Jon Snow Row - OH WHAT A GIVEAWAY

As Zelo Street observed yesterday, the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog have been in Ron Hopeful mode, running a post claiming that Channel 4 News main presenter Jon Snow said something during his visit to Glastonbury last weekend that was highly disobliging to the Tories. The Fawkes blog’s apprentice sandwich monitor, oops, sorry, senior reporter, Ross Kempsell, thinks he’s on a winner.

Kempsell, rapidly acquiring a Walter Mitty streak, wrongly believes that his single sourced drivel will get Snow sacked. But he is right on one thing: the right-leaning part of the Fourth Estate is all too keen to pick up on the item, especially as it detests Snow, who refuses to serve the news up in a form which they find acceptable. Of course, what they would find acceptable is the equivalent of Tory propaganda.

And in picking up on the Snow claim, the more mainstream media has committed not one dead giveaway, but two. While the Mail has added professional Billy No Mates Philip Davies to the list of Tory MPs eager to dump on the Channel 4 News man, the Murdoch goons at the Super Soaraway Currant Bun have put the odious flannelled fool and pretend journalist Master Harry Cole, their alleged “Westminster Correspondent”, on the story.

Ross Kempsell - claims to be a real journalist. No, really

Thus the first giveaway: Cole was, for some time, tame gofer to Staines at the Fawkes blog, and his involvement is another sign of the closeness between The Great Guido and the Murdoch mafiosi. Not only does this show the depths to which Sun journalism has sunk in recent years, it also confirms that Staines and his pals are seriously constrained in what they can say about the print media and its hangers-on.

That’s why the Fawkes blog, which was so gung-ho in its pursuit of Piers Morgan back in 2011, making all sorts of allegations over phone hacking, with Staines boasting how he’d taken down cabinet ministers (so Morgan should have taken him seriously ho ho ho), has not said a peep over recent hacking payouts at Mirror group titles, some of which concern the Daily Mirror at the time Morgan was its editor.

Master Cole - an unsavoury sleazebag airs his views

And the second giveaway? The Spectator magazine, ostensibly a respectable right-leaning magazine, but in reality a repository for Tory propaganda, Islamophobia and climate change denial under the less than benign leadership of its casually dishonest editor Fraser Nelson, has also picked up on the Snow story in its online version.

This has featured in the Steerpike column, formerly the preserve of Master Cole (see above), which uses rather a lot of Fawkes blog terminology - anyone not actively reviling the Labour leader is automatically smeared as a “Corbynista”, Channel 4 is sneered at for being allegedly leftist, and it’s made clear that the author thinks Snow is lying.

So, Spectator people, ‘fess up - are you employing Ross Kempsell to write Steerpike, in the same way you used to employ Master Cole before he took the Murdoch shilling?

As I said, a double giveaway. And the sure and certain confirmation of right-wing media desperation. The Snow story was crap at the Fawkes blog, and it’s crap everywhere else.