TPA Police Hypocrisy – They’re Nicked

Until last month, policing priorities and the liaison between elected representatives and police forces were the remit of Police Authorities. These have now given way to Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs), the reason being that this makes policing more democratically accountable, as the Commissioners are elected representatives themselves. And in the vanguard pressing for them was an old friend of this blog.

More guff from Tufton Street

Yes, supporting PCCs from the very start has been the dubiously talented array of non-job holders at the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA): back in 2010, using the platform afforded him by ConservativeHome (not that they’re Conservatives, of course), non-job holder Mark Wallace told that “we need directly elected Police Commissioners”. He urged the Home Secretary to press on with them.

Indeed, it was later reported, also on ConservativeHome, that the TPA’s EU “expert” Lee Rotherham would stand for election as a PCC in Lincolnshire, and he was described as “An excellent candidate”. Sadly, when the election was held, Rotherham was elsewhere. So that excellence did not extend to actually completing and submitting nomination papers, then.

But the TPA pressed on with its support, with “grassroots coordinator” Andrew Allison (as the TPA has no grassroots, this is their most aptly titled non-job) complaining about supposed waste by Humberside Police Authority while repeating the mantra “We support elected Police Commissioners”. This was followed with more TPA “research” titled High Costs Of Unaccountable Police Authorities Revealed.

Not everyone, however, was persuaded: West Midlands Councillor John O’Shea, aka PoliticalHackUK, asserted that the TPA had it wrong, especially the claim that PCCs would replace chief executives. He estimated that, when the cost of elections was factored in, PCCs would in fact cost more than the Police Authorities they were replacing. So how are things looking as the dust settles after those elections?

Well, quite apart from the miserable 14.7% turnout across the country, the TPA are complaining about the activities of the very people they campaigned for. “Are Police and Crime Commissioners appointing friends to non-jobs?” asked non-job holder Andrew Allison, wording his rhetorical question in the style of Fox News Channel (fair and balanced my arse). Then he answered his own question.

“More rows as some PCCs appoint friends as deputies” he confirmed. What did he expect? Freed from the oversight of Police Authorities who would have stamped on that kind of behaviour in short order, PCCs can please themselves until the next election comes into view. The TPA has once again failed to think through its ideas and is now playing the other side of the field, hoping the public won’t notice.

Well, they have noticed, and hopefully some of the politicians will notice, too.

Littlejohn Zero Research Take 94

The Daily Mail’s tedious and unfunny churnalist Richard Littlejohn has a more or less permanent grudge against a number of politicians, most of whom represent Labour and the Lib Dems, which he clearly believes to be too liberal and wishy-washy for his taste, which gives every impression of being that of an early 1980s London cabbie. And one of those he most reviles is Leicester East MP Keith Vaz.

Keith Vaz, Guv? 'E's a bleedin' foreigner, innit?!?

This should surprise no-one: Vaz was not born in the UK, he is Asian and of Indian-Portuguese heritage, he supports the wrong party, and has been criticised in the past for certain of his activities. That his constituents have returned him to parliament for the past twenty years with (since 1992) well over 50% of the popular vote is of no significance to Dick and his legendarily foul mouthed editor.

So what has Vaz done to provoke the ire of Dicky Windbag? Simples. He has become involved in representing the family of nurse Jacintha Saldanha. So, instead of asking why this might be, Littlejohn has gone off the deep end. Fortunately for him, right-wing pundit Jill Kirby had already produced a why-oh-why attack on Vaz in her weekly ConservativeHome column.

And today’s Littlejohn rant covers, to no surprise at all, much of the ground already covered by Ms Kirby, with a suitably exaggerated listing of Vaz’ supposed misdeeds inserted, together with giving the impression that he was actually there when the bereaved family appeared before the media this week, rather than the more prosaic fact – that he was behind the gates of his secure Florida compound.

So Dicky Windbag appears to have lifted his line of attack from someone else, and has, like Ms Kirby, complained that Vaz is not the family’s MP. But, as Littlejohn’s own paper has already noted, he is the family’s spokesman. Why Jacintha Saldanha’s immediate relatives would want his assistance is not considered, and yet again this shows that Dick can’t be bothered with a little research.

“The only obvious connection between the Saldanhas and Vaz is a common Indian heritage” he asserts, failing to understand that the family name is actually Barboza. He’s wrong: unlike most who live and have relatives on the Indian sub-continent, Jacintha Saldanha and her husband shared the same Christian and indeed Roman Catholic faith as Keith Vaz.

Moreover, the dead nurse also shared the same Indian-Portuguese heritage as Vaz: Saldanha (it’s pronounced Sal-Dahn-Ya) is a Portuguese name. So there is very good reason for her family to seek out Keith Vaz. Littlejohn could easily have found all of this out, but then, that would have introduced the kind of nuance that would detract from the blunt and crude objective of kicking a Labour MP.

And that, after all, is what meets the Daily Mail agenda. No change there, then.

Murdoch Stateside Court Case

Seemingly going unreported despite the increasing notoriety of the defendants is a class action for securities fraud lodged at the US District Court in the Southern District of New York. Here, plaintiffs including a UK Local Government pension fund are suing News Corporation, News International, and also Rupe, Junior, Les Hinton and Rebekah Brooks, just to be on the safe side.

Securities fraud in this instance refers to the price of News Corp shares, the allegation being that some information regarding the less than totally legal behaviour of some of Rupe’s troops in the UK had not been disclosed in a timely manner so that potential investors could form a properly informed judgment as to whether or not it was worth putting their money into the Murdoch empire.

That so little is known about this action seems strange, given that it has been rumbling on since papers were first filed in July 2011 (my thanks to @jpublik for the tip). And why the action was taken is not hard to see if the News Corp share price movements during 2011 are examined: after fluctuating between $18 and $19 in April and May, there was a fall in August to under $14.

