Guido Fawked – Deeper In The Mire

The news that the Super Soaraway Currant Bun has unearthed a two year affair involving soon-to-be-ex-Tory MP Brooks Newmark has been received with great joy by the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog, who are now claiming that what newly anointed teaboy Alex Wickham did was right, because He Done It, so there.

But, as Captain Blackadder might have said, there was only one thing wrong with this idea: it was bollocks. What has dropped The Great Guido in the brown sticky stuff of late has not been Newmark’s infidelity, but the way in which his team went about their sting. It is still a fact the two Sunday titles, the Sun and Mail On Sunday, declined to run the story offered to them.

So today we have the Fawkes rabble executing a predictable “look over there” strategy, consisting of three key elements: claim that the end justifies the means (wrong), play the victim (conforming to Olbermann’s dictum: “The right exists in a perpetual state of victimhood”), and if all else fails, kick the Guardian, which, more specifically, means whining at future head of media Jane Martinson.

The combination of whining and self-promotion has been as predictable as it is nauseating: the odious flannelled fool Henry Cole snarking at Jim Waterson of BuzzFeed, Wickham and Staines jeering at Ms Martinson, Staines making claims about all the Tory MPs who have confided in him, honestly, and, in real sick bucket territory, suggesting Wickham merits some kind of award.

Meanwhile, Wickham has been on an orgy of self-justification, which of course he would have avoided had this blog not figured out the real identity of “Sophie Wittams” and Steve Hewlett hadn’t named him on Newsnight. “Today shows it wasn’t a fishing expedition” he whines, mainly to himself. Then he tells “Newmark was the target. The only MP messages were ever exchanged with”.

That, teaboy Alex, isn’t true, is it? There were several other (then) Tory MPs targeted, and it isn’t only the Guardian that says it: see the Mail HERE and HERE, and the Telegraph HERE. Eagle-eyed readers will also notice Staines effectively admitting the IPSO code was broken, talking of “wanky ‘media standards’” and calling the Guardian “more concerned with processology than substance”.

And what has clearly not occurred to the Fawkes folks is that the Sun today, rather than putting them in the clear, has shown that it was possible to catch the former minister without resorting to entrapment. The Newmark story would have broken without The Great Guido, who appears to have latched on to it as a means for grandstanding, for self-justification. That’s not good enough.

They aren’t out of the woods – quite the opposite. Another fine mess, once again.