Grant Shapps: smoke and mirrors

In recent months, Grant Shapps has been issuing threats of legal action against some people who dared suggest that he was running ‘get rich quick’ schemes under the name Michael Green while he was an MP. Shapp’s aggrieved contention was (a) that there was no attempt to deceive, as this was merely a ‘pen name’ that he used, and (b) that he stopped acting as Michael Green when he became an MP.

On the first point, I have only ever seen evidence of Michael Green being described on the relevant websites as ‘a Member of Parliament’, and certainly not specifically identified as Grant Shapps. We would be able to go to older versions of his websites and check if Shapps and/or his wife hadn’t deliberately excluded the howtocorp.com domain from the Web Archive, and in any case the existence of text bragging that Michael Green is an MP rules out any accidental overlap between his two lives. Grant Shapps was deliberately cashing in on his status as an MP, and he is preventing us from seeing older versions of his site that might allow him to demonstrate that he did so merely in the spirit of transparency.

Further, after several stringent denials, Shapps has since been forced into a humiliating change of position about what he said or did when; he now claims that he ceased operating as Michael Green “shortly after” becoming an MP. My records show that Grant Shapps was still operating as Michael Green over two years after becoming an MP, so I guess your position on this depends on your definition of ‘shortly’.

The new line being wheeled out today by Shapps and other Tory high-ups such as Jeremy Hunt is that this is was all sorted out a long time ago and this is merely a Labour-led plot to undermine that nice Mr Shapps because they fear his campaigning abilities (*cough*) and/or because they “hate business”.

It was after seeing this that I began to take a renewed look at the business interests of Grant Shapps, his wife Belinda Shapps, and his sister Marla Coutts. What I recalled about earlier versions of this ‘web empire’ was confirmed on the first site I checked. Sites like ‘auctiongirl.co.uk’ are clearly registered as if the operation and its key operators (Belinda Shapps and Marla Coutts) are based in the US, and not the UK. This raises questions about what/how any income/profits/earnings are declared in this country; the Tory spin about Shapps being a ‘wealth creator’ depends rather heavily on his family generating wealth in this country and paying a full and fair amount of tax on any associated income.

All of this is mere background to today’s story, but as that story unfolds, I will produce a full shopping list of websites in the Shapps ‘wealth creation’ empire, and I invite bloggers and journalists who are interested in the tax/earnings question to explore the many sites involved at their leisure.

[snip]

UPDATE (17 March) – I was in the process of researching domains in the shopping list I mentioned (which you are still welcome to browse) when I discovered evidence giving Mr Shapps some deniability about the fate of one specific domain (‘savenewbarnfield.com’). I am voluntarily withdrawing the associated text purely because there is now significant room for doubt, but I’m sure you’ll be delighted to learn that what I found instead was much, much juicer:

Grant Shapps is a lying liar who tells lies

:o)

Cheers all.








Posted in Consume!, Tories! Tories! Tories! | 2 Comments

Tweet archive of @toryeducation, the abusive sock-puppet of Michael Gove and/or his SPADs

[TL:DR – Tories running the Department of Education sought to harangue and taunt their critics anonymously like playground bullies. Here is the evidence they tried to bury.]

For over two years, an anonymous Twitter account endorsed by the Conservatives sought to denigrate, discredit and abuse critics and opponents of the former Education Secretary Michael Gove. Given that the Conservative Party Chairman (and shyster) Grant Shapps is highly tolerant of abusive sock-puppets in the party ranks and isn’t above sock-puppeting his opponents personally, I am of the opinion that people far-too-readily assume that a senior figure like Gove didn’t risk having a direct hand in the account himself.

I recommend this informative timeline and the following articles if you are unaware of the significance of this account and its authorship:

Michael Gove advisers face claims of smear tactics against foes (2 February 2013)
Are dark arts spinning out of control in Michael Gove’s department? (2 February 2013)
Michael Gove’s officials act to clean up abusive @toryeducation Twitter feed (16 February 2013)
MP calls for ‘Toryeducation’ Twitter user to be unmasked (26 March 2013)

The account was downright childish and abusive in tone, and often challenged critics of Gove to ‘get a real/proper job’ rather than waste any time subjecting his department to scrutiny (not a wise narrative to press during a recession, especially when you are spouting party/political propaganda instead of focusing on the job that the taxpayers are paying you to do).

The morally impoverished authors were also known for cringe-worthy use of a #winning hashtag (see: Charlie Sheen), repeated characterisation of opponents as ‘lefties’ and ‘comrades’, even a comparison of some critics/opponents to Hitler and/or Stalin… and throughout, nauseatingly effusive praise of Michael Gove and his bold mission to reshape education in his divine image.

This archive is a near-to-complete* record of everything tweeted and retweeted from its inception (Jan 2012) through to the date of Michael Gove’s humiliating ‘promotion’ to Chief Whip (Jul 2014). Upon the news that the Grand Headmaster had been demoted, there was a short silence, a flurry of tweets announcing the cabinet changes to be a glorious victory for Michael Gove and his loyal staff, then a very long silence followed only by sporadic tweeting until the end of that year, when all prior tweets were carefully and deliberately erased… because it simply wouldn’t do to be answerable for childish and abusive attacks on opponents, now would it?

(*It does not include any tweets that were deleted on/near the day of publication, and this is a common tactic of bullies with or without sock-puppets: they like to hit people and run away.)

