Don’t Menshn Harry Leslie Smith

The brief and ultimately failed campaign by the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog to smear veteran campaigner Harry Leslie Smith using the faux device of concern trolling was dealt its most grievous blow not by the reality of Smith’s assertion that he did indeed manage his own Twitter account, but the unwanted intervention of the right-wing’s own bad luck charm.

(c) Doc Hackenbush 2014

Yes, fresh from getting it totally wrong over a minor diplomatic incident between the USA and Iran (not quite worth air strikes, sorry) and pretending to be a victim on the recent Troll Hunters documentary, (thankfully) former Tory MP Louise Mensch saw the Fawkes folks’ post on HLS, immediately concluded that she, as usual, knew more than all other interested parties combined, and went in with both feet.

“Very disturbing if publishers are tweeting as @Harryslaststand … - are you? Another @JohnPrescott situation? … are multiple people tweeting this account and pretending to be him? Yes or no please” she demanded. The reply she received was not to her satisfaction. And nor was the statement HLS gave Peter Jukes.

This reply was duly ignored

“Who says he wrote that?” she snapped, having been told who wrote that. HLS had told Jukes that he did his own Tweets. This did not accord with the conclusion Ms Mensch had already reached. She knew more than he did about what he did, and to demonstrate this, she disregarded that information and just carried on ranting.

At this point, the errors began to creep in: “this tweet and the successive tweet were typed in under one minute, including the sub quoting of tweets. At 93, doubtful … Really objectionable if, as seems the case now, other people tweet from the @Harryslaststand account. two subquote tweets in [under]1m”. HLS is 92. He is not 93 until later this month. And only one of those Tweets has to be typed within the minute. Think about it.

Ms Mensch was, as so often, not for thinking about it: “to be clear I am saying Harry Smith quite obviously does not tweet the account  @Harryslaststand and is being exploited … Deeply respect Harry Smith; not the folks behind the @Harryslaststand account. Not a 93 yr old typing 2 tweets a min”. Not sufficiently deep respect to get his age right, though.

Nor was she for leaving well alone so long after the Fawkes post had been debunked: “Publishers still using the @Harryslaststand twitter I see. How can any company sink so low. Awful”. Awful that someone should take out their obsessive streak in this way. And only last night came “@minn_janet @Harryslaststand it's nor [sic] ‘he’ it;s [sic] a nasty bunch of others pretending to be a great man, gross”.

That’s a horribly ungrammatical Tweet for someone who took English Language and Literature at Oxford. That is, of course, assuming Ms Mensch does all her own Tweets. I mean, she wouldn’t have someone else doing them, would she?