and established beyond any doubt:

Charlie Flowers, when confronted in public about the online attacks on me…

More comments have been received regarding my posts on Charlie Flowers and the “Cheerleaders”. As any regular readers will know, this is the gang of semi-anonymous cyber-vigilantes who last year decided to post Tim Ireland’s home address all over the internet, without regard for his family’s safety, in the stated hope that he would be forced to flee the country. Threats of violence were also received, including “machete to your throat”.

Richard Bartholomew

… claims that he is knowingly acting outside of the law not on behalf of Dominic Wightman, but instead on behalf of Iain Dale, Nadine Dorries and Paul Staines:

So I ran into “Charlie Flowers” today and asked him why he was stalking Tim Ireland.

Here is some hilarious stuff that came out.

CF claims Tim Ireland was harassing me at one point! When I pointed out this wasn’t the case at all, he just flustered and tried to pretend he had a story straight on the issue

He also claims he’s not a “vigilante” because “they uphold the law”. In other words he fully admits he’s not doing it lawfully.

Thirdly, he claimed he was doing it on behalf on Nadine Dorries and had informed her and Paul Staines and Iain Dale about it.

Sunny Hundal

Iain Dale, Nadine Dorries and Paul Staines; all three of these people have repeatedly (and I would contend dishonestly) characterised my criticism of them as ‘stalking’ (both directly and by proxy, the latter most often with the assistance of Phil Hendren*), but only Iain Dale was foolish enough to go any further than a series of vague insinuations, most recently in a post that he has since deleted.

(Not withdrawn or retracted or apologised for… just deleted. As if the false accusation never happened and it’s not being used against me to this day. Right now Iain Dale is taking David Wright MP to task for deleting comments he published and pretending that they never happened, but I am assured that this is not hypocrisy because Iain Dale is not yet an MP.)

Their defence for doing this is that they are expressing an honestly-held opinion. This is very easy trick with claims of harassment against yourself (if you say you feel harassed, who’s to tell you any different?) but Iain Dale, for example, has also made quite specific accusations about my treatment of Conservative MP Anne Milton (even though he certainly didn’t get this from Milton herself and he admits that he has not read any of the detail of the weblog he presents as his ‘evidence’)

Tellingly, these three refuse to back this ‘honestly-held opinion’ with any evidence and refuse to acknowledge how easily their ‘honestly-held opinions’ might be interpreted (and are at present being used/abused) as statements of fact.

Sometimes, they even go so far as to characterise any objection I may have to their accusations/’opinions’ as sufficient evidence in itself; they accuse me of stalking, I confront them about the accusation, they yell ‘stalker’. This is the same game the Cheerleaders have been playing, as it happens.

More recently, any complaint to these people by me that Dominic Wightman, Charlie Flowers et al have been using these ‘honestly-held opinions’ as statements of fact has been dismissed as evidence of paranoia that they claim supports their case and justifies their published opinion(s).

Now, unprompted by me in any way, Sunny Hundal confronts one of the ringleaders when he happens across him at a public event and – surprise, surprise – that person turns out to be behaving exactly as described, and puts his case forward as if he is attacking me on behalf of a series of ‘top bloggers’, hilariously including Sunny in his list of targets.

Once again, Iain Dale, Nadine Dorries and Paul Staines are in a position to either cripple these attacks against me, or allow them to go on without impediment:

– Would any or all of these people care to comment on any communication they may have had with Charlie Flowers (or any other person claiming to be attacking me on their behalf, including Dominic Wightman/Whiteman, aka Richard Walker)?

– Knowing how certain uncertainties are being exploited, would any or all of these people care to clarify their position on any past ‘honestly-held opinions’ about stalking (including those that have since been deleted, but not retracted)?

(When doing the latter, Iain Dale will also need to provide supporting evidence for his quite specific claims that I have stalked both Nadine Dorries and Anne Milton, or withdraw the claims as publicly as he made them.)

If Iain Dale, Nadine Dorries and/or Paul Staines continue to remain silent instead of disowning and discrediting Charlie Flowers today, well, we’ll know what they’re all about, won’t we?