Obviously, with the account so thoroughly cleansed of evidence (see also: Jeremy Hunt), it is difficult to determine the full context of some tweets and/or access any wider conversations, but I thought that hard-working taxpayers deserved to keep some kind of record of the Tory propaganda they paid for when Gove and his squadron of flying monkeys were running the Department of Education.

On that note, I will leave you with one of the final tweets from one of the anonymous authors who spent over two years accusing their critics and opponents of rampant dishonesty (and anonymous bullying, naturally):

It’ll take all you Blobbers a lot more than 4 yrs to glue pieces together & by then computers will have fired you! #Won #MissionAccomplished

Archive begins below the fold (click here to read in full). Do with it what you will. Cheers all.

[Note – Just for the record, in formatting these tweets for publication, I noted characteristics of the text that demonstrate that many of them were not tweeted ‘live’, but were first drafted in Microsoft Word. A key example: some of the nastier attacks on Suzanne Moore. Make of that what you will.]

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Posted in Teh Interwebs, The Political Weblog Movement, Tories! Tories! Tories! | Comments Off on Tweet archive of @toryeducation, the abusive sock-puppet of Michael Gove and/or his SPADs

Alex Wickham (‘top tabloid journo’) vs. John Cleese, Hacked Off and the facts

Yesterday I attended a rally for Hacked Off. While there, I observed Alex Wickham enter the room and take a front-row seat in the press box before thumbing away at his handheld device.

Wickham and his cohorts like to downplay typical everyday victims of tabloid excess, and instead press a narrative about a small gang of celebrities trying to restrict free speech so they can keep their dirty little secrets. Knowing Wickham to be a deeply tribal and unapologetic tabloid ‘journalist’ who had previously taken every opportunity to demonise Hacked Off and their supporters, I was curious to see how he was reporting this event.

I accessed the Twitter feeds of the two main accounts he uses, and observed him in action.

First, he took this photo of Hugh Grant and (using the same device) live-tweeted it to the @MediaGuido account (12:56pm):

Then, he manually retweeted himself using the @WikiGuido account (12:57pm)

I was not at all surprised to see Wickham pressing the celebrity angle, or to see him using mutliple Twitter accounts in this way. I was even less surprised when he escalated to more overt attempts to reject one argument and instead press his own false prospectus (1:06pm):

(Note : the above was also RTed to his @WikiGuido account a moment later.)

I did not think it was fair on the audience, and this tweet helped me make up my mind to report the matter to the Chair (1:08pm):

The above was a gross and deeply offensive mischaracterisation of what was being said to the audience, and how they were reacting to it. Brian Cathcart compared a range of media owners/editors to the man behind the green curtain in The Wizard of Oz (his exact words: “the squeaky little figure, or the squeaky little line-up of figures…”, and later “tear away the curtain and we see the squeaky little figure of Paul Dacre; let’s keep it that way, let’s keep them out in the open”).

The “rapturous applause” Wickham describes in response to some crass personal assault on Paul Dacre is pure invention (if not a gross distortion of the end-of-speech applause that everybody has received at the end of every speech at every political rally since the dawn of democracy). The Orwellian reference to the “obedient audience” is entirely over the top, and typically so.

Further, Wickham was totally engrossed in this task and typing his distortions while John Cleese was speaking about a long list of everyday victims of tabloid abuse and intrusion. The only report of any of this from Wickham was Cleese’s opening mention of the role played by celebrities in this debate (1:10pm), followed by the moment that Mr Cleese became momentarily overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the inhumanity he was reading aloud, with the clear suggestion being that his was an entirely emotional and therefore flawed argument (1:11pm).

You are invited to listen to the actual event rather than a cherry-picked moment of it written by a man so crassly preoccupied with his task of distortion that he didn’t even look up and acknowledge that any of this was being read out at the time:

Note that the above two tweets neatly bracket a long list of victims that Wickham is determined to gloss over, and that the second tweet throws two words together and attributes them as a description of the press in general. Here’s the text of what Cleese actually said after reading a long list of examples of specific and undeniably monstrous, sociopathic acts:

“So what do we say about this monstrous behaviour? And what is (so) monstrous about it for me is the almost complete lack of contrition on behalf of people who do these dreadful, sociopathic things.” – John Cleese

If responsibility for this behaviour was laid at anyone’s feet, it was at Rupert Murdoch’s, but given how closely Wickham is associated with The Sun on Sunday, it is unlikely that this is a point/debate that he would wish to address on anything but his own twisted terms.

