Guido Fawked – Silenced By Dacre?

Anyone still not persuaded that the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog have sold out to the right-leaning part of the Fourth Estate should consider the long-running feud between Staines and Andrew Pierce, formerly of the Maily Telegraph, but now of the Daily Mail, which had been running for around five years, but now appears to have fizzled out.

Course the f***er's silent, I shut the c**** up

This was over Staines routinely calling Pierce out for plagiarism, an early example of which can be seen in Private Eye, Issue 1225, from December 2008, which is reproduced below. Staines accuses Pierce, then at the Tel, of being a “thieving c***” (twice), while Pierce attempts to come over all perplexed and innocent. There have been many more examples since the latter’s move to the Mail.

August 2011 brought “Andrew Pierce Goes All Hari On Us”, after The Great Guido caught the Mail hack lifting content from Telegraph readers’ letters. One cannot disagree with Staines here: that’s bang to rights. And in May last year there was “Andrew Pierce is a Thief – An Occasional Series”, as the Mail man was once again caught raiding the Tel’s letters page.

Last August brought “Mail Magpie Pierce Does It Again”, this time following the Fawkes blog having its content lifted for one of Pierce’s Mail columns. And as recently as last month, “Magpie Pierce At It Again”, after the Fawkes column in the Sunday Sun was raided to enable Pierce to flesh out his witterings with a tasty morsel of gossip. But today’s lift has brought silence thus far.

Pierce’s latest rant, “He presided over corrupt elections and smears. Yet Red Ed's picked this union dinosaur to clean up Labour's vote rigging scandal”, is a hatchet job on Ray Collins, who has been detailed by Mil The Younger to investigate the apparent packing of the selection process for the Falkirk constituency by the Unite union. Much of it is gathered from readily available sources.

But the part alleging that Collins was involved in the infamous and short lived Red Rag site, along with Charlie Whelan, Derek Draper and Damian McBride, comes directly from a post published by the Fawkes blog ten days ago, titled, just to give Pierce the signpost he needed, “Ray Collins Helped Plan to Set Up Red Rag”. There are even a series of gay-bashing smears added for good measure.

Collins’ partner is described as “an exuberant florist 15 years younger than him”, for example. This is sickeningly hypocritical: Pierce is gay, and the Mail wheels him out whenever there is a requirement to deflect accusations of homophobia. Yet, among all the other detail in the Pierce attack on Collins, there is no acknowledgement that he’s cribbed some of it from the Fawkes blog. Staines has remained silent.

Has Guido sold out to the Vagina Monologue? Another fine mess, once again.