Guido Fawked – Livingstone Foot In Mouth

The ability of the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his tame gofer, the flannelled fool Henry Cole, to open mouth and insert boot was illustrated superbly at the Guido Fawkes blog yesterday. This less than dynamic duo, the Laurel and Hardy of the blogosphere, had decided to widen their attack on rotten leftie Ken Livingstone to London bloggers who they deemed of inconvenient thought.

Now that's not a good idea

And, demonstrating the tribal and uncharitable nature of the Fawkes blog, the post thus generated links to only two of the eleven blogs upbraided: on this matter, Staines and Cole expect their readers to be gullible enough to take them on trust. But the Fawkes blog also needs to generate advertising revenue, and the need apparently trumps any need for ideological purity.

Because, as readers were reading the allegations against Livingstone and the bloggers who are supposedly batting for Labour, they were also being served a series of very prominently displayed adverts promoting the former Mayor’s campaign and passing suitably adverse comment on current (and occasional) Mayor Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

Moreover, the adverts were on the right-hand side of the screen, the part towards which the eye naturally gravitates – as witness the Huffington Post using it for its sleb stuff (an idea later lifted by Mail Online, which as far as is known hasn’t even given Arianna so much as a thank you). So readers were informed that the blog’s hero Bozza had a second job at the Maily Telegraph.

Not only that, they were then informed that this “second job” paid Bozza a cool £250,000 a year, although the great man has dismissed this amount as merely “chicken feed”. Following this information comes a reminder of the Livingstone assurance that he would be a full time Mayor, with a sign-off giving a text number to send “chickenfeed” to BorisStoppers.

And one additional thought enters, given Bozza making light of his wad from the Telegraph: his Mayoral stipend is a far smaller amount, so if £250,000 is “chicken feed”, one can only conclude that he is in receipt of a rather more substantial sum from one or more other sources. And the accepted way of dealing with multiple income streams is to work through a limited company.

So if Staines and Cole are so keen on full Mayoral candidate disclosure, no doubt they will be just as keen – given Livingstone’s commitment – to expose Bozza’s full range of income, the company he funnels it all through (or not), and his equivalent commitment to put all else aside to concentrate on being London Mayor, if returned for a second term.

Won’t they? No, they’re just blinkered, clueless tribalists. Another fine mess.