Getting back to those terms, later in the piece, Cleese compared the field of journalism to other fields that would like to regulate themselves (builders, accountants) and to those that used to regulate themselves, but no longer do (lawyers, doctors). To illustrate his point he made a joke that murderers would probably like to regulate themselves too. That murder is not an acknowledged profession or field (in this country) should be clue enough to most people that a joke was in progress, but Wickham was quick to seize on it and present it as a standalone comparison (1:13pm):

Wickham then retweeted himself using his other account (1:14pm)…

… before repeating his assertion once more at @MediaGuido for good measure (1:15pm)

Now have a listen and decide for yourself what was actually said. Also note that John Cleese wraps up this point with talk of the people who lie about Hacked Off seeking to muzzle the press (trust me: we’ll get to this soon enough):

Here’s a transcript of the relevant section of the audio for those of you in the cheap seats:

“Of course they want to regulate themselves. We’d all like to regulate ourselves, wouldn’t we? But it would mean without appropriate oversight, builders, accountants, murderers; they’d all like to regulate themselves. And murderers would make a good case! They’d say ‘We’ve murdered a lot of people, we know people who’ve murdered people. We are best qualified to regulate (murder)’…”

“Yes, they want to go on [laughs] regulating themselves. Oh dear. The press editors simply want the freedom of the press – to be free to do what they damn well like, without independent oversight. Of course, things used to be different. Remember the lawyers, they used to have the Law Society to regulate themselves? Doctors used to have the General Medical Council. That’s all done. The only group that now regulates itself without independent oversight is [laughs] is the press. And why? because the politicians are more frightened of them than they are of anyone else, right? [sounds of agreement, then applause] But, you see, a lot of us don’t trust the press to regulate themselves without oversight any more than we don’t trust the murderers.” – John Cleese

Some other people spoke, Wickham’s distortions continued, and then the Chair (Evan Harris) spoke to the audience about one of the tweets by Wickham that I had brought to his attention:

Wickham is audibly mumbling when first challenged, but he clearly says it was “a direct quote” twice before not only being invited to speak but being urged to speak up by the Chair, when he finally says something the whole room can (almost) hear:

“I don’t understand the problem. It’s a direct quote. It was exactly what he said.” – Alex Wickham

This earned an immediate and vociferous response from one audience member concluding that he was a “cretin”, but this was putting it rather generously as it assumes that Wickham misquoted John Cleese out of ignorance alone before falsely stating when challenged that he had quoted him verbatim.

But it is clear from the audio that not only did Wickham misrepresent what John Cleese had said, he also made a false claim about having quoted him word-for-word when he had done no such thing. Wickham even challenged the Chair when his actions were described as presenting words out of context. Once again, he got to have his say, and this is what he said:

“How can it be out of context? It’s a direct quote.” Alex Wickham

So that’s twice that Wickham has been permitted to speak his mind, and twice he has refused to vary from an entirely false assertion that he had quoted John Cleese verbatim.

Listening to the audio, you will also hear a very strident Australian (*cough*) pointing out exactly how he had presented words out of context, even if one were to accept his argument that he had quoted John Cleese verbatim (which he had not done). At the very end you will hear the Chair once again invite him to identify himself, and you can also hear that by now the crowd are keen for him to do this, too. The specific calls for him to stand are for him to stand and identify himself. When he refuses to do this, at the very end of the audio, you will hear this moment, which also appears int he 15-second snippet of video that Wickham is now using to ‘prove’ that he was denied the right to free speech:

But Wickham was not refused his say; far from it. Neither was he robbed of his right to free speech. Wickham was not gagged or manhandled out of the room for daring to speak his mind; he was merely challenged, identified, then politely invited to leave, or sit and listen from that point on (i.e. after squandering multiple opportunities to explain himself). Wickham chose to sulk and portray himself as a victim on Twitter, starting with this (1:53pm)

The audio I have published here covers the entire exchange, as opposed to the 15 seconds of it that Wickham and the Guido Fawkes team seek to legitimise by citing the Press Association as the source of the clip (‘never mind the quality… feel the width!’). At no stage does Evan Harris shout at him. At no stage does John Cleese shout at him. This did not happen, before, during or after the event. But Wickham is banking so much on his assertion that it did happen that he has pinned this tweet on his profile.

(‘Look at me, everyone! John Cleese shouted at ME!’… and obviously I’m paraphrasing for effect here, so no letters, please.)

This didn’t happen either (1:57pm):

The audio makes it clear that Alex Wickham was repeatedly invited to stand to identify himself, something that he repeatedly refused to do. This is quite apart from the fact that he took any further opportunity to speak to again repeat the false assertion that he had quoted John Cleese “directly”, when he had not.

Wickham then when on to falsely assert that John Cleese had called him a liar:

John Cleese would not have been wrong or unfair to describe Wickham as a liar – because this tabloid tea-boy is a shameless and unapologetic liar – but what Cleese did was jokingly invite him to tell lies about him (“You’re absolutely free to tell any lies you want about me.”). So, Wickham lied about John Cleese calling him a liar!

Wickham then went back to his oh-so-crucial narrative about Hacked Off being an enemy of free speech, again giving a wholly misleading account of the event and what was actually happening when he was asked to stand and identify himself (2:00pm):

And it was at this point that Alex Wickham appeared to tweet about himself in third person using the @MediaGuido account (2:00pm), describing himself as a ‘top tabloid journalist’ and likening the audience to a gang of children descending into savagery:

It was after this flurry of tweeting that he skulked out of the room of his own volition.

Within 20 minutes, the main @GuidoFawkes account was used to post a picture of Alex Wickham the “hero” being gagged (2:22pm):

Within another 20 minutes, Harry Cole (also of the Guido Fawkes website) was characterising the Chair’s intervention as a “meltdown” (2:39pm):

And before an hour had passed, the main Guido Fawkes Twitter account and website had been deployed to describe the lobbying event as a “show trial for journalists” (2:58pm):

Wickham has since asserted that both Dr Evan Harris and John Cleese have accepted his version of events as accurate, but this assertion is based on further distortion and invention.