The volume of shares traded as the price fell shows spikes that suggest heavy selling, possibly automatically triggered, and one can only assume that the investors taking the action baled out during one of these episodes. The News Corp share price did not recover that $19 level until January this year (it later went well above $20 on the prospect of the company being split up).

So who is taking the action? Well, there is a US Trust and a Union pension fund, but the interest for those in the UK is that the action has been joined by the Avon Pension Fund, which is nowadays administered by Bath And North East Somerset Council (aka BANES). Avon was a county set up as part of the 1973 Local Government reorganisation, but later abolished.

And the latest development is that News Corp is trying to have the action dismissed. The grounds for this are that the allegation of non-disclosure of wrongdoing is incorrect, and that evidence of voicemail interception had been disclosed as early as January 2011. But what really put the lid on the whole affair was the July 2011 revelation that the Screws had Millie Dowler’s phone hacked.

It was the Dowler revelation, and the subsequent closure of the Screws, that hit the share price, and it is more than likely that this will form the central plank of the case against News Corp, along with the likelihood that someone high up in that organisation knew about it. So if Rupe and his Stateside troops get this action dismissed, I reckon they can count themselves very lucky indeed.

And if not, well, it could get even more messy – and a lot more expensive.

Guido Fawked – HuffPost Jealousy

One has to cut the rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog a little slack on one part of their approach to the blogosphere: they like to see other bloggers get on, to the extent that there is a regularly updated list of links to other blogs and media websites. But – and with the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines there is inevitably a but – this encouragement is only given to those approved by The Great Guido.

HuffPost UK Political Director Mehdi Hasan gets kitted up for a friendly chat with The Great Guido and friends

And that means any blog that passes adverse comment on Staines and his gofers, the odious flannelled fool Henry Cole and newly-appointed teaboy Alex Wickham, cannot hope to be allowed on to the supposedly privileged list. This proscription also extends to any blog or online news source that is regarded as competition, and especially if its politics do not meet with the approval of Staines and his pals.

So it should come as no surprise that the Huffington Post UK is frequently on the end of sneering dismissal by the Fawkes rabble, and is rarely cited in its links list, especially now that Mehdi Hasan has been appointed Political Director there. Staines harbours an irrational hatred of Hasan, partly because he is making a success of his career and Staines can’t do anything about it.

The latest lame Fawkes attempt to spin against Hasan and the HuffPost UK has come with the news that early hire Dina Rickman is leaving to further her career elsewhere, and that the site’s first Political Editor Chris Wimpress had already left (the Fawkes blog is a bit late with the latter news, which I was given last month). This is suggested to be something out of the ordinary. It isn’t.

Then, to reinforce the idea that the HuffPost UK with Hasan on board is A Bad Thing, come selectively interpreted traffic figures. The figure for August of 4.1 million unique visitors is mentioned, then a figure of 2.5 million per month from a HuffPost UK advert, followed by the suggestion that traffic must have declined since August, which is then laid at the door of Mehdi Hasan.

Sadly, this is nothing more than hot and steaming bullpucky. The 2.5 million visitors figure is clearly an average one – the hint is in the “per month” phrase, folks – and the 4.1 million in August is more than likely due to most of the Olympic Games, and part of the Paralympics, falling in that month. Those events might not matter to The Great Guido, but they are meat and drink to the HuffPost UK.

So there hasn’t been a downturn, the HuffPost UK isn’t suffering a “brain drain” (clear scrape of the barrel there, Fawkes folks), and Mehdi Hasan is still no nearer to the exit door. But The Great Guido has demonstrated his high principles: Staines has no problem in gatecrashing the HuffPost UK opening bash and getting himself Elephants Trunk and Mozart on their booze, and then kicking them as a thank you.

Especially as he can’t stop their ratings progressing. Another fine mess, once again.

Mail Photo Theft Hypocrisy

[Update at end of post]

The Mail Online website likes Poppy Dinsey. This 25 year old “fashion blogger” had already been featured after she appeared on the BBC Newsnight programme – the characteristically leering headline was “Newsnight bunnygirl” – and yesterday she made another appearance after finding that a porn site in the States had published photos of her without asking first.

What's f***ing wrong with a little photo copying, c***?!?

Now, given that Ms Dinsey runs a site called What I Wore Today, and uploads a photo of her in her outfit du jour on a regular basis, it is no surprise that there are a lot of photos of her out there. And it’s all too easy for someone to take copies of them, even if the results may not be a patch on the originals. But the Mail is deeply concerned about photo theft.

And that may come as a surprise to many who have encountered the Mail and its cavalier attitude to thieving photos when it suits, such as the time in 2010 when Los Angeles and Miami based agency Mavrix Photo decided to sue for copyright infringement. It was alleged that Mail Online had used as many as ten photos without permission. This was not an isolated occurrence.

After the student protests and fringe violence that took place in November 2011, photographer Thomas Welfoot sold an image of the young man who dropped a fire extinguisher on to Police from the roof of a Central London building to Sky News. The Daily Mail then lifted it and published it five times. After taking issue with this copyright theft, he was offered a fraction of the amount invoiced.

In April last year, they were at it again, this time raiding Flickr and Facebook to garner images for a Mail Online piece. This year, Neil McGrain discovered that the Mail had lifted one of his photos without permission, acknowledgement or payment, and despite his only request being that a donation was made to a late acquaintance’s memorial fund, it took several attempts to get it.

And in the same month, photographer Gakuranman found that the Mail had used several of his photos without permission and had even cropped the identifying watermark from most of them. Again, only after the Mail was pursued for payment did they agree to stump up. By now, it should not be difficult to discern a pattern of offending: lift the image and hope the photographer doesn’t pursue you.