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[*Phil Hendren (‘Dizzy Thinks’) is the only person outside of this gang of ‘Cheerleaders’ who has published my private data online in an effort to intimidate me into silence. His close chum Iain Dale didn’t act or speak out against this at the time, either, though he did take the time to deny being the source of the data. Hendren now claims that he never published my unlisted home phone number because publishing it in two parts – or in ‘code’, or with one number missing from the end – doesn’t count. Phil Hendren also continues to host specific claims about me that he knows not to be true, even though he knows they are being repeated by the likes of Dominic Wightman to justify their attacks. His stated justification for allowing this to go on amounts to this and this alone; he doesn’t like me. Harry Cole (‘Tory Bear’) has been equally helpful in kicking the ‘stalker’ claims along, and has a similarly undeniable alliance with Paul Staines. The pattern is very similar; both Hendren and Cole attack targets on behalf of the ‘bigger’/Daddy blogger, and are rewarded with ongoing linky-love and other forms of patronage. What Charlie Flowers and the ‘Cheerleaders’ get out of a very similar relationship with Dominic Wightman – who also claims to have been ‘stalked’ by me while attacking me directly and by proxy – is not yet clear.]

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UPDATE (18 Feb) – Iain Dale and Paul Staines have both been contacted directly, and both have made it crystal clear that they do not wish to intervene or even comment in any way. If Charlie Flowers is lying, they could expose him in seconds with minimal effort, but they choose to remain silent. Nadine Dorries (who is an MP and therefore maginally more accountable) has made a vague claim about having forwarded some emails to police, but she does not specify who those emails were from, who she reported them to, or when she reported them (my money’s on yesterday, if at all). Her claim means nothing until she provides some specifics that allow for confirmation.

UPDATE (18 Feb) – Nadine Dorries has decided against clarifying her vague statement about a police report and has instead jetted off on a 4-day holiday. Isn’t that nice?

Unlike some of Nadine Dorries’ nearest and dearest blog-chums, I don’t go around attacking people from behind a shield of anonymity or a range of sock-puppets. In fact, I’ll usually seek to intervene if I see someone engaging in unfair/anonymous political gameplay, so as amused as I was by Nadine’s recent Twitter witlessness…

… I still took the time to politely ask the person who grabbed her old username to play the game fairly and squarely:

By morning, Nadine Dorries had published a false claim that I was behind the hijacking (details), claiming that I was anonymously taking control of this username and other variations of her name. She was also carrying on with some needless hysterics about my being some sort of “sick” cyber-transvestite. While I don’t expect Nadine Dorries to be entirely happy about what I have done quite openly with this single account, her claim that I have repeatedly (and secretly) hijacked her name in an effort to somehow restrict her access to Twitter is a damaging (and, I suspect, malicious) falsehood that I reject entirely.

So I was none-to-impressed when the person who had grabbed Nadine Dorries’ old username retweeted Nadine’s false claim without counter or comment, and I asked them to address the matter:

Sadly, it soon became clear that the anonymous web user was determined to remain anonymous in order to protect their reputation while not giving a damn about mine.

I took a more active interest and quickly established the IP address of the web user who had taken control of the username ‘nadinedorriesmp’ (86.178.153.142). I also discovered that, days earlier, the same IP address had been used to make this edit to the Wikipedia page for the Tory Reform Group:

What you’re looking at there is a classic no-no in Wikipedia; when someone asks for a citation to support any given claim about an organisation, a link to a repeat of the claim on the organisation’s website (in this case, word-for-word) doesn’t quite cut the mustard. Typically, this kind of muppetry involves someone who is at the very least closely associated to that organisation (by profession or friendship); it is not what one would expect from a passing stranger who has yet to develop a taste for the Kool-Aid.

Life is full of infinite uncertainties, but I thought it warranted a polite question. I asked Nadine’s anonymous tormentor what their connection was to the Tory Reform Group:

I didn’t get an answer. In fact, shortly after this question was sent, the nadinedorriesmp username was abandoned.

Meanwhile, Nadine Dorries continues to maintain a claim she cannot possibly prove, despite my emphatic denials, and has even ignored all offers to help her identify the real culprit.