Guido Fawked – Yeo Didn’t Get Tim

The Murdoch Sunday Times has stung Tory MP Tim Yeo, who has decided to “stand aside” from his position as chair of the Commons Energy and Climate Change Select Committee. But, not for the first time – pace Chris Huhne – the scalp has been claimed, and on equally erroneous grounds, by the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog.

As with Huhne, Rupe’s supposedly upmarket troops have done the hard work only to find the Fawkes folks – the odious flannelled fool Henry Cole has been particularly gobby on the matter – saying it was them wot done it. Moreover, on this occasion there has been the additional, and suitably fawning, support of James “saviour of Western civilisation” Delingpole.

Del Boy’s grovelling adulation for Staines is truly vomit-inducing: “On our fighter base he wouldn't be with the rest of us down the pub of an evening singing songs round the piano. He'd be out in the hangar with his rigger and his fitter discussing ways to tune his Spitfire to an even deadlier pitch”. Considering Staines had such trouble keeping a VW Golf in a straight line, letting him loose with an aircraft is not something that sane men ought to be even contemplating.

And he misses the point entirely: Delingpole credits The Great Guido with “getting” Yeo, Huhne, Denis McShane and Mike Hancock, but none of their downward career trajectories (note that Hancock is still under investigation) are due to the Fawkes blog, which has merely ridden on the coat tails of others.

Let me give Del Boy and anyone else so minded a similar example. Zelo Street has been on the case with what became Phonehackgate from the day the story was first broken back in 2009 by the deeply subversive Guardian (Master Cole decided that it was payback for Damian McBride, showing the true level of the Fawkes rabble’s insights). This blog has published dozens of posts on the subject since then.

But, so what? Sure, I called it right at the outset, but it wasn’t my doing that led to many of Rupe’s faithful retainers ending up facing trial. That was down to the authorities, with the journalistic heavy lifting done by Nick Davies and the rest of the team at the Guardian. When I invoked The Curse Of Zelo against Milo Yiannopoulos recently, it was his own idiocy that finished him – not me.

And that’s why Staines and Cole have no cause to claim credit for this latest downfall of Tim Yeo (they should also note that he has bounced back before, notably from earning the “Shagger” epithet and thus embarrassing “Shagger” Major, who had embarked on a “back to basics” campaign). Nor will Del Boy’s pathetic grovelling change matters, though it may score him a few more hits.

The Great Guido did not get Yeo. The press did. Another fine mess, once again.