Alex Wickham was allowed to attend, but it was a trust he abused. He was allowed to report, but he gave a wholly distorted account of events. This was not “a direct quote” as Wickham repeatedly stated. At no time did John Cleese utter these words in this order:

Further, after the kind of behaviour that would earn one immediate ejection at most events, Wickham was challenged and invited to explain himself, but chose to give a false account of what he had done, and then give a false account about being denied the opportunity to speak.

(Surely, Alex, you remember speaking. You must have sensed your lips flapping, the sound waves leaving your body and the bullshit dripping off your chin.)

I will add to this that if you dare voice any dissent in the comments at the ‘Guido Fawkes’ website, you are shouted down by a series of anonymous comments before being invited to go and complain on your own blog. It turns out that Alex Wickham can’t even hack being asked nicely to leave and do the same. So he’s a hypocrite as well as a liar.

Alex Wickham, Harry Cole and site proprietor Paul Staines owe John Cleese a full retraction and an apology for giving a distorted account of what he said and how he responded when this came to light. They also owe Evan Harris, the speakers and the entire audience a retraction and an apology not only for the initial distortions, but for later giving a distorted account of what Wickham did, what he said, and how those gathered reacted to his audacity.

However, I am guessing that the only response we will see to this article is the usual round of tabloid obfuscation and intimidation designed to shut me/others up and discourage the one thing these people fear most: attention to detail, and timely and irrefutable deconstruction of their hastily-woven fictions.

[drops mic]

UPDATE (27 Feb) – At one stage, someone tried to explain that the ‘stand up, sit down’ event did not happen as Wickham described (and it didn’t). Of course, what Alex Wickham seized upon was any suggestion that ‘stand up, sit down’ did not happen at all (when he did actually stand up and sit down), so on this basis – brace yourselves – Alex Wickham is claiming that the audio I have published here proves his version of events, and further asserts that this is the “end of the matter”. No, I am not kidding. Here’s a direct quote, complete with context, and you can click through for more if you have any doubts:

Some might also note that Wickham doesn’t actually link to the audio that ‘proves his version of events’, or even hint where it might be found. This demonstrates his attitude towards accuracy… and his audience.








Posted in Old Media, Rupert 'The Evil One' Murdoch | 3 Comments

Louise Mensch: Cry ‘Rape!’, and let slip the dogs of war

Over the weekend, the Sun on Sunday columnist and former Tory MP Louise Mensch began beating the drum for war in Iraq. The intensity and bloodlust was striking, and stood in stark contrast to the thoughtful quote in her Twitter bio:

War is always a defeat for humanity.... KILL THEM! KILL THEM ALL!!!!!

It is also worth noting how ignorant and downright childish some of her tweets were. At one stage, Mensch began tweeting in Arabic, hurling abuse at alleged/perceived supporters of ISIS* that ranged from ‘your leader is fat’ jibes (seriously) to the kind of ‘cave dwelling’ and ‘goat fucker’ slurs that have strong, offensive and damaging racial and cultural overtones whether you direct them at a specific group or not.

(*NOTE – Some of these so-called ISIS operatives used words like ‘fag’ and ‘dude’, indicating to most reasonable people that they were more likely to be a teenage troll operating not out of a cave in Iraq, but their Mom’s basement in Iowa.)

Critics of this behaviour were characterised by Mensch as ‘terrorist sympathisers’, or ‘apologists and lefties’ who risked aiding and abetting the enemy.

I recorded not only the outburst, but the reaction to it (i.e. by logging mentions of her name/username in Twitter). Mensch was getting a lot of support from the kinds of people who will tell you that Barack (HUSSEIN!) Obama is a secret Muslim, but the majority of Tweets on Saturday morning especially involved people who were genuinely concerned that Mensch was (a) the victim of a Twitter hack, or (b) experiencing some kind of breakdown or drug/alcohol-fuelled episode. Any judgement on the latter aside, it is worth noting how many observers regarded her output to be so extreme that they could not believe that this dedicated controversialist had posted it herself… at least, not while sane and sober.

Keeping in mind that while there are outrages that ISIS (or IS) are responsible for, much of what Mensch was posting during this outburst was (at the time) unverified, wholly inaccurate, and/or in many cases entirely fabricated.

Zelo Street has some further detail here. This post exists mainly to call Louise Mensch out on one single fabrication in the hopes that she will finally retract it, not only to correct a shocking libel against the two people pictured, but to bring comfort to the tens of thousands of people who are needlessly concerned about the fate of one of the young girl involved.

Here are the two main tweets of concern. The first (bottom) is a retweet, the second (top) is where Louise Mensch repeats the monstrous lie in her own words:

A man who is not a paedophile comforts a girl who is not a rape victim

While the man pictured is (or perhaps was) an advocate of the Islamic State (IS) and may or may not be involved in the current armed conflict, in this picture he is not an invading soldier, but the host of a ‘family fun day’. At this 2013 “Ramadan event for children”, there was an cream-eating race, a tug-of-war… and a competition to accurately recite religious text, in which the young girl pictured was involved.

Now, if you share any concern about religious indoctrination of young children, we are totally on the same page. I personally own a bible that was given to me at age 8 in reward for accurately reciting the 10 Commandments, and I treasure it in much the same way that a soldier keeps the bullet that didn’t kill him. You can be as OK or as upset about the religious component as you wish to be, but it does not change the fact that the girl in the following video is upset only because of a mere error and/or stage fright.

