A website called The Swamp (“a community exploring the murky waters of politics”, according to its publisher, Jerrick Media) has published a particularly nasty conspiracy article focusing on Theresa May’s father. There’s an argument for ignoring this kind of material – the article is thin even by the standards of conspiricists, and so far no-one of standing is promoting the story on social media. Yet there is a sense that the article – by one Johnny Vedmore (“Singer, Songwriter, Political Blogger, Legalise Cannabis Advocate and a Welshman”) – is gaining social media traction, and so I reluctantly give it a minimum of attention here.
The conspiracy focuses on the fact that Theresa May’s father, the late Reverend Hubert Brasier, used to have a Wikipedia page, but that this has been removed. The author found a copy of the original on Wayback, and asks: “It’s not a large entry, it covers only the basics, so why would you want it removed?”
The answer, of course, is to be found on the relevant “Articles for Deletions” page, which remains live. It shows that Wikipedians discussed the page, and that it was eventually decided that Reverend Brasier had not been a public figure in his own right, and as such ought not to have his own entry. Instead, the link to the original page now redirects to the page for Theresa May. The supposed “mystery” is thus solved.
However, the Swamp conspiracy theorist prefers to suggest that it has been removed to hide some sinister secret, and without providing any documentation he adds that “After researching Hubert’s life I came across many pages that had been removed, links to nowhere, and a few conspiracy theories too”. Whereas I looked him up online and found plenty of references to him in the media.
The author points out that Reverend Brasier trained to be a priest with Community of the Resurrection Seminary School in Mirfield, West Yorkshire, and that some decades later there were claims of child sex abuse associated with this location. He further notes that Brasier married late; that he was a hospital chaplain in Eastbourne at the same time that John Bodkin Adams, a GP suspected of murdering patients, was active in the town; and that the Diocese of Chichester has seen several clerical child sex scandals (including that of Bishop Peter Ball). There is nothing to implicate Brasier in any kind of wrongdoing (indeed, there’s not even a coherent allegation), but Vedmore builds an edifice from these tenuous associations and his misunderstanding of why the Wikipedia page no longer exists to posit a “cover up”.
But just when you think the article has scraped the very bottom the bottom of the barrel, there’s an even more idiotic suggestion: that Theresa May deliberately set up the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse to fail, because “the inquiry into child sexual abuse seems to be something Theresa May does not want to face”. In which case, why did she propose it in the first place?
There’s no point arguing with this sort of author (and those promoting the garbage on Twitter): they don’t give a damn about what’s true or not, and they’re not interested in helping abuse victims. All they care about is (a) the cheap thrill they get from accusing “powerful” people of child sex abuse, no matter how flimsy the supposed basis for it; and/or (b) weaponizing a concocted claim for some reason or another, usually to do with politics (I looked at another example a few weeks ago). The current example is logged here primarily as a particularly egregious specimen of the problem.
UPDATE: Vedmore has now promoted his “research” on the Richie Allen Show. I previously discussed Allen, an associate of David Icke, here.
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