Daily Star Meets Wallace And Gromit

[Update at end of post]

Among those who scrabble around the dunghill that is Grubstreet, there are some particularly unsavoury characters, for whom integrity, honesty and principles are readily traded for cowardice and falsehood. And there are few hacks less savoury than one Nigel Pauley, showbiz correspondent of the downmarket Desmond rag the Daily Star, who has appeared on the Zelo Street radar this week.

The acme of quality journalism

Pauley, who was described to me with some feeling as “a nasty little man” by someone who has observed him in his natural habitat, is at present on long term sick leave from his post. He has set great store by protesting vehemently that I should not pass adverse comment on him, as he is recovering from “a life saving operation”. But, typically, he is not averse to putting the boot in himself.

And so it came to pass that Pauley decided to join washed up former Mail hack Dennis Rice, who still pretends anonymity as Tabloid Troll, in the latter’s obsessive (and laughably fruitless) attack on this blog, and – demonstrating the level of desperation – on me personally. Pauley’s first effort was to assert that Crewe was in the Potteries. Well, it’s all out of Landan, innit?

From there, he and Rice could only go downhill, and presently the Twitter conversation hinged on the intellectually uplifting subject of facial appearance (future chats will no doubt tell how both have had lots more shags than I ever will). Pauley commented, on a photo which Rice claimed was of me, “I’d be in denial if I looked like that”. So Nige is a veritable male Adonis, is he?

Daily Star hack

Plasticene dummy

Well, no he isn’t: Pauley could easily stand in for the lead in a Wallace and Gromit film without anyone noticing, except that his ears are funnier than the plasticene one’s. And to cap it all, he’s allowed himself to he photographed dressed like he just came from having a fiddle in the back row of the local cinema (as it were). He’s all Neville Thurlbeck without the style.

And, if any helpful people out there can supply a recent photo of Dennis Rice, so he too can pass before this blog’s examination – email address, as ever, at right – that would be much appreciated. If Pauley has so little room to talk, one senses that his pal may be in an equally draughty glasshouse. And there’s nothing that this unprincipled shower hates more than being mocked for their utter idiocy.

Thus another involuntary trip to the cleaners by the dregs of journalism.

[UPDATE 6 September 1905 hours: Nigel Pauley and Dennis Rice took this post very badly, spending much time yesterday on Twitter passing adverse and extremely personal comment about me, which goes with the territory when one is dealing with those of low principle and yet lower brainpower. As a result, a number of defamatory assertions have been made which I will address tomorrow in a new post.

In the meantime, my apologies to the family at the mid-Cheshire address which Rice published yesterday and which has nothing whatsoever to do with me, and to all the Tim Fentons who are not me, whom Rice has also managed to involve, however tangentially. It seems the former Mail On Sunday "investigations editor" still cannot investigate his way out of a paper bag. More later]