Guido Fawked - EU Agri-Whopper Busted

One need not look too far before realising where the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog stand on the upcoming EU membership referendum: their forthright hostility to the EU is clear. To this end, the Fawkes blog has been running a number of posts making variously creative claims about those whose views do not accord with theirs. Sadly, fact checking and accuracy have suffered in the retelling.

“Shameless EU Sockpuppet’s Spin Unravels On Radio 4” proclaimed a Fawkes headline yesterday, the post going on to tell “Agra Europe’s editorial director Chris Horseman went out to bat over his ‘independent’ think tank’s EU funding on Radio 4 earlier. As Guido has previously revealed, Agra is in the pay of Brussels”. Well, Guido previously revealed wrongly then, because that claim is not true. But do go on.

“To recap, Agra won a €36,000 contract from the European Commission, and their consultancy sister arm won another €200,000 contract from the EU’s agriculture programme just last year”. And that’s not quite true either, is it, Fawkes folks? For starters, that €36,000 “contract” is not a contract. It is a subscription. And it is to an organisation separate from the one that won the €209,000 (note correct sum) contract.

Let’s take this nice and slowly, so the Fawkes rabble have a chance of understanding. Agra Europe, which provides a specialist agribusiness information service, is owned by a company called Informa. The EU is only one of many subscribers to that service. One can hardly claim that someone who subscribes to a service you sell therefore has you “in their pay”, well, unless you’re the Fawkes blog, anyway.

The consultancy Agra CEAS, which secured the €209,000 EU contract, cannot be called Agra Europe’s “consultancy sister arm”, as Informa’s stake in it is just 18.2%, and it is not a controlling one. It gets worse for The Great Guido: going over Agra CEAS’ accounts for the last four years, a Zelo Street source has confirmed that the €209,000 contract accounts for just 7.6% of the consultancy’s revenue.

And I have a cautionary note to sound for Staines and his rabble: securing a contract from a third party organisation does not make you that third party’s “sockpuppet”, and nor can it be used to even infer any kind of friendship. As an example, I would refer the Fawkes folks to the case of Andy Miller and his legal action against Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Daily Mail, for libel, which Miller won. And the Mail didn’t.

Miller, who knew former Met commissioner Ian Blair, sued over a Mail article titled “Met Boss in new ‘Cash for friend’ storm”. The paper claimed Miller had won an IT contract unfairly because of his friendship with Blair. It was estimated last year that the paper’s characteristically stubborn defence of its claims ended up costing it as much as £3 million in legal fees. Paul Staines, who knows all about losing in court, might think on that.

Then he can find himself a fire extinguisher. Because his pants are on fire once again.