Don’t Menshn Murdoch Losses

Another day, another challenge for (thankfully) former Tory MP Louise Mensch, as she tries – and, not for the first time, fails – to remain consistent in the face of having to grovel in the general direction of Creepy Uncle Rupe, but at the same time lay into the hated Guardian at every opportunity. The result, as so often, sees her with foot firmly in mouth, amid unintended hilarity.

(c) Doc Hackenbush 2014

When Alan Rusbridger announced that he would be leaving the editor’s chair at the Guardian next year and moving upstairs to chair the Scott Trust, there was no happier bunny than Ms Mensch, despite her shock realisation: “Finally annoyed [Alan Rusbridger] enough that the Guardian has blocked my Twitter account. I have almost as many followers as he has circulation” she trilled.

And, as Jon Stewart might have said, two things here. One, she doesn’t offer a print edition of whatever wibblings she is offering right now, and so, two, that leaves Twitter, where she has around 88,000 followers, many of whom are there for the laughs, while the Guardian has three million followers. So it would be more accurate to say “I have almost 3% as many followers as they have”.

But the better class of people will be glad that the Guardian has blocked her, although many will wonder why they did not do it rather earlier. Meanwhile, she wished the departing editor “Goodbye and good riddance”, in a demonstration of petulance at her previous failure to get Rusbridger jailed over the Snowden material. Then she condemned him as “Dr No circulation”.

The Guardian’s website is, meanwhile, massively popular, second only to Mail Online, and no sidebar of shame in sight. That thought, though, was not allowed to enter as Ms Mensch just kept on sneering: “Haahaa, so fitting that the story of [Alan Rusbridger] quitting is scooped from them by the Independent”. Laugh? I thought I’d never start. And then we get to the main event.

“Dear [Alan Rusbridger], an excellent Guardian piece to read in your downtime” she smirked, citing an article titled “Times Newspapers posts £1.7m profit, first in 13 years”. Yeah, take that, yogurt-knitting lentil-munching Guardianistas! However, and here we encounter a most inconvenient however, one must expect Ms Mensch to be consistent in reporting these financial results, which she is not.

As the Guardian has also noted, “News Corp suffers £3.5m loss after £51m profit the year before”. The detail was most revealing: “One stand-out feature was the plunge in the profitability of the Sun, where operating profits were down to £35.6m from £62.1m in 2013”. So Rupe needs to get the Sun back to its previous profitability? No problem there, economies should be easy to find.

There’s at least one useless pundit they can do without. Hello Louise.