All of which makes the synthetic outrage over Poppy Dinsey a blatantly obvious slice of hypocrisy. But perhaps there is a more straightforward explanation: the “revealing outfits” that she is alleged to wear are exactly the kind of thing that Mail Online loves to parade in its so-called “sidebar of shame”. And letting anyone else get a piece of that photo action is not in the interests of Martin Clarke and his gofers.

One rule for the Mail, and another for everyone else. No change there, then.

[UPDATE 1830 hours: In a jaw-dropping case of "You couldn't make it up", it seems that the Mail even lifted Poppy Dinsey's own photos themselves - and then ran a piece complaining about someone else doing it! Ms Dinsey has been in touch to point Zelo Street in the right direction, for which many thanks.

The photo the Mail used for their original "Newsnight bunnygirl" story was used without Ms Dinsey's permission, and without payment (the Evening Standard, formerly part of the same newspaper group, also lifted her photos, but was rather less gracious when it came to paying up).

Both papers were invoiced and ultimately settled, but once again it is a case of nick the photo, don't tell the copyright holder, and only pay up and acknowledge if pressed. The Mail went one step further, by lifting photos without permission and then castigating someone else for doing the same thing. There's some brass in those necks round at the Mail offices]

Tom Watson Vindicated – Nobody Apologises

Back in October, Labour MP Tom Watson used Parliamentary privilege to allege that a child sexual abuse ring had links to a former aide to a Prime Minister. He urged the reopening of the files on notorious paedophile Peter Righton, but did not say which PM the aide worked for, and nor did he specify any timeframe for his service. Watson did not even suggest which party was in power at the time.

The following week, it was reported by the deeply subversive Guardian that Met commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe had confirmed that Watson’s claims would be taken seriously. And now the Independent has confirmed that five officers are working on what has been christened Operation Fairbank. But in the meantime, a torrent of misinformation about Watson’s intervention has spread.

Much of that misinformation has been directed to suggesting that Watson had tried to connect a former PM to the North Wales care home scandal. He had not. It was claimed by Express man Patrick “Lunchtime” O’Flynn that the PM in question was either Sailor Heath or Margaret Thatcher, but Watson did not give so much as a hint of a pointer in their direction.

That didn’t stop the usual suspects. On November 9, the Daily Mail’s unfunny and tedious churnalist Richard Littlejohn wrongly asserted “the Labour MP Tom Watson claimed in the Commons that a prominent Conservative had been involved in the North Wales child abuse case” and thereby scored two whoppers at once. Tory MP Rob Wilson, always keen for a session of stir’n’leak, followed up.

Wilson’s letter to Watson, tactlessly and deliberately leaked to the rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog, loftily instructed the latter to take his claims to the Police. This had already been done, and had Wilson bothered to do a few minutes’ research, he would have easily found the Guardian report confirming this. Watson’s reply once again stresses that he’s unaware of any North Wales connection.

But the phony association between Watson and North Wales was off and running, with the Spectator’s Isabel Hardman gleefully recycling the Wilson letter, stating “Watson has adopted these allegations about ‘Tory paedophiles’ as his next crusade following the phone hacking scandal”. Once more, fact finding and checking was absent: no party had been mentioned by Watson.

And, now that the fog of misinformation has started to clear, none of those slinging mud at Tom Watson is showing any sign of contrition. Neither Isabel Hardman, nor Rob Wilson, and certainly not the Fawkes crowd, have so much as mentioned the Indy revelation, and of course Littlejohn won’t even consider rowing back on his smear unless the Mail gets threatened with legal action.

As with Phonehackgate, Watson has been proved right. For some, that’s a sin.

Murdoch Is Served (90)

END TIMES FOR HARDING

Following on the news that the settlement between News International (NI) and the twinkle-toed yet domestically combative Rebekah Brooks is almost £11 million came the “resignation” of Times editor James Harding, not of course that Rupert Murdoch engineered the departure to take attention away from his empire’s largesse towards his former favourite. Perish the thought!

Rupe’s editors down the years have known that their proprietor will not hesitate to sack editors he does not deem sufficiently effective, loyal, or inculcated with the necessary mindset. Harold Evans, who lasted just the one year at the helm of the Times, failed his master on the last two of those tests, and it seems Harding failed the same tests, but not in the same manner.

Harding, according to Andrew “Brillo Pad” Neil, whose time in the hot seat at the Sunday Times gives him a particularly intimate insight into such matters, was “way too liberal [and] wishy-washy for old Rupe”. And, as Neil also opines that Murdoch hates Young Dave, that signals a requirement for a replacement who will put the firm stamp of Conservatism (with a capital C) on the paper.

So far, so predictable, but there is another reason for Harding to be given the boot at this time, and that is his informal appointment as the contact with 10 Downing Street over editors’ responses to the Leveson Report. As the deeply subversive Guardian has noted, those talks were “about how to create a body to certify the work of the press regulator that would be set up by royal charter”.

My hunch is that Rupe wasn’t happy with the idea of a royal charter, and that he would see it as yielding ground towards those wanting to see self regulation that is completely independent of editors and owners. On top of that, Harding embarrassed his proprietor with the unnecessary “outing” of blogger NightJack, a case that was only concluded recently (the Times lost).

So Harding’s penalty points finally got him banned. But what is also worryingly familiar about his departure is that the rest of the Fourth Estate appears to be reverting to the culture of Omerta which so typified its reaction to the emerging scandal that was Phonehackgate. Then, it was the Guardian and later the Indy that allowed journalists to report the case. All other papers kept schtum.

Once again it is the Guardian which has both reported Harding’s departure, and given his statement on the matter in full. The sites of the Mail and Telegraph – and thus far also the Indy – have said nothing. But the BBC has reported the story, and many journalists have disseminated the news over Twitter. The old ways do not work. Maybe those old ways also include Murdoch’s approach to this affair.