The girl is NOT in tears because the host of the show wants to molest her. Perhaps Louise Mensch was thinking of someone else at the time.

A man who WAS a paedophile

Let’s be especially clear about two things: the man pictured has not just announced his intention to marry a young girl, and the event has not taken place in the recently-overrun city of Mosul. To claim otherwise is to engage in a lie with a dark and insidious purpose that also has strong, offensive and damaging racial and cultural overtones.

1. I am not getting into the whole ‘was Mohammed a paedophile?’ thing; it is sufficient to know that accusations of paedophilia carry a certain resonance in this context, and anyone claiming expertise in Islam and/or the West’s role in conflict in the Middle East should know it.

2. The idea that ISIS are invading cities and raping children is a lie that is clearly designed to provoke the kind of shock and fear that removes any question about the need for an armed response.

That there is reported to be “striking evidence” that ISIS have killed women and children and perhaps even buried some alive should not distract you from the latter concern. If anything, it should cause you to approach such reports with caution, especially if the source is calling for a response of total annihilation and accusing any moderate voices of being in league with the enemy.

Many observers of the outburst noted Mensch’s refusal to back down on what was an obvious lie specifically designed to draw people to join a call for bloodshed.

I would like to leave the last word to one such observer…

… but if you prefer we can leave the last word to Louise, her god, and her guns:








Posted in Christ..., Humanity, It's War! It's Legal! It's Lovely!, Rupert 'The Evil One' Murdoch, The War on Stupid, Tories! Tories! Tories! | Comments Off on Louise Mensch: Cry ‘Rape!’, and let slip the dogs of war

Dennis Rice and his conduct as ‘@TabloidTroll’

Over two years ago, in April 2012 to be precise, I became aware of a Twitter account by an anonymous tabloid journalist: @tabloidtroll.

While maintaining pretensions of whistle-blowing, @tabloidtroll actually sought to attack those outside the industry who highlighted or criticised wrongdoing within it. This included campaigners for press reform, critics of tabloid excess, and even police officers who dared to arrest journalists alleged to have engaged in such excesses to a criminal degree.

Psychological projection was evident from the outset. In a series of circular arguments, the author engaged in trolling, abusive and circumstantial ad hominem attacks on a range of targets and justified these attacks with allegations that his targets had engaged in trolling, abusive and circumstantial ad hominem attacks on himself and/or others. Those who dared to object to such treatment were accused of seeking to bully the author into silence.

Relevant distortions became increasingly bold and pronounced over time. For example: an objection to the treatment of Milly Dowler’s family would be characterised as ‘trolling journalists with a dead girl’.

There was also a clear pattern of targeting critics first with the allegation of bias, then of abusive behaviour, and ultimately some form of financial impropriety, which was usually used as a premise for contacting their employer(s), client(s), donor(s), etc. – all based on nothing but piss and wind.

Very early in the piece, I obtained IP evidence that demonstrated that a tabloid journalist by the name of Dennis Rice was the main account holder. I then confronted that journalist about my findings.

Dennis Rice responded by saying: “My lawyers will deal with anything anyone would be foolish enough to print – alleging or otherwise – that I am (@tabloidtroll)”

But I never did hear from those lawyers, even after publishing my findings. Instead, Dennis Rice made a complaint to Thames Valley Police alleging that I had stalked and harassed him and mishandled private data. The @tabloidtroll account was then used to announce that I was under police investigation. When this investigation closed without action Rice simply made another complaint and repeated the process. Thames Valley Police are very clear that I was “never a suspect” but they declined to investigate any potential waste of police time on the grounds that Rice had not wasted enough time for it to be worth their time.

(Note – Rice uses the word ‘stalker’ according to his needs. As @tabloidtroll he accused me of electronically stalking him because he received an alert that I had viewed his ‘Dennis Rice’ LinkedIn profile. Meanwhile, he has demonstrably sought to intimidate other Twitter users through detail he claims to have obtained from LinkedIn, the Land Registry, and even the Electoral Register. Further, these messages assuring others of my guilt – based on his highly inventive reports of a police investigation in progress – appeared alongside allegations that critics of certain other tabloid journalists had forgotten about the fundamental right of the presumption of innocence.)

Also, while publicly challenging me to publish the relevant IP data and thereby ‘prove’ my case, Dennis Rice was first researching and then contacting the employers of (a) parties who had offered to verify my findings, and (b) parties who merely spoke about the quality of the evidence in principle. Rice wrongly alleged that they had mishandled his private data and ‘enabled a stalker’, and to some parties he pretended police involvement to the extent of threatening a potential visit by police to their workplace (i.e. if the employer did not provide an ‘alternative method of contact’ for the accused party). Let me clear on this point: Rice was using a clumsy form of social engineering in order to mine/blag personal data that was none of his business and using an allegation of improper handling of data to do it.

Rice also began to pretend that @tabloidtroll was the work of many journalists, but he repeatedly allowed this fiction to slip through carelessness and the effort was further undermined by a linguistics report comparing the output of @dennisricemedia and @tabloidtroll that showed “multiple significant points of consistency between the output of Dennis Rice and ‘@tabloidtroll'”.

