The Pretentious Commentator

A most unseemly Twitter row has broken out over a less than adulatory reference to the self-promoting and appallingly vain Raheem Kassam, no longer on Wikipedia because his lofty perch out there on the right meant that, well, nobody had heard of him. The unfortunate recipient of Kassam’s superior insights, Dave Talbot, may be wondering what The Great Man’s problem is.

As can be seen, Talbot clearly concluded adversely on Kassam’s self promotion, but did not include the latter’s Twitter handle in his Tweet – perhaps (shock horror) not everyone knows or cares what it is. But somehow Kassam was watching, which I found eyebrow raising, and peppered his riposte with intellectually uplifting terms such as “dipshits”, “coward” and “idiots” (even though Talbot is only one person).

But, as I noted with his admission of buying Twitter followers, Kassam is on occasion prone to refreshing bouts of candour, and he then conceded that he wrote the biographical details for his entries on the websites of the Henry Jackson Society (his employer) and Media Intelligence Partners (for whom he is part of their “Talent Management” – no, seriously, don’t laugh) himself.

The admission, however, was reinvented in the retelling as “Marketing”. I will leave it to devotees of the Boston Consulting Group to deduce whether this makes him a Problem Child, Star, Cash Cow or Dog. It clearly failed to impress Talbot, whose dismissal provoked yet more cerebral insights from Kassam, resulting in the magisterial deployment of the terms “tool” and “twat”.

And then a slightly disturbing note was struck, as Kassam started searching anything he could find about Dave Talbot, including his LinkedIn profile and company website. Why he would need to do this, when he had already decided to do little more than brush off his criticisms with a welter of abuse, is just strange. Not everybody in the world thinks you’re wonderful? So what? Deal with it.

But the best had to be left till last, with Kassam proclaiming that “I am ... a public facing part of various orgs” (Yeah, right, and so is a receptionist in one of those multi-occupancy office buildings over on Crewe Business Park). This enables him to dismiss a link from Liberal Conspiracy, despite the subject of that link – purchasing Twitter followers – being about a practice to which he had admitted.

Kassam then blocked Talbot (despite his also searching for information about him), which allies him with his pal, the flannelled fool Henry Cole, who blocks other Twitter users and then obsessively monitors their activity. Not that the right are paranoid about anything, of course. Or perhaps he is merely working to confirm Olbermann’s dictum: “The right exists in a perpetual state of victimhood”.

In any event, that’s one more heart and mind the right has failed to win over.