Bartholomew's Notes

From BBC News, yesterday:

Thousands of demonstrators are marching through London in a day of protests.

Anti-lockdown and climate change demonstrations are under way across Westminster, Lambeth and Southwark alongside some smaller protests.

…Whether it was austerity or Palestine, lockdown or the NHS, campaigners of all ages and backgrounds wanted to make their voices heard today.

…It didn’t matter your cause, all groups mixed and chanted alongside each other.

…The protest was prompted by the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which proposes to give police in England and Wales more power to impose conditions on non-violent protests, including those that are deemed too noisy or a nuisance.

Although not mentioned by the BBC, the protestors included a contingent of Satanic Ritual Abuse activists, led by Jeanette Archer and a large banner declaring “Exposing Satnic [sic] Ritual Abuse”, which was carried along the Mall down towards Buckingham Palace. A video upload shows Archer addressing a cheering crowd of a hundred or so in Hyde Park as she read off a litany of generic horrors that she claimed to have experienced during childhood, including witnessing the murder of children, women being forcibly impregnated and having the resulting babies cut out of them (even though that would mean the death of the supposed “breeders”), cannibalism and so on. The banner was then carried to places that Archer had previously said need “exposing”, such as the Supreme Court in Westminster.

More specifically, Archer also claimed to have been abused by Edward Heath, Greville Janner and Jimmy Savile, and that uniformed police officers would rape her and transport her to Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. I discussed some of Archer’s story previously here.

Archer also paid tribute to Wilfred Wong, a Satanic Ritual Abuse activist who is due to stand trial on charges of child abduction during the week ahead, and one of her assistants read out a letter from him; out of an abundance of caution I won’t go into details while the matter is sub judice.

A leaflet produced by Archer ahead of the protest can be seen here; James Hind, who observed the event, has an account here. In his assessment:

Despite the march feeling bizarre and incompetent, I felt Archer had achieved a result today by coming out of the event with more followers and a stronger voice amongst the QAnon community. I was doubtful that Archer had made any impact on the decision-makers in the media or politics, having painted them as child-murdering Satanists; but, making change at the top was never the goal of Archer, it was winning over the QAnon market, and she achieved that. What was strange and sinister was the reluctance of the police to intervene or challenge Archer and her marchers, who had free reign to go, say and do what they liked in their march in London today.

For further commentary see also Spin vs Truth here.

The subliterate “Satnic” banner was also notable for its logo branding of a half-sun giving off rays above the letters “SOS” (Save Our Children). The same logo was used on the same day at protests in Australia and New Zealand. Archer made a video with her Australasian allies a few days before the march; the discussion included the need for child “rescues”.

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A post from Peter Jukes on the Crowd Justice website:

Life-Changing Libel About Me, Spread by Right Wing Activists
by Peter Jukes

About me: I’m an author and dramatist who, in the last ten years, has dedicated myself to helping to fund accurate, accountable journalism first through the Byline.com crowdfunding site and the Byline Festival, and now the successful investigative newspaper and news site Byline Times

Summary On the weekend of 19 June this year I was hideously libeled by former UKIP leadership campaign manager Jay Beecher on the site Politicalite, edited by Jordan James (Jordan Kendall).

Both had previously threatened Byline Times months before. The entirely fake allegation of child sexual abuse was published without the comments I had sent them,. A tweet with even worse commentary (“just the tip of the iceberg” was spread by Blue Tick account James Melville (with over Twitter 180,000 follower) and his editor at Country Squire Magazine, James Bembridge. Both also have a history of derogatory comments about me.

The Legal Principles. I have instructed specialist defamation solicitors at Bindmans LLP. I understand this is a slam dunk case of serious harm (what could be more distressing and damaging than an allegation of child sexual abuse?), but bringing the sources of this malicious libel to book is an expensive process, and there is no security that I could recover my own legal costs if it goes all the way to court and an inevitable victory.

I previously wrote about Byline here and here, and I have met Peter a few times. He is perhaps best known to the general public for his efforts with Alastair Morgan to highlight the police corruption that stymied police investigations into the 1987 murder of Alastair’s brother Daniel Morgan.

Beecher’s article claims that a man named “Adam” alleges that Peter sexually assaulted him in the 1980s when he was 12, apparently in Edinburgh. On Twitter, Beecher has stated that he is unconcerned as to whether the claim is true or not, but that he is is entitled to publish the allegation. He has expressed confidence that this amounts to a defence in law. There is nothing in the Politicalite article to indicate that Beecher made any enquiries as to “Adam’s” credibility or the plausibility of the allegation, and Peter has expressed scepticism that he even exists. Politicalite has run various posts attacking Byline for political reasons.