Rice sought to undermine these findings with a series of inventive but wholly flawed arguments, but in the end he settled on the first of a long series of threats (made as @tabloidtroll) to visit me at my home and sort it out ‘in person’. I made it very clear to Mr Rice that any such visit would be inappropriate and unwelcome. He responded by accusing me of cowardice and actually using this to justify his actions; he was not seeking to intimidate a critic, he was facing up to a coward who had sought to intimidate a critic.

Some equally inventive distortions were used to play on my dispute with the Conservative MP Nadine Dorries. Thinly-veiled death threats were being published about me and justified with the false allegation that I had stalked that MP. Rice portrayed my complaint about this as a death threat against Dorries, and several further threats to visit my home followed.

Another party who saw an opportunity to use Rice against me tweeted a public message suggesting that I might be a child rapist. I used a polite private message to ask why they might do such a thing, but the author portrayed my behaviour as ‘abusive’, telegraphing the report to Rice, who of course followed up with a series of threats to turn up and my house and ‘confront the coward’.

By this stage, it was not any mention of his name that set him off, but my mere presence on Twitter. I had stopped blogging and stopped engaging on twitter for weeks and then months at a time. The moment I dared show up online, the threats would commence based on some allegation or another. At times, even the mere fact of my absence would be used against me, as in this example:

TABLOIDTROLL: “Hide all you like, you despicable woman stalking prick, but know I’m coming for you, and its going to get bloody :-)”

Rice had also used the entirely false allegation that my in-laws had bought the house next door for cash as justification for publishing a list of names of people in my extended family. The claim was that I was somehow living a life of privilege while maintaining pretensions of being a working class hero or some such nonsense.

I asked Rice to cease and desist from the outset, pointing out that what he was publishing was as intrusive as it was inaccurate. Rice responded as @tabloidtroll in the following manner:

TABLOIDTROLL: “Message to TT’s stalker about his latest gutless plea: Make Me.”

Seeking a path for legal correspondence that would not lead to similar outbursts, I emailed the lawyer Mark Lewis*, who I knew had acted for Rice at one stage. I asked Lewis if Rice was still a client. Rather than answer this question, Lewis simply forwarded my email on to Rice with a chummy ‘Hope you’re OK’. I know this because Rice then began forwarding the email to multiple recipients and presenting it as evidence that I was harassing him.

Meanwhile, Rice’s attempts to portray me as a privileged outsider extended into associating me with the banking scandal. Rice was so intent on this that he first began referring to my “banker father in law”, but when he subsequently found out that the relevant party had died recently, he immediately switched to referring to my “banker’s widow mother in law”.

You are invited to imagine the emotional impact this had on grieving family members.

Behind the scenes, I had placed my faith in Surrey Police… who proved to be utterly useless and totally ignorant about the relevant technology. Judging by his own account, when attending an interview, Rice showed Surrey Police some tweets that were made on the @tabloidtroll account while he was volunteering in some capacity in a prison (i.e. and therefore without access to a laptop or mobile). The investigating officer simply could not fathom that a tweet might be scheduled for future publication, or that someone might be roped in to tweet on the author’s behalf. Worse, Surrey Police did not regard it to be ‘proportionate’ to investigate the account or its authorship through Twitter, and they even struggled to appreciate the significance of Dennis Rice writing to my employer three days prior to his police interview threatening them with a grand exposé based on a series of absurd allegations.

After that interview turned out rather better than he had been expecting, Rice withdrew the threat, but the exposé turned up anyway… on the website of @tabloidtroll, obviously. In this hatchet job, Rice accused me of ‘betraying’ my employer and promoting my articles by using their facilities to magic them to the top of search results (i.e. as if they did not do so on their own merit, and as if my employers engaged in black-hat SEO). He also accused me of stalking my own clients. One example: Like hundreds of others, I boycotted Tesco products once to protest their position on ‘Workfare’; Rice described this as ‘stalking’ and wrongly claimed that I engaged in this ‘stalking’ while retaining them as a client.

None of this was true, but by now Rice had extended his threats to confront me face to face at either home or work, or even en-route. At one stage he openly offered to share my travel itinerary to any ‘victims of abuse’ who contacted him.

In was in the face of this ongoing escalation and continuing inaction by Surrey Police that I sought to detach myself from my employer before Rice began targeting my workmates as he had my extended family. Rice used visible signs of my departure to support an allegation that his report of my ‘stalking clients’ had led to some discovery or ruling by my employer that supported his argument.

(Nadine Dorries was kind enough to pretend the same thing at the time, and made a big show of contacting the CEO about the allegations, but refrained from publishing their response for reasons that are easy to guess at. Harry Cole and Paul Staines also saw fit to promote the allegations, and again their reasons for endorsing an anonymous hatchet job are no big mystery.)

Rice then used this in a new narrative designed to further undermine the original IP data linking him to the account (e.g. “Your friend Tim initially claimed to have incontrovertible IP address evidence then subsequently refused to show it. And as I understand it later left the employ of an IT firm after it was revealed he was tweeting abuse to the company’s clients, including one Rupert Murdoch**”).

