Bartholomew's Notes

UPDATE (20 January 2011):  Tim adds some new information:

It turns out there is, at present, a police investigation. Police had not contacted me about it until yesterday (19 Jan 2011). It relates specifically to the hustings event at Flitwick [see here – RB]. There is no crime reference number for this as yet, because there is no crime. I was perfectly happy to speak with police and answer their questions (and I still am), but there is very little I can share publicly about it at this stage, and police didn’t raise anything that I haven’t already published/addressed (as text or video), so you’re not missing much.

Obviously, this revelation does not change or undermine the central thrust of this post or the vast majority of what I specifically assert in it. If it had, significant changes would have been made to the headline and body of this post to reflect this. For now, this update will suffice, as nothing has changed about the following:

Dorries made her accusation about there being an investigation in progress at a time when no relevant police force can confirm her ever having made a complaint. I still intend to hold her to account for that, as you should.

(23 January) See also new post here.

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Tim Ireland has the latest on the unhappy subject of Nadine Dorries MP:

The results of my information request to Bedfordshire police are in, and it doesn’t look at all good for Nadine Dorries, who has repeatedly claimed that she reported me to police for harassment in both London and Bedfordshire, and further claimed that this resulted in a police investigation into my activities.

…I made FOI/DPA request to both forces so I might see what they had on file about me. Last year, I blogged about the response from the London Met, who showed NO record of ANY complaint/report against me.

The result from Bedfordshire police is in… and they too show NO record of ANY complaint/report against me.

The one, single, solitary scrap of data that Bedfordshire Police revealed was exactly what I expected to see; the information I volunteered when I approached the police officer who attended the hustings event at Flitwick (i.e. where Dorries claimed I was already under investigation by police for harassing her).

…If Nadine Dorries has ever received any advice from police about harassment, it was entirely generic. If she hasn’t invented the relevant conversation, she has wholly misrepresented it.

Tim’s post is comprehensive and provides a good deal of background context. The evidence from Beds police, of course, simply confirms what we have known all along – that Dorries objects to being held to account by members of the public, and she found it politically convenient to smear Tim as a “stalker” for his investigations and satirical postings about her.

Her prime motive was to discredit a critic, but her calumny also provided a superficial explanation for to why she had lied to her constituents on her blog; as was widely reported a few months ago, Dorries had run into trouble over her expenses claim for her designated second home, and she explained that she spent more time in her designated main home than her blog indicates because her blog is “70 per cent fiction”. The reason for her dissembling, she explained, was because she wished to “reassure” her constituents, and because she feared for her personal safety. It is perhaps worth noting here that the Crown Prosecution Service is currently investigating Dorries’ expenses, and she is hanging up the phone on journalists who ask her about this.

Tim also points out that the “stalker” smear has been used by other political opponents on the right who are irritated by Tim’s insistence on pressing the point on various matters of public debate or interest that they would prefer not to discuss. This includes the blogger Iain Dale, as I blogged here, and two other MPs: Anne Milton, who does not wish to discuss some appalling behaviour by a couple of her campaign workers, and Patrick Mercer, who would rather not revisit his past links to Glen Jenvey and why he endorsed the VIGIL Network, a (now defunct) “terror-tracker” organisation whose director has turned out to be a liar and manipulator. Mercer introduced this man to senior police at New Scotland Yard and perhaps facilitated an appearance on Newsnight in November 2006.

The “stalker” smear, particularly as used by Dorries, has also been used as an excuse by someone getting a cheap power-trip from subjecting Tim to some real-life harassment:

The Iain Dale post that Charlie Flowers cites above has since been deleted; the “Black-Eyed Girls” refers to Flowers and one or two associates, who see themselves as cyber-vigilantes. Flowers, who first contacted me on Christmas Day 2008 to boast that he had worked for VIGIL, turned on Tim (and, to a lesser extent, me) after we wrote about our experiences with the director of VIGIL. The full background is here.

Tim adds that Dorries’ stalker smear was made

repeatedly for personal/political gain while knowing that she has been contributing to an actual campaign of harassment (the subject of a series of genuine reports to police and actual police investigations), and knowing that the people targeting me claim to do so on her behalf, often in direct response to her allegations. Dorries has even linked to the site of one of the main ringleaders (where he reveals the exact location of my home) and sought to make contact with this person.

There is a pattern of reckless maliciousness with Dorries: here’s Dorries attacking another on-line critic as a benefits cheat (helped by Paul Staines, another blogger on the right with a grudge against Tim), and here she is rubbing her new lover’s estranged and broken wife in the dirt.

Whatever your personal politics may be, it is clear that Nadine Dorries is unfit to play any part in public life.

And those who have hidden behind her bogus allegations to justify their own acts of harassment and intimidation need to be made to account for what they’ve done.

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