BBC – Delingpole Makes It Up

One golden rule for those regularly peddling falsehood and misinformation is simply this: don’t dwell on the subject and allow your opponents to show you up for spinning and telling whoppers. The target must keep moving. And so it is that, having fraudulently pretended to be a candidate in the Corby by-election when he had no intention of standing, James “saviour of Western civilisation” Delingpole moves on.

Del Boy, as I noted the other day, pretended to have achieved some kind of victory, but in reality he knew he’d lose his deposit if he really put himself before the local electorate, so when the time came to submit nomination papers and stump up the required £500, he chickened out. It was nothing more than a cheap publicity stunt. Any assertion he makes to the contrary is a porkie of the most basic kind.

So Del has quickly moved on to tell his adoring readers (Sid and Doris Bonkers) to “look over there” instead, and today’s diversionary tactic is to fall back on the old and trusted Delingpole attack line and kick the BBC. Here, he includes a photo of Jimmy Savile, captioned “Savile: heavily into wind farms, apparently”. See? You like the idea of wind power and that makes you the same as a serial sex offender!

And then there’s the headline: “The BBC and Jimmy Savile: peas in a pod”, which means that if you side with the BBC, then you too are on a par with serial sex offenders. Never mind that Del Boy derives significant income from the Corporation – which, perversely, refuses to disclose the amounts he trousers from it – he has discovered something deeply disturbing at its heart.

He has? Well, no he hasn’t, but with Del Boy, a little selective quotation and dramatic licence is enough to have those who drift around the comments sewer of Telegraph Blogs up in arms over whatever conspiracy or other dastardly deed is being inferred. Someone has tried to force the Beeb to reveal who attended a seminar several years ago. It falls outside Freedom of Information (FoI) rules, so they declined.

The enquirer, a bloke from North Wales called Tony Newbery, persisted. Still the BBC declined, as I suspect they would if I asked who was in any particular meeting on BBC premises at any time in the past decade. How this can fall under FoI I can’t fathom, but Newbery has kept on, and his requests keep on being declined. But because it’s all about Climate Change, there must be a conspiracy.

And in Delingpole world, because the BBC declines to give out the information, this means there is wrongdoing, but only on their part. From there, it’s a short hop to his wailing that the Corporation’s coverage of the issue “has warped the minds of the young and impressionable”. David Attenborough is smeared as merely a “useful idiot”. There are “bird slicing, bat chomping eco-crucifixes” once more.

Alternatively, Delingpole could just be on a paranoid rant. No change there, then.