Leveson Is Served (38)

BRIAN DOWN UNDER

In the days before the web and all that it has brought with it – email, blogs, Twitter, Facebook and more – far more opinion was disseminated face to face, and one place you could be sure of hearing some, whether you wanted to or not, was the pub. I lose count of the number of wacko conspiracy theories and plainly barking stories I’ve been regaled with by someone propping up the bar.

Back then, you would leave the pub, shake your head at the monumental idiocy of what you’d heard, and as Tone might say, move on. But now, the crackpots who used to inhabit their local have moved online. Some lurk around the comments section of newspaper websites. Others try their hand at blogs, and some of those occasionally manage to construct grammatically correct sentences.

What they are all subject to today that they were not while exchanging gossip down the pub is the law. Just because a blog does not enjoy the imprimatur of a national or local newspaper does not exempt it from the potential for legal action, and just because someone says it on Twitter does not trivialise it to the extent that it slips beyond the reach of the law of the land.

 None of this should be news to anyone who has previously engaged brain on the subject, and certainly not to Lord Justice Leveson, whose latest speech made during his stay in Australia has been relayed to the waiting ears of the Fourth Estate, and who has referred to much of what comes out of social media as “electronic versions of pub gossip”. Maybe he visited some of the same ones I did.

And he also considered the potential effects of not applying the law to forms of social media in the way it was applied to print and broadcast journalists. This, he observed correctly, enabled social media users to “flout with impunity the rights of others”, which will also come as no surprise to anyone who has observed the less principled part of the blogosphere at work recently.

Leveson is clearly concerned, though, that this less than upstanding behaviour could cross over into print journalism: “In order to steal a march on bloggers and tweeters, [journalists] might be tempted to cut corners, to break or at least bend the law to obtain information for stories or to infringe privacy improperly to the same end”, and here I don’t see such an immediate problem.

After all, with the best-known political blog scoring a measly 4% trust rating, and for the foreseeable future needing papers and TV to gain real traction for its stories, journalists know they are going nowhere if they allow their standards to drop just to step from the gutter into the sewer. But in the future all may change, and Leveson is right to warn that nobody out there is above or beyond the law.

Daniel Hannan – Pants On Fire

After his spell of three whoppers in five minutes in the company of host Sean Hannity on Fox News Channel (fair and balanced my arse), it should surprise no-one that Dan, Dan the Oratory Man still has an occasionally tenuous relationship with the facts, and his latest venture into the bear pit that is Telegraph Blogs is no exception, as he waxes lyrical about the UK’s glorious South American past.

Beware fringe Tories bearing whoppers

“British managers and engineers ran a great deal of Peru’s industry” he notes, attempting to couple the retreat from his native country to our accession to the (then) EEC in 1973. This, sadly, is total tosh: Lisbon’s tram and bus operator Carris was British owned, but isn’t any more, and both the UK and Portugal are part of the EU. The locals have taken over whether the country is in the EU or not.

Then we get the attempted link of EEC accession to the economic difficulties of the 1970s: “Prices surged, our trade balance worsened and inflation took off” he asserts, managing not to notice the not insignificant effect of the Yom Kippur war and the associated energy crisis. And the inflation part started with the so-called “Barber boom”, which means, yes, it was his own party that set it off.

Granted, the Wilson and Callaghan Governments failed to properly put a lid on inflation, but then the Thatcher regime let it rip again and it was well into the 1980s before it was brought under control. That, together with the trade gap, had very little to do with our joining the European club to which Hannan holds his irrational antipathy. And his economic geography is shaky, too.

“Glasgow and Liverpool found themselves on the wrong side of the country, and have never recovered” he observes. Well, in the case of Liverpool, he is plain flat wrong. The population of the city peaked not immediately before EEC accession, but before the Second World War. Why, Dan, d’you think that the Overhead Railway (aka the “Dockers’ Umbrella”) was closed in 1956?

Liverpool’s docks were then decimated by the advent of containerisation: once again, there was stuff all to do with whether or not we were in the EU. And our membership has not stopped the UK from trading with anywhere else in the world – or perhaps all the food and drink from Australasia and South America that I see every time I visit the local Asda is some kind of mirage.

Nor does the notion that the EU stifles trade with growing markets in countries like India – except, it seems, our own inability to provide what that market needs. So we find ourselves in the situation where Germany does more trade with India than we do. Hannan’s irrational hatred of the EU is like a red mist that stops him, and by his writings, his readers, viewing the reality of today’s world.

And that reality is that his trousers are well and truly alight. No change there, then.

EXCLUSIVE Guido Fawked – Teaboy No-Mates

In the aftermath of the rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog thinking it would be a really good idea to take the piss out of shadow chancellor “Auguste” Balls because of his stammer, there was a discussion between newly appointed teaboy Alex Wickham and the rather more real-worldly Owen Jones, after the former had claimed that the two were “mates”. Jones protested that he’d only met Wickham briefly.

It does seem a stretch for a vapid right-wing spin merchant to enjoy any kind of meeting of minds with someone as forthrightly left-leaning and inclined to adhere to facts, but I can confirm that Jones and Wickham were both at the last Political Scrapbook party, along with the odious flannelled fool Henry Cole, who was pretending to be off-duty, while fishing for any information he could find.

In the course of his attendance, it seems Wickham encountered a lager shandy of significantly greater strength that he is accustomed to, the result being that he had to be given assistance to remain in an upright position. Owen Jones, being a more seasoned practitioner in these matters, suffered no such problem, and being of selfless nature, he briefly gave the necessary assistance.

The moment of charity and good humour was captured for posterity, and has found its way – no names, no packdrill – to Zelo Street. Note the slightly apprehensive look on Wickham’s face, possibly at having to be assisted by someone wearing one of Scrapbook’s T-Shirts which bears an unkind (but probably factually accurate) reference to Education Secretary Michael “Oiky” Gove.