But of course, none of this put the genie back in the bottle, even after Rice wrote to Google seeking the removal of certain search results based on his false allegations of stalking. I had not only determined that Rice was the main account holder using IP data, I had also published further expert evidence demonstrating that he was the primary if not sole author. Often, when Rice tangled with anyone of any substance as @tabloidtroll, they would greet him with a cheery ‘Hello, Dennis!’ and he would feel compelled to yet again go over the allegations against me that he felt undermined the evidence I had published… but his attempts to deny the obvious only made the obvious even more obvious.

Over the past two years, as @tabloidtroll, Rice has progressed from attempts to intimidate and undermine witnesses at the Leveson Inquiry to attempts to intimidate and undermine a reporter who saw fit to live-tweet the recent hacking trial: Peter Jukes.

Peter has repeatedly been treated/threatened with the same attention that I have enjoyed over the past years, and so far the pattern has remained exactly the same; through @tabloidtroll and associated hangers-on, Peter stands accused of bias, abuse, and financial impropriety. It is my understanding that Dennis Rice has grown increasingly anxious about this conduct being documented in Peter’s upcoming book Beyond Contempt.

The blogger Richard Bartholomew has also been singled out for such treatment, up to and including intimidating calls to his mother. It was recent threats to visit the home of Richard’s mother that prompted me to suppress my fear of this individual and reiterate what I could demonstrate about Dennis Rice being the author of @tabloidtroll (example).

Rice responded by using his @dennisricemedia account and his @tabloidtroll account to not only announce that I was under investigation for stalking Nadine Dorries, but even name a specific officer… something he really should have checked with said officer before publishing any such claim. Rice followed this up with a threat to visit the premises of my partner’s new business venture (to ‘look at the dodgy financials’), then assured me that if I did not ‘crawl back under my rock’, he would subject me to further attention.

By this time, myself and others had begun to ask questions about the extent to which the former NOTW editor Neil Wallis*** and one of his drinking buddies had involved themselves in this anonymous bullying.

Shortly after these two developments, for reasons that remain unclear, ‘@tabloidtroll’ announced that he was taking ‘a longish break’ to write a book about his experiences. Rice then rendered the account private and soon after deactivated it, thereby abandoning any pretence that it was maintained by multiple authors.

But Dennis Rice isn’t done. Not by any means.

I am aware of further correspondence from Rice (under his own name) where he seeks to intimidate his critics into silence with vague threats of legal action over unspecified libel(s). Said critics have been assured that their faith in my evidence is misplaced on the grounds that I am mentally unstable and under police investigation for stalking.

However, the more Dennis Rice behaves like this, the more he confirms what has already been said about his behaviour both under his own name and under the guise of @tabloidtroll.

It would be tragic to think that Rice actually believed anything he said about the effort being in defence of journalism; where he has not simply lied about or invented damaging evidence, he has wilfully distorted it or single-sourced it from discredited parties with an obvious agenda. One of the forgeries targeting Richard Bartholomew is so amateurish it’s embarrassing, but Rice is long past caring about such details.

Dennis Rice may well have something to be proud of in the 20+ years he claims to have been conducting journalism, but at present he is no more than a thug, and in the past two years he has amply demonstrated how tabloid journalists can and will behave if they are not subjected to some form of oversight.

(* “Dennis is a really great bloke. Old fashioned journalist. I know him well.” – Mark Lewis)

(** Rupert Murdoch has never been a client of mine, and he never will be.)

(*** I welcome any challenge/discussion about what I allege about Neil Wallis in this article, but I wish to stay well clear of anything potentially prejudicial given recent charges, so please understand the need to avoid that subject or any issue/topic likely to be associated with it.)

UPDATE (August 2014) – Dennis Rice was in such a hurry to delete the evidence that he left his old username abandoned… so 30 days later I was able to register a new account with that same username! It strikes me as somewhat hypocritical that Rice is bragging that he has screen-captured tweets of his targets when he has deleted all of the tweets made using the ‘tabloidtroll’ account (and rendered the account under his own name private), so I suspect that sometime very soon I will put the time in and upload all of his old tweets as a searchable database, and use this same account to announce/distribute the relevant file. Cheers all.

UPDATE (August 2015) – It has recently been determined that Dennis Rice has been acting in a formal capacity as Nadine Dorries’ media representative (example: he is not named, but described here as “the complainant’s representative”). This relationship was active before and after the 2015 general election, but it is unknown at this time what/how Dennis Rice has being paid (if, indeed, he is being paid at all for this role). So far, the only response to my polite queries about the status/appropriateness of this relationship has been an anonymous sock puppet calling for my arrest for daring to ask Nadine Dorries such a question.








Posted in Old Media, Rupert 'The Evil One' Murdoch, Teh Interwebs, Tories! Tories! Tories!, Updates | 5 Comments

Back on deck and campaigning for Labour

Hi, folks.

It may surprise some of you to learn that I have experienced a significant change in circumstances since I last blogged with any regularity.

For those who don’t yet know, I will spell it out for you: @humphreycushion and I have entered into a long-term partnership. With smooching and stuff.

me and Humph

I am such a fan of the aforementioned smooching that I have now moved to Mid-Bedfordshire, despite its reputation for having the most appalling MP in Parliament.

Speaking of outspoken narcissists and their spurious narratives, during this period of transition, I’ve remained largely quiet in the hopes that certain people would be discouraged in their attempts to portray me as a danger to themselves and others.

Short version: they weren’t.

It has in fact reached a stage where I see little point in allowing myself to be marginalised any further, so here I am.

