Bloggerheads

Skip to #5 if you’re in a hurry….

1.

Hey, do you remember that rigged poll of weblogs that Iain Dale claimed was “not meant to be scientific, and has never pretended to be”…?

Well, he’s already presenting it as scientific evidence of the natural dominance of the right.

That didn’t take long, did it?

2.

There are several lies in his list (and the list itself is a lie), but one of the biggest ones is about the Nadine Dorries ‘blog’ being the work of one person. And Iain Dale was present when Nadine Dorries declared that she has to email her articles to a member of her staff so they can upload them (because she’s too witless to manage even this by herself), so he can’t even rely on the old stand-by of claiming ignorance.

I say ‘bigger’ lie mainly because of the potential scale of consequence (Iain also appears to have forgotten how cosily his website and Total Politics have overlapped recently, and a whopper of a lie hides behind his claim that Ashcroft’s money doesn’t at least grease the wheels); the Nadine Dorries ‘blog’ that she has gone to great lengths to visibly distance from her expenses cannot function without help from staff members.

If those members of staff are paid for out of expenses… well, she’s neck deep in s**t all over again, isn’t she?

3.

Meanwhile, it’s not the first time that claims like these have been made on Iain’s site, but this fresh set is quite exceptional, and Iain has published these anonymous smears even though he (a) presently has the luxury of comment moderation, and (b) is only avoiding answering questions about his status with the PCC because he claims to be ignoring me.

You cannot claim to be ignoring someone and publish lies about them at the same time; the two positions are contradictory.

And this is a lie. A big, fat lie:

“So that’s two visits from Tim Ireland, posting anonymously, in one night Iain.”

No, it’s not. I don’t care how many IP addresses these anonymongrels ‘see’ (that are invisible to everyone but themselves and the magical interweb pixies that speak to them), and I don’t give a tuppeny stuff even if I am the only person in the world who pauses to type ‘sigh’ (and I’m pretty sure that I’m not); nobody can prove that this happened because it didn’t happen.

But Iain is going to leave that lie in place, just like he does all the others. And next time I take him to task over it, he’s probably going to scream “Liar!” in my face. Or maybe he’ll just sit back and let someone else do it for him. Anonymously.

(Of course, because I am banned from Iain’s website for complaining about anonymous abuse, the only way I can have any hope of a right of reply to these is to respond…. anonymously. Can you spot the clever trap?)

4.

Hasn’t it been fun watching Iain Dale and Paul Staines (aka ‘Guido Fawkes’ ) try to turn the Osborne and Mandy story on Mandy all week?

:o)

Paul Staines’ take on the Sunday papers is particularly revealing. Reading that run-down, you might get the impression that the only story focusing on Osborne was some old mud dug up by a mucky tabloid… but you’d be wrong. Here’s just one story that Staines ‘missed’.

You won’t get any denial here; Mandelson is a money-grubbing liar, and no revelation about his meetings with billionaires would surprise me.

But this is totally uncalled for:

Richard Littlejohn is pushing the gay=paedophile lie.

Perhaps Iain Dale would care to condemn that. Then again, perhaps he’ll just let it lie because it suits his political purposes.

5.

I’m getting nothing but an embarrassed silence from the Independent about their publication of a lie that Iain is quite fond of; that he has hundreds of thousands of monthly readers. Iain has since suggested that this must have been an innocent mistake, but this ‘mistake’ seems to follow him around an awful lot.

Even Iain’s engagement agent appears to be confused:

Specialist Speakers: Iain is Britain’s best recognised and leading political blogger with more than 300,000 regular readers a month…

And look… Iain’s friend Nadine Dorries is at it, too:

Bedford Today: Ms Dorries said: “…. according to Google I had 800,000 readers in July.”

Bull. Dust.