Guido Fawked – Wickham Still Lying

Brooks Newmark may have all but left the stage, but Alex “Billy Liar” Wickham, newly anointed teaboy to the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines at the Guido Fawkes blog, is still wriggling and flailing as he tries desperately to both justify his sting on Newmark – proved unnecessary after the Sun’s later exposé – and convince the wider world that he is a real journalist, which he is not.

Fart in lift inquiry suffers blowback

Wickham’s latest apologia has been published in Varsity magazine, and the dishonesty begins more or less at the beginning, as he whines “Frustratingly, a lot of what has been written by journalists who’ve never broken a story in their lives, mainly at the Guardian, has been very uninformed”. Phonehackgate, Liam Fox, Wikileaks, Edward Snowden ... yeah, no stories there, eh? Liar.

Will the next one be taken down the Scrubs?

And, as the man said, there’s more: “Mr Newmark was the priority for the investigation”. So how did Nick de Bois, Jesse Norman, Mark Pritchard, Mark Reckless, Charles Elphicke and Robert Jenrick come to be contacted as well? We’ll award that a mere “misleading”, and move on to the next whopper.

“This is an important journalistic enquiry into the man who was in charge of getting women into the Conservative Party, and abusing this position”. It’s not important as the Sun did the job properly, it isn’t journalism, and he has no evidence that Newmark ever abused his position. Liar. “I’d like IPSO to come up with an alternative suggestion of what we could have done to prove this man’s wrongdoing”. That is no defence against charges of bad and potentially illegal behaviour.

And then the main event: “I was very disappointed when those photographs were published...We did everything we could to prevent their identities from coming out, and those photos from coming out – deleting the twitter account, and stuff like that. If I were to do it again, sure, perhaps I would get the photos to have been posed, but I would say that the Sunday Mirror and myself never published the photos”.

Now you see the photo ...

Would you, teaboy Alex? Then you would be lying yet again: what do you think that photo is, then? The one that was published by the Guido Fawkes blog, before you and your pals tried to cover your tracks by deleting it? And how do you “prevent their identities from coming out” when it is easy to identify the original source? Liar.

... And now you don't

But remember, he’s doing it because “There’s lots of what politicians do that we’d consider a resigning issue and a political scandal, and lots of that wouldn’t get looked at by the police, or their own parties, they’d always be covered up”. Like all the scandals of the Major years, that got unearthed without the Fawkes rabble.

“Billy Liar” Wickham presents himself as a fearless campaigner, but in reality is someone so unable to tell fact from fiction that he would be well advised to seek help for his problem. And leave journalism to real journalists. Another fine mess.