In other news, shortly after Jack Straw announced his intention to stand down as an MP, I up and joined the Labour Party. As many regulars will be aware, I was pretty vocal about my opposition to the invasion of Iraq and the Blair government’s complicity in torture, and felt unable to support the Labour Party while Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Miliband played any significant role in it.

Now they’re all out, I’m on board, and looking forward to campaigning locally in the run-up to the European Parliament election.

If you’re local and Labour, I look forward to seeing you at the coal-face.

Cheers all.








Posted in Updates | 4 Comments

Nadine Dorries misleads Parliament about her relationship with Andy Rayment

Short and sweet, folks. This is the tangled web one weaves…

Nadine Dorries in a statement to the Parliamentary Standards Committee on 15 October 2013:

“My business partners, who have nothing to do with me personally-he is just a business partner, with his wife-were very clear that, in going into business, they did not want to be brought into the public domain via my political position.”

Nadine Dorries in a statement to the Sunday Mirror on 17 November 2013:

“Andy and Ann Rayment are two of my closest friends.”

Ouch. Dorries has form for showing contempt to Parliament, but this example’s so clear, it’s going to sting like a paper-cut between the fingers.

See also: This earlier (and long but important) post by Unity, who has noticed this same contradiction.








Posted in Tories! Tories! Tories! | Comments Off on Nadine Dorries misleads Parliament about her relationship with Andy Rayment

Pleb!

Just me wearing a t-shirt out the front of Downing Street the other night. No biggie.

You too can look this cool*. Find out more here.

Pleb at Downing Street

(*Come on, who are we kidding? There’s no way you could look this cool.)








Posted in Consume! | Comments Off on Pleb!

Page 3 and the ‘News in Briefs’ lie exposed

Last week Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid flagship The Sun finally brought an end to the shameful practice of using Page 3 models to sell the opinions of senior editors to readers as if they were their own.

This practice began under the since-disgraced editor Rebekah Wade – now Rebekah Brooks, soon to be inmate #5318008 if I’m any judge – but rather than let it die with her career, Dominic Mohan saw fit to let it drag on for nearly 4 more years under the pretence that it had all been a clever bit of post-modernism (i.e. before he was suddenly removed as editor for reasons that I am sure will become clearer to us as time goes by).

I am here to refuse Brooks, Mohan and other intellectual cowards the luxury of a neatly rewritten history.

‘News in Briefs’ was no joke, and my leading example from February 2004 needs no explanation. It is stark, it is real, and it is a perfect example of how sincere Rebekah Wade/Brooks was in her efforts to use topless models to push political propaganda, and how deeply she and others invested in it:

Page 3, Feb 4 2004

These further examples paint a more complex but no less compelling picture. They date from August 2004, when David Blunkett’s reign as Home Secretary was about to end in ignominy over issues surrounding his affair with Kimberly Quinn.

Blunkett was balls-deep in the kind of ‘love rat’ and corruption scandal that tabloids normally go nuts for, but in this case, the subject of the scandal was not only politically-aligned with then-editor Rebekah Wade/Brooks, but a personal friend to boot.

What usually happens in cases like this is that the damning details are played down or not explored at all. Meanwhile, the feral enthusiasms one normally expects from tabloids are diverted into undermining critics/accusers while sympathetic editorials paint the besieged ally in as positive a light as possible.

In this case, the editorials extended onto Page 3, and praised three distinct Home Office initiatives over three editions (the Friday before the scandal broke cover, and the Monday and Tuesday following):

Page 3, AUG 13 2004

Page 3, AUG 16 2004

Page 3, AUG 17 2004

She has yet to admit to any of this (or anything else, for that matter), but I remain confident that these editorials were strategically placed by then-editor Rebekah Wade/Brooks in order to better service her friend and political ally David Blunkett, and not the result of any topless model(s) spontaneously deciding that they would use the empowering platform of Page 3 to express their admiration for the work of the beleaguered Home Secretary.

That said, there is an outside chance that this was a genuine and spontaneous outpouring of emotion following the first of two resignations:

Page 3, DEC 16 2004

Those not wanting to see what happened after Blunkett’s second resignation should look away now.

‘News in Briefs’ editorials were not designed for shits and giggles, folks. They served a very real political purpose, they exploited Page 3 models way beyond any concerns about pornography*, and I’m damn proud to have campaigned against the practice for as long as I did.

*Related link: No More Page 3

See also: This video explains the situation in more detail and this video (NSFW) contains many, many examples

Page 3: Propaganda [sfw] from Tim Ireland on Vimeo.

Page 3 :: Girls + Words from Tim Ireland on Vimeo.








Posted in Page 3 - News in Briefs, Rupert 'The Evil One' Murdoch | 1 Comment

Cute Font launches

It’s funny what life throws at you sometimes. For years I’ve been putting little notes to one side that describe ideas and projects I doubt I’ll have the time for. I showed one of these to Ms Humphrey Cushion a few weeks back. Then, shortly after, this (finally) happened:

Cute Font – men’s & women’s t-shirts with hidden swears

[some detail -> Cute Font: how we put swears on your chest]

I say ‘finally’ because that particular scrap of paper was nearly 12 years old at the time. My sincere thanks go to Humph for some great collaboration and a proper kick up the asterisk.








Posted in Photoshopping | 1 Comment