Note also that, unlike his Twitter photo which suggests he wears glasses, Wickham appears not to need them, even when Elephants Trunk and Mozart. So don’t be fooled into dismissing the presence of what looks like the Fawkes teaboy just because he isn’t wearing his specs – back to the disguise drawing board for the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his pals.

And finally, note that the odious Cole, despite continuing protestations of objectivity, could not bring himself to actually put the Gove T-Shirt on. Once a clueless right-winger, and all that. Another fine mess, once again.

Littlejohn Phone Prank Memory Loss

The fallout from the death of nurse Jacintha Saldanha continues, with the two hosts from Australian radio station 2Day FM giving interviews about their horror at the result of the law of unintended consequences. The tears shown by Mel Greig may have been genuine, but this has not assuaged the righteous anger of the Daily Mail’s tedious and unfunny churnalist Richard Littlejohn.

Australian birds, Guv? They're all called Sheila, innit?!?

“Do spare us the self-pity, Sheila” he snipes dismissively, at the start of a long and suitably dull rant about how “Prank phone calls are the lowest form of so-called ‘comedy’ currency”, despite his being a great friend of the late Jeremy Beadle, whose appetite for pranks of whatever kind he could devise knew no bounds. And then he goes on to Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand.

Their prank call – which resulted in the infamous message left on Andrew Sachs’ voicemail – is judged by Dick to have been “evil”. Moreover, it “was signed off by BBC producers” (so Dick gets to kick the Beeb, which will earn him extra brownie points from the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre). Plus Ross and Brand did not suffer enough for Littlejohn’s liking.

So by now it’s pretty clear that making prank phone calls is A Very Bad Thing. And that means that anyone making those calls is dealing in “the lowest form” of comedy. So you may think you won’t find Littlejohn so much as mentioning any of them. But you would be wrong, because Dick is clearly a fan of someone who turned the hoax phone call into an art.

Back in 2009, Littlejohn wanted to pour scorn on the Chilcot Inquiry (more prosaically known as the Iraq Inquiry). His intention was to suggest that “the outcome was preordained”. In his attempt to frame the Inquiry as some kind of sham, he cited the late Peter Cook, describing him as “comic genius ... brilliant ... inspired ... hilarious”. But he missed out one small factoid about Cook.

And that was his propensity for hoax phone calls, especially to Clive Bull’s late night show on LBC, for which he devised the fictional character of “Sven from Swiss Cottage”. Moreover, unlike the Beadle stunts and the 2Day FM prank, all of Cook’s calls went out live. Maybe Littlejohn has forgotten all of that – or just hoped that the daily news cycle would have moved on, so that his audience wouldn’t notice.

Not that Richard Littlejohn is a hypocrite, you understand. Perish the thought!

Delingpole Shale Homework Fail

Have you heard of Nick Grealy? Maybe not, but anyone involved with the continuing arguments over the practicality and economics of shale gas knows him: Grealy is a veritable disciple for it. He has the modestly titled Twitter handle of @ShaleGasExpert. Moreover, he is feted by the so-called Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), which is dedicated to, er, rubbishing global warming.

So it should surprise no-one that Grealy is also quoted approvingly by James “saviour of Western civilisation” Delingpole, who has lauded Grealy’s riposte to the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley. The latter had dubbed shale gas enthusiasts “frack-heads” in a comment piece at the weekend, and was less than approving of the UK’s prospects for viable shale gas exploitation.

Subtle, isn't he?

Cue Grealy, to pour scorn on Rawnsley, although he also lauded Bozza’s whopper strewn column on shale gas from yesterday. And there is a clear contradiction in Grealy’s own piece, where he talks of shale gas resources “having been under the ground for 450 million years”, and then shows in a comparison chart that the Bowland shale has a probable age of 327 million years.

But the Grealy trump card is in his comparison of the thickness of shale beds between known US and Canada fields and the Bowland shale in the UK. He notes that the North American shales are between 150 and 450 feet think, and then claims that the Bowland shale is “Over 6000 [feet thick] in [the] basin centre”. He cites a study on the Transform website as his source.

That study does indeed report shale bed thicknesses of between 150 and 450 feet for North American fields. But it does not so much as mention the Bowland shale. This is an eyebrow raising omission, given that Grealy gives the impression that the presentation comes from the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC), although they have estimated the thickness of the Bowland shale elsewhere.

In a report from 2011, the DECC goes into detail for the gross and net thickness of the Bowland shale beds (the latter is the potentially productive part). And the conclusion? “The organic rich, net thickness ... ranges between 0-110m”. So that’s a maximum of around 350 feet, and a potential average of much less. Why would the DECC publish that figure and then another making the “over 6000 feet thick” one?

It goes without saying that Delingpole will not have bothered to delve even this far, having heard the news he wants to hear. Maybe Nick Grealy will be able to point the more sceptical observer of his pronouncements to an authoritative source which backs them up. Because the impression is given that there is at least an inconsistency in the information that is being cited and presented.

I await the definitive answer from @ShaleGasExpert.

The Drugs Laws Still Don’t Work

Two states in the USA voted last month to legalise pot. And following some consultation and much enquiry, the Commons home affairs select committee has recommended that there be a Royal Commission to consider alternatives to the current laws in the UK, including decriminalisation of use, and even legalising all substances that are at present illegal.

View south from Parque Eduardo VII, Lisbon

Moreover, as the deeply subversive Guardian has reported, “the MPs say Home Office and health ministers should be sent to Portugal to examine its system of replacing criminal penalties for drug use with a new emphasis on treatment. They say the Portuguese example clearly reduced public concern about drug use and was backed by all political parties and the police”.

Note, though, that Portugal has not legalised any previously illegal drugs, but has moved the emphasis from punishment to treatment, together with informing and persuading users. But the results from more than a decade of decriminalisation have been emphatic: the number of users has been halved, and drug related diseases and overdoses have also been reduced.

