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Tuesday 8 September 2020

Camilla Tominey And The Far-Right

Rising almost without trace at the increasingly desperate and downmarket Telegraph, the paper’s “associate editor” and go-to Royal source Camilla Tominey has done rather well for a hack who was previously little more than a minor fixture at the Express. Now she is a regular fixture on TV panels, to the extent that she is one of those favoured by The Andy Marr Show™ as a remote paper review pundit during the Coronavirus lockdown.

This is my article here, and as you can see, it's total shite

But the recent focus on racist bigot David Vance may not be good news for her: it has caused her role in legitimising far-right misinformation to be re-examined, and in particular her attack at the end of 2018 on the Duchess of Sussex which, arguably, led to the breakdown of Hal and Meg’s relationship with our free and fearless press.

As Zelo Street observed last January, the court papers for the Sussex’s legal action against the Daily Mail included one instance not of anti-black racism, but of vicious and fabricated Islamophobia, designed to undermine Meg’s support for the Cookbook project that supported victims of the Grenfell Tower tragedy. Here’s what they said.


In the article entitled ‘Kitchen supported by Meghan’s cookbook is housed inside Mosque “which has links to 19 terror suspects including Jihadi John”’, the connection made between the Hubb Community Kitchen (in which the [Duchess] worked with those affected by the Grenfell tragedy as part of a cookbook project that became a New York Times best-selling book) and the al-Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre (supposedly ‘linked to 19 Islamic extremists’) is at best a highly tenuous and deliberately inflammatory one”.

There was more. “The characterisation of these victims as being linked to terrorism in the same way as the [Duchess] is said to be supporting or endorsing jihadi terrorists through her participation in a cookbook for victims of Grenfell, is as false as it is offensive”. The intention appeared to be to hurt sales of the book. But the Mail didn’t originate the story.

David Vance. In a black shirt. Again

They had merely lifted it. The original claims, in an article headlinedMeghan cookbook mosque linked to 19 terror suspects including 'Jihadi John' in group's investigation”, had come from the Telegraph. The author, you guessed it, was Camilla Tominey.

And, as Jon Stewart might have said, two things here. One, Ms Tominey was congratulated on her article by none other than David Vance - which is why it is now being revisited. Moreover, two, her published source for the piece was the Henry Jackson Society, an organisation which any sensible hack would avoid like, well, Covid-19.


As Marko Attila Hoare, who served that organisation for some years, told about it back in 2012, the HJS was “No longer ... a centrist, bipartisan think-tank”, but had “become an abrasively right-wing forum with an anti-Muslim tinge”. The “investigation” which Ms Tominey cited linked the Grenfell victims to those with whom they had no connection.

Worse, the HJS is now clearly ploughing the same furrow as the far-right - hence Vance being there with his congratulations. Camilla Tominey has some explaining to do. So do all those media outlets that have been indulging her for the past two years.

The far right has no need to infiltrate the MSM when the MSM has openly invited it in.


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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tominey: another tory propaganda clerk.

Corporate media is infested with them. Cultural dry rot.

grim northerner said...

A plump skeleton.