Guido Fawked – No Gallagher Prediction

The perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog were beside themselves with joy yesterday as a rumour they had heard actually turned out to be true: former Maily Telegraph editor Tony Gallagher, recently sacked from his post at Fleet Street’s last broadsheet daily, had rejoined the Daily Mail as deputy to the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre.

Nah, I missed asking Tony cos I was going to get ratarsed, shit no, to the bog, after getting well pissed, bollocks no, fed. And getting blotto on wine. Oh sod it

Gallagher will share the deputy role with Jon Steafel, but the move appears reminiscent of Dacre’s own promotion to the editor’s chair, when his predecessor David English stepped aside and took up an “editor-in-chief” role to stop the Vagina Monologue being poached by another title. Gallagher was taken on board to make sure the succession is in place when Dacre finally goes.

And, as to the Fawkes rabble being a few minutes ahead of the field on the news getting out, it is another case of, as Jon Stewart might have put it, two things there. One, the Fawkes folks did not, despite knowing that this move had been rumoured for several months, manage to tell their readers anything about it. Zelo Street discussed it as far back as December 2012.

I don't need to get scoops, cos I'm on telly!

Indeed, this blog has noted Gallagher being tipped to succeed Dacre on at least three more occasions (see HERE, HERE and HERE). But this appears to have passed The Great Guido by. One has to wonder whether this is yet another side-effect of the Fawkes rabble selling out to the Fourth Estate, and their being frightened witless of offending Dacre.

And the second point is that The Great Guido had a very public recent encounter with Gallagher, yet managed not to bother putting the questions to him: what were his future plans? Had he received any offers to return to the editor’s chair, directly or indirectly? What about the rumours surrounding the Dacre succession? He must have known, even before the end of February.

Tony Gallagher at the Leveson Inquiry

Instead, Staines and his clueless gofer, the odious flannelled fool Henry Cole, were happy to just tell readers that they had lunched at Moro in Islington, where the two of them had blown a sum well into three figures ensuring they not only ate well, but washed it all down with two reassuringly expensive bottles of wine, so they could summon some very old Harry Enfield and go “loadsamoney”.

Instead, Tony Gallagher kept his new job under wraps, and fobbed off the less than dynamic duo with a photo. So there is a wily streak to the former hard man of the Telegraph, and it needed very little application to see off Staines and Cole. There was a scoop there waiting, and the two of them fluffed it. What was that Fawkes saying? “You booze, you lose”. They certainly did. Both.

All that expenditure for a shonky photo. Another fine mess, once again.