Guido Fawked – Two Week Old News

The perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog have been getting in the Christmas spirit recently, which, more or less, means that when visiting the Rub-A-Dub, they become even more Elephant’s Trunk and Mozart than usual. Sadly for The Great Guido, this has not had a beneficial effect on their ability to bring their unfortunate readers up-to-date news.

Worst Father Ted tribute act ever

While Staines, his tame gofer, the odious flannelled fool Henry Cole, newly anointed teaboy Alex “Billy Liar” Wickham, and viciously anti-Semitic “sketch writer” Simon “Lurch” Carr were working themselves into a state of alcoholic derangement yesterday lunchtime, it seems that news broken two weeks ago at One Great George Street had still not reached them.

And, given the news was about one of their favourite targets, this was a double omission. Zelo Street regulars will by now know what is being alluded to here; for everyone else, a little background may be in order.

On Wednesday December 3, campaigning group Hacked Off presented the second annual Leveson lecture, delivered by Labour MP Tom Watson. During that lecture, he told, to sustained applause, that as part of the Shadow Cabinet reshuffle caused after Emily Thornberry resigned her post, Chris Bryant had been appointed Shadow minister for Culture, Media and Sport.

Zelo Street waited for the press reaction, the premise being that most, if not all, papers would deliberately ignore the appointment in order to make it go away. This they did. This blog subsequently posted on Bryant’s promotion on Sunday December 7, with some Tweeters telling me later that this was wrong, and that Bryant had only been made Shadow Arts Minister. But they were unaware that when Watson made his announcement, Bryant was in the hall, and did not dissent from the news.

Just seen ... late again!

Well, guess what? Two whole weeks after Tom Watson gave out the news, and ten days after Zelo Street, Master Cole has at last heard about it. “Just seen that [Chris Bryant MP] has been moved to shadow DCMS” he confirmed on Twitter earlier, and his pal Wickham dutifully Retweeted it. The Great Guido and his rabble ought to give up if they can’t do better than that.

Of course, had they been in the Westminster Arms – which, after all, is one of their favoured watering holes – after the lecture, as many of those who had been in the hall were, they would have found out. It’s a strange omission for a crowd who made such an effort to gatecrash Steve Coogan’s party last year (and yes, that was another miserable failure on their part, too).

They failed to turn up to their own Westminster local, then couldn’t bother catching up on the news for a fortnight. Another fine mess, once again.