The prediction that Portugal would become a centre for drug tourism has been disproved. Of those infected with HIV, the proportion has shrunk from over 50% before decriminalisation to around 20% today. The number of new HIV cases has gone from around 3,000 a year to less than 2,000. There has been an apparent decline in deaths among street users, too.

And this time, even the Daily Mail is softening its coverage, although, as before, they insist on also reporting those who talk of “opening the floodgates”, and telling apocalyptic tales of what cannabis can do to the brain, while ignoring the fact that in Portugal the floodgates did not open, and that leaving cannabis in the hands of organised criminality means at least as much harm, if not a lot more.

Plus, of course, the Mail just has to give the pundit slot on this one to Melanie “not just Barking but halfway to Upminster” Phillips, who fraudulently ascribes a rise in homicides in Portugal to drugs (the numbers are not attributed to any one cause, or number of causes). Then there is a screaming denunciation of Russell Brand, because he gave evidence to the Commons committee.

It does not seem to occur to Mad Mel that a reformed drug addict is an ideal person to comment on the present law, its enforcement, and the treatment offered to those criminalised. Instead, all those who favour decriminalisation are dismissed as being of dubious character. Mel’s favoured la-la land is one where drug use is eradicated, and which by definition does not exist – and moreover never will.

But her ever more desperate ranting shows that the tide is turning against her. Good.

Boris Johnson – Pants On Fire

As he is reputed to do every Sunday while waiting for his host to prepare luncheon, London’s occasional Mayor Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson has once more produced his weekly column for the Maily Telegraph – his generator of an annual £250k in “chicken feed” – on the subject of shale gas, an energy source that he has embraced with the usual Bozza enthusiasm.

Cripes chaps, rumbled again!

Sadly, such has been his Messianic drive that Bozza has sprinkled his copy liberally with a significant number of whoppers. As a result, the requirement has arisen for someone to call him out on this, given the Telegraph’s editorial staff will not or cannot do their job properly and vet his column for accuracy. The first Johnson howler concerns London’s newest skyscraper, The Shard.

“A new building like the Shard needs four times as much juice as the entire town of Colchester” he proclaims, to which I call bullshit. Renzo Piano, architect of The Shard, has estimated that a town of 8,000 (the projected occupancy of the building) would consume five times its energy. Colchester has a population of over 104,000. Do the math. Bozza exaggerates by a factor of just 260. There’s a fail for you.

Never mind, perhaps he’s on firmer ground with wind power: “the total contribution of wind power is still only about 0.4 per cent of Britain’s needs”. Sadly, wrong again: it’s around 4% at quiet periods, and has recently managed over 10% on more than one occasion. So Bozza is out by at least a factor of ten, and as much as 25. So what about shale gas fracking in the USA?

“There have been 125,000 fracks in the US, and not a single complaint to the Environmental Protection Agency” he tells, so perhaps he can explain the EPA’s continuing investigations into complaints over the water supplies in the state of Arkansas (see HERE, HERE and HERE for example). The EPA does not investigate without somebody prompting them.

But Bozza does have a very valid concern about energy security: “We are therefore increasingly and humiliatingly dependent on Vladimir Putin’s gas or on the atomic power of the French state”. Two things here. The Anglo-French interconnector works both ways, and the place we get all that gas is the state of Qatar, which when I last looked was not under the control of Vladimir Putin.

And what about jobs? “The extraction process alone would generate tens of thousands of jobs”. Not according the Quadrilla, who put the figure at 5,600. So that’s another wild exaggeration, then. Some time ago I called Boris Johnson an “Upmarket Littlejohn”, and it seems I was dead right: he just can’t be bothered doing any research, and says whatever is needed to back up his argument.

That isn’t good enough, except for the Telegraph. No surprise there, then.

Jacintha Saldanha – Media To Blame, Says Media

In the last days of Diana, Princess of Wales, the media was on her case more or less round the clock. There was constant pursuit, much of the copy fuelled by photos taken by paparazzi photographers. In the days following her death, that same media turned to play the other side of the field, blaming and stoking anger against the same snappers that they had been paying handsomely just days before.

Such is the routine hypocrisy of the Fourth Estate, which has been deployed in similar fashion following the sad death of nurse Jacintha Saldanha, who had answered the phone at the King Edward VII Hospital early one morning last week and put through a prank call made by two hosts from Australian station 2Day FM to the ward occupied by Kate, Duchess of Cambridge.

At first, the papers simply reported the hoax call. Then they pored over the contents. Then came the why-oh-why stories. What effect this must have had on Ms Saldanha, away from her family in Bristol while discharging her duties in London, can only be imagined, although we do know that the hospital did not admonish or otherwise discipline her for the incident.

Then came the news of Ms Saldanha’s death. Just as with Diana all those years ago, the papers that had been happily feeding on the 2Day FM prank call immediately about-turned and went after the two hosts. And to be on the safe side, the Saturday edition of the Daily Mail put a photo of one of those hosts, Mel Greig, showing a big smile and plenty of cleavage, on its front page.

So now the Fourth Estate is talking of “anger” against Ms Greig and her co-host Michael Christian, 2Day FM, owners Southern Cross Austereo, and just about anyone else with an Australasian accent. Rumours that the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre will deploy Amanda Platell to write an account of what it is like to personally play both hero and villain are as yet unconfirmed.

On top of the usual level of intrusion, the press has trawled every Twitter feed and Facebook page they can find for the family of Ms Saldanha. Relatives in the Indian city of Mangalore have been sought out and paraded for the cameras. Australian PM Julia Gillard has had to make a statement. A letter from the hospital upbraiding the Australian broadcasters was “damning”, because it came from a peer of the realm.

Yet very few stop and think what is going on here: it is the press who are stoking this wave of anger simply to feed off it and thus generate more cheap copy. After all, with Kate having left the hospital and returned to a life well away from the snappers – and a staff alert to blagging and the rest of the “Dark Arts” – there had to be something to fill the void. So they trample over the memory of Jacintha Saldanha instead.

