Don’t Menshn Reality

There is something both sad and compelling in the sight of a highly intelligent person allowing their conviction of purpose to turn into faith so blind that only the reality they allow to be defined is real to them. Anyone dissenting from their absolute certainty is denounced as a liar, anything they offer in evidence is fake. That person is, after all, on the side of the Good Guys. Welcome to the world of Louise Mensch.

Has she got news for us? Only if we truly believe

In support of my contention, let Ms Mensch speak for herself: “we had Alan Rusbridger trying to deflect the attention of the UK’s papers from the Guardian’s lies, smears and omissions on the Miranda mule story by diverting their attention to the smashing of Guardian computers by GCHQ. ‘We had copies of the data in New York and Rio’ he said, tweeting an obviously faked picture of a MacBook Air he said heavies had smashed that was actually the components of all sorts of different computers, leading to suspicions by normally on-side geeks that the Grauniad was faking the photo for effect with random computer parts”.

Yes, the Guardian dissents from the Mensch Weltanschauung, hence “lies” and “fake”. And of course GCHQ did not do the smashing of the computers, but hey ho. Then follows the ultimate expectation that reality be suspended: the rest of the press is held to be “swallowing the spin ... uncritically”. The Guardian’s “spin”, that is.

Now, I hate to have to break news of real world intrusion to Ms Mensch, but the last thing the remainder of the Fourth Estate does is toddle along after the Guardian. But she’s off and running: Glenn Greenwald? “Repeated lies”. David Miranda – does she believe him? “I absolutely don’t”. They don’t fit her view, therefore they lie!

In any case “they are stealing, storing and disseminating classified intel about not just NSA snooping but America’s intelligence programmes against China, Russia and so forth. They are, in doing so, risking countless lives”. Then she asks the questions that everyone else should ask, so she can give them the right answers.

And these include the assertions that Edward Snowden “should rot in jail for it for the rest of his life”, and that he has indulged in “filthy treachery”. The South China Morning Post is held to be a “state engine” of the Chinese regime (it’s privately owned). Information from the USA’s National Security Agency (NSA) becomes “CIA data”. Theresa May is always right! Yvette Cooper is weak, weak, weak!

Anyone demurring is merely dismissed as not knowing what they are talking about, whatever their qualifications. A leading QC? Who are they compared to an English Lit graduate? And just wait until the next blog post, which by definition the outside world is eagerly awaiting. But, as the Fourth Estate lives in the real world, it is not: some speculation is too wild even for them.

“Listen to me, world” shouts Louise Mensch. But nobody who matters is listening.