Guido Fawked – Brown Makeup Time

[Update at end of post]

Not content with reducing themselves to slinging solid objects from their now very draughty glasshouse, the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his tame gofer, the flannelled fool Henry Cole, have today returned to rubbishing the evidence placed before Mr Justice Leveson yesterday by Pa Broon, which was, in the case of the Murdoch “war” phone call, corroborated by several witnesses.

He's just spinning. Or it might be my head

Sadly, the Laurel and Hardy of the blogosphere want to hear a different version of events to that presented, and this presents a problem. How do they counter a sheaf of sworn statements, especially given, as I observed yesterday, their often tenuous relationship with the facts? Ah well. This is not a problem, as the less than dynamic duo also possess brass neck in abundance.

This means that any witness whose testimony is inconvenient to them is smeared as “political loyalist”, “political appointment”, or just “spinner”. Thus their statements can be dismissed, and the Fawkes blog can claim to have been right all along. A significant amount of shamelessness is required to even consider this course of action, but this is of course no barrier to Staines and Cole.

I'm not spinning, cos I'm on telly!

So Brown’s former advisor Stewart Wood – a tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford – has his evidence dismissed, because Brown may have pushed past him once, and he’s a mere “political appointment”. Likewise Gavin Kelly, a mere “political loyalist” who is alleged not to be credible because he is supposed to have been grabbed by the collar once by the former PM.

By the time the Fawkes blog gets on to the third witness, David Muir, they dismiss him as just a “spinner”, who is discredited because of telling that Brown sometimes got angry, but not condemning him for it. The same treatment is doled out to Michael Dugher, because he is not only a “spinner”, but also because he “spent the dying days of the Brown Government forcing the line”. Er, what?

So who can be trusted? Ooh, easy peasy: Simon Lewis, because he alone was a career civil servant (but then, so was Bernard Ingham). And to reinforce all that is an update to the post: “A reliable Westminster watchers [sic] notes: ‘I think the contention from Murdoch is that there was a call in late September (just after the Sun came out), rather than in November which is the call people refer to’”.

There’s only one problem with this quote: it has rather obviously been manufactured. Not only is there a Cole grammar howler preceding it, but the body of the quote also has the same clumsy construction that no proper journalist would be seen dead employing. The punctuation is also deficient, underscoring that private education plus top Scottish university does not equal linguistic competence.

What was that quote they used yesterday? “Guilty, m’Lord”. Another fine mess.

[UPDATE 15 June 1245 hours: the Cabinet Office has confirmed that there was only one call between Pa Broon and Rupe in the year to March 2010, and that was the one in November 2009. They have also confirmed Brown's version of events, as backed up by all those witnesses. The supposed September 2009 call never took place.

That would suggest that the Guido Fawkes blog was being flagrantly dishonest when it made that suggestion, and one can only conclude that their "reliable Westminster watchers" were in fact themselves. Thus far there has been no comment from the less than dynamic duo, whose current masterworks include telling of measures to "install confidence".

So that's another Cole howler, then, to add to all the whoppers. And, although I know the Laurel and Hardy of the blogosphere don't ever read what I post (ho ho ho), they should know before slipping in the necessary change from "install" to "instil" that I took a screenshot. Another fine mess, once again]