And, conveniently, it’s someone else’s fault, as with Diana. No change there, then.

YBF – Right-Wing Alternate Reality

While many folks did their Christmas shopping or went to support their football team yesterday, the allegedly sound conservatives of the Young Britons’ Foundation (YBF) gathered in Cambridge, where they could be among those of like mind, and away from all those nasty leftists who laugh at them for their insistence on inhabiting an alternate reality driven by fantasy politics.

Forthright analysis from Boris Watch

Fortunately, an appropriate Twitter hashtag of #YBF9 had been established – this is the group’s ninth conference – so those in the real world looking for a good laugh could observe the wingnuttery from a suitably significant distance. So who was going? A typical speaker was Jonathan Isaby of the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA), one of three TPA representatives who aren’t really conservatives, of course.

What a thrilling prospect

Tory politicians also featured, but apart from Fat Eric, they were either has-beens or never-going-to-bes, like grovelling MP Conor Burns, whose constituents in Bournemouth will have been relieved to see departing the area for the weekend.

What a complete crawler

And their followers? Well, there was Pete Spence, who brought a note of gravitas to matters by reminding others that they “could do worse than to read Hayek”, so no problems with insomnia there, then.

Zzzzzzzzz ...

What of the lofty intellectual heights of YBF9? Alex Wickham, newly appointed teaboy to the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines at the Guido Fawkes blog, gave everyone inspiration by quoting this pearl of wisdom: “I wish I’d done a lot more negative campaigning against Andy Slaughter, he’s an absolute arsehole”. Takes one to know one, Alex (Slaughter’s sin is to be successful, and a Labour MP).

You certainly are, Alex

Then there is the selective retelling of history, as demonstrated by Jack Walker: “It is always painful being told about the Thatcher years when you were not alive to enjoy them”. Yes, it’s such an enjoyment to experience galloping inflation, mass unemployment, social unrest, decimation of manufacturing industry, and the odd war, all spun with flagrant dishonesty by a compliant Fourth Estate.

They sup some strong stuff at the YBF

So what of the people the YBF hold up as exemplars, as they do not deem mainstream Tories like Young Dave and his jolly good pals sound enough? Ah well. We can see who they want their followers to look up to by examining the award winners. Take the Dolphin Award, for example, which is given for being not merely “sound”, but “ultrasound” (laugh? I thought I’d never start).

I get a gong, cos I'm on telly!

This was given yesterday to the odious flannelled fool Henry Cole, which tells you all you need to know about the standards of the YBF. They hold up as a shining example to others someone whose modus operandi includes smears, abuse, serial dishonesty, inconsiderateness, intolerance, gratuitous overindulgence, snobbery, blagging and wilful ignorance. And he’s their #1 star. The prosecution rests.

Top Six – December 9

So what’s hot, and what’s not, in the past week’s blogging? Here are the six most popular posts on Zelo Street for the past seven days, counting down in reverse order, because, well, I’ve got some domestic stuff to do. So there.

6 Max Clifford And The Platell Hypocrisy Amanda Platell, another of the Daily Mail’s resident Glendas, asserted that she would shed no tears for the great Cliffus Maximus after he was nicked as part of Operation Yewtree. But she didn’t mention that this was because he’d shown her up as useless, and more than once.

5 Murdoch Is Served (89) Rupe and his troops could be in big trouble as more news emerged about the payments made to secure the photos of Saddam Hussein in his underpants, such as paying a bung to a National Guardsman on US soil.

4 Murdoch Tried To Buy A President Roger Ailes, head of Fox News Channel (fair and balanced my arse) pretended it was all a joke, but he did send word to David Petraeus suggesting he run for President as the Republican nominee. Murdoch was apparently even prepared to bankroll the campaign.

3 Sun Man Smears Beeb Man Tom Newton Dunn alleged that Evan Davis had been carpeted over his combative interview of the Rt Hon Gideon George Oliver Osborne, heir to the Seventeenth Baronet. But he hadn’t. So the Sun made it up anyway, and the Mail then pretended the Beeb had apologised to Young Dave. They hadn’t.

2 Max Clifford And The Facts The great Cliffus Maximus was nicked as part of Operation Yewtree, but there was no Jimmy Savile connection, despite many reports trying to make the link. But anyone who has studied Clifford’s past should not be surprised, given the serial womanising and years of sex parties.

1 Guido Fawked – Sneering At Disability The perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his entourage, the odious flannelled fool Henry Cole and teaboy Alex Wickham, thought it was OK to take the piss out of “Auguste” Balls because he has a stammer, justifying their action by saying he was a rotten leftie. But it was just out of order.

And that’s the end of another blogtastic week, blog pickers. Not ‘arf!

Nadine Dorries Sells The Religion Pass

Today the Daily Mail is the latest paper to go after the Tory MP for Mid Bedfordshire (yes, it’s her again) Nadine Dorries. The Dacre hackery has decided to soften up its target with a hatchet job on her former husband, and thus to taint her by association. And its clinching information nugget is that no marriage (nor divorce) papers can be found for the fragrant Nadine and her ex.

So that’s the kind of damning evidence that is only of any use to Daily Mail readers, then. But it does show that the press attack on Ms Dorries is not confined to the Maily Telegraph, and moreover that it is coming (unusually) from the same side of the political spectrum that she inhabits. Given this increasing level of interest, then, it might serve her well to get her arguments in order.

And one subject on which she might usefully make a start is human rights: after all, all good right wingers are hot on freedom, and so one might think that laws guaranteeing that freedom would meet with approval. But Nadine is unhappy with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) from which she has decided the UK should withdraw, because she believes it is against one particular freedom.

That freedom is religious freedom. That, I thought when reading her assertion, is a strange interpretation of things: the UK does not appear to present any problem to any religion being practised here. So the next stop was Lord Bingham’s speech on the subject of the rights enshrined in the ECHR, in which he briefly described each one. It is a description I would commend to Ms Dorries.

