The Glover Coincidence – 2

As I observed recently, it was a remarkable coincidence that Stephen Glover, the sad looking hack whose outpourings regularly grace the Daily Mail, was on hand to put the boot into suggestions that Phonehackgate was a serious matter only days after the head of the Metropolitan Police had visited the editor of the Guardian and tried to get him, and Nick Davies, to back off.

And it is also remarkably coincidental that today, that same Stephen Glover has produced a column, once more in the Daily Mail, on how the whole business is down to the rotten lefty (and, of course, obsessed) BBC. He starts by selectively identifying those punters who had appeared on Newsnight last Tuesday, omitting to make the connection between Tory MP Louise Mensch and her dishonest attack on the appalling Piers “Morgan” Moron, an event I covered yesterday.

Moreover, Glover fails to mention former hack Paul McMullen at all, such is his determination to prove bias. This means he then characterises Trevor Kavanagh as a mere “columnist” with “no executive responsibilities”, a superb slice of deception. Perhaps he believes his readers are so poorly informed that they will not know Kavanagh is an associate editor of the Sun, and spent over 20 years as its political editor.

And Glover appears to have thrown his rant together with little attention to detail. Thus we are told “Anyone with a grouse against Rupert Murdoch is invited to dilate without any requirement to produce evidence” by a hack who is under no requirement to produce evidence. Then we get “the BBC loathes Murdoch because he has built BSkyB into a formidable programming rival” following immediately from “the estimated audience of all BBC news bulletins ... is some 20 times greater than ... Sky News”.

We also get the suggestion, in Glover’s analysis of the Kavanagh Today appearance, that the Beeb is phone hacking too, something for which he has, you guessed, no requirement to produce evidence. This convenient position has also served Glover well in his previous tirades against the BBC: in October 2008, the predicament of the then shadow Chancellor was down to the Beeb, then the following December there was a rant about Panorama and Robert Peston.

February 2009 brought the assertion that the BBC was run by a “narrow sect”, with readers treated the following May to the idea that the corporation was somehow anti-Christian. And the Glover line was consistent across platforms, with his pontificating in the Independent bringing the false equivalence of Beeb staffers “paid more than the Prime Minister”.

So it’s a remarkable coincidence, but no surprise, to see today’s Glover rant.