The Politicalite post was amplified on Twitter by an anonymous troll account, and a Tweet from this account was in turn promoted by Melville and Bembridge, neither of whom have any apparent link with Beecher. Unlike Beecher, they have both apologised for their actions, although in ways that are inadequate and possibly even vexatious. First, Melville:

Yesterday, I retweeted a serious allegation against Peter Jukes, made in a news article online, that was damaging to his reputation. I apologise unreservedly and am sorry for any harm this has done and distress caused. @peterjukes [1]

It’s important to act respectfully and with care on social media. Yesterday I didn’t do that. I let myself down. I am ashamed that I fell into this trap I often warn others about. So, a note to self and from me to you, be careful, be respectful and be mindful. Always. [2]

This does not amount to a repudiation of the post, and describing it as “a news article online” obscures the nature of Politicalite as a vicious fringe-right attack site. His subsequent victim narrative, in which he “fell into this trap”, and pontifications on the need to “be mindful” come across as self-serving.

Bembridge, meanwhile, has a mitigation defence:

Last night I retweeted a tweet which I apologise for retweeting related to @peterjukes. Having now read the tweet and the article it linked to, I realise that I should not have unthinkingly just retweeted the tweet. My reaction was premature. Apologies, Peter.

But Bembridge did not just “retweet a tweet” – he embedded the Tweet into a Tweet of his own, adding the suggestion that it undermined Peter’s standing to call him a “cheap polemicist”. It is very difficult to believe that he did not read the Tweet’s content, in which the allegation was laid out explicitly. And as with Melville, this again does not amount to a repudiation of the story, and the word “premature” implies he believes that it may yet be substantiated in some way.

The former England rugby player Brian Moore, who is also a qualified lawyer, had some advice:

To @TheBembridge – I’ve seen your so-called apology to Peter Jukes and as a former lawyer who did defamation work I just wanted to tell you it won’t be sufficient to defend a libel claim.

Peter noticed that Bembridge had also deleted older Tweets in which he had criticised or mocked him. Bembridge perhaps did this because a history of prior hostility might be evidence of motive if the matter comes to court; if so, though, his efforts here have been undermined by a close associate who has waded in with abusive trolling of Peter and of Brian Moore (the latter dismissed as a “shite lawyer”).

It is worth noting that the site where Bembridge is “Deputy Editor” was featured in the Guardian in late 2019 in relation to the “Hijacked Labour” smear chart that was published in the Sun ahead of the last general election. As explained by Daniel Trilling:

The map linked to by the Sun closely resembles an earlier graphic that first appeared online in August, under the name the Traitor’s Chart. The earliest mention of it that I can find is on an obscure website called Country Squire Magazine, which said it had received a press release about the map. That article, since deleted, had a publication date of 21 August. The website’s only other significant intervention to date has been a pro-Brexit polemic that described Ireland as a “land of puppy farms, rain-soaked holidays, dingy bars, drugs mule celebs, verbal diarrhoea and squeaky fiddles”, also now deleted.

There is no evidence that anyone else received the “press release”, and it should be noted that the Traitors’ Chart and Country Squire Magazine were both built using the same WordPress theme (appropriately called Canard). The deletion of the article and creation of the new “Hijacked Labour” version of the graphic occurred just a few days before the Sun article appeared. The Sun item itself was pulled after just a short time online, and its author, Tom Newton Dunn, has been derided ever since over his refusal to provide any explanation.

UPDATE (31 July): Bembridge and Melville have now both Tweeted the same formal apology, which they have agreed to pin as their top tweet for two weeks (here and here). The text reads:

On 19 June 2021, I retweeted allegations about Peter Jukes @peterjukes which I have no reason to believe are true, and am not aware of any evidence to suggest are true. I apologise for this and have paid a sum to charity and his legal costs.

The troll account of the “close associate” of Bembridge mentioned above has not reacted, although a different anonymous account fired off abuse against random Twitter users who were mocking him over the outcome. I attempted to bring this to his attention, as a consequence of which I was blocked.

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From The Times:

The former chief constable who led the inquiry into alleged abuse by Sir Edward Heath and who later resigned over allegations of serious misconduct is being paid to advise an elected police and crime commissioner.

Mike Veale