Here’s the relevant extract: “The right to life. The right not to be tortured or subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. The right not to be enslaved. The right to liberty and security of the person. The right to a fair trial. The right not to be retrospectively penalised. The right to respect for private and family life. Freedom of thought, conscience and religion. Freedom of expression. Freedom of assembly and association. The right to marry. The right not to be discriminated against in the enjoyment of those rights. The right not to have our property taken away except in the public interest and with compensation. The right of fair access to the country’s educational system. The right to free elections”.

Yes, Nadine Dorries wants the UK to withdraw from a convention that guarantees freedom of religion ... so that its citizens can enjoy freedom of religion. Whether that is a display of stupidity, wilfulness or ignorance I will leave to others to decide, but one thing is for certain: anyone who can’t get the basics of the ECHR straight should not be sitting in the House of Commons and potentially passing judgment on it.

That, and not phantom marriage certificates, is what the media should really be exposing. While they fail to do so, Nadine Dorries will simply carry on as before.

Max Clifford And The Platell Hypocrisy

One pundit is not at all unhappy to see Max Clifford being nicked and lightly grilled by the Met’s finest as part of Operation Yewtree, the potential reasons for which I discussed yesterday. The happy person is, to no surprise at all, Amanda Platell, appalling Glenda and holder of the only known season ticket for the sofa on The Andy Marr Show (tm).

The stuff of nightmares

“I’ll shed no tears for the king of sleaze” she snipes, before telling of “the scores of people whose lives and families Clifford and his clients have ruined during his long and lucrative PR career”. And who might some of those be, Mandy, these “legions of home-wreckers, prostitutes and gold-diggers” as you put it? Well, for starters, there’s Rebecca Loos, she of the David Beckham affair allegations.

Ms Loos only got the publicity because some papers had no problem in running with the story, and there are examples a-plenty out there, starting with “Rebecca tells all”, with the highlights of her interview with Kay “Surly” Burley on Sky News (“first for breaking wind”). The same paper then followed up with “Stop this woman, pleads Becks”, covering the legal wrangling.

And there was more to follow: next up was “Becks: affair claim ludicrous” as the Beckhams pushed back. Moreover, the appetite for Ms Loos did not need the intervention of the great Cliffus Maximus, as witness later pieces such as “Rebecca Loos is back in a bikini eight weeks after giving birth” and “Rebecca Loos completes her transformation from glamour girl to sensible mother”.

There are no prizes for guessing that the paper running all those articles is the same one that is now publishing Mandy’s why-oh-why fest. So the usual hypocrisy from the obedient hackery of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre. And the reason that Amanda Platell is so keen to sneer at Max Clifford is also not hard to find, as the deeply subversive Guardian tells us.

After the 2001 General Election drubbing of her then boss William ‘Ague, Clifford told the paper how his potential successors might proceed. “They desperately need a good PR person in the Conservative party” he concluded. Platell was still employed by them. He went rather further in the Maily Telegraph, telling “She’s been a disaster. What would Amanda Platell know about making a politician popular?”

He went on “She is a failed newspaper editor and hasn’t got a clue”. But she clearly had a long memory, probably reinforced after Clifford came to the defence of his pal Simon Cowell (aka The Black Helmet) after Platell had run a hatchet job on the Cowell fiftieth party (by sheer coincidence, she hadn’t been invited). The part about Cowell paying his taxes in the UK won’t have gone down well with the Mail’s owners.

“Shame about Amanda Platell” he concluded. And that’s why she’s so catty today.

Leveson Still Getting Smeared

Just in case anyone believed that the publication of the Leveson Report would cause the Fourth Estate to desist from its diet of not-really-smearing-him-and-his-advisors-but-we-just-found-all-this-dirt-on-them-and-you-know-how-it-is, the Maily Telegraph has decided to demonstrate that, in the world of Tony Gallagher, there is still a need to put the boot in and keep frightening the readers.

“Lord Justice Leveson calls for new laws to curb 'mob rule' on the internet” proclaimed the headline on the Tel article, the sub-heading confirming this. So Leveson must have called for new laws, then. But he has not. Not at all. No, there was no call for new laws, but only observations on how the law may develop in the face of developments in social media.

So what did Leveson actually say? “The established media broadly conforms to the law and, when they do not, they are potentially liable under the law ... In so far as the internet is concerned, there has been, and for many, there remains a perception that actions do not have legal consequences ... There is not only a danger of trial by Twitter, but also of an unending punishment, and no prospect of rehabilitation, by Google ... Just as it took time for the wilder excesses of the early penny press to be civilised, it will take time to civilise the internet ... [The internet] does not trade in gossip. It simply publishes it online, conveys it on Facebook, uploads it onto Youtube, tweets and re-tweets it. It is likely that new [legal norms] and new laws will need to be developed”.

Which, not to put too fine a point on it, is a statement of the bleeding obvious, not just for lawyers, but all participants in the world of social media. The case of Alistair McAlpine demonstrated, if demonstration were necessary, that merely being online does not put one beyond the law. But, as Leveson points out, such things take time, and law develops and adapts to the world ... over time.

What Leveson’s remarks are not is a call for new laws, or for any other curb on social media. This is not only a cheap shot from the Telegraph, but devalues their rather more interesting take on press regulation, that Young Dave may be considering establishing a new independent regulator by Royal Charter – as was done with the Bank Of England and the BBC.

While the latter suggestion may indeed make the regulator independent of Government, though, it also needs to be properly independent of the press that it would monitor, and thus far that press has been mightily reluctant to lose control over the regulatory process. By the strangest of coincidences, the Tel piece manages not to mention this. Not that they’re being selective with the facts, of course.

At least in the latter case, they’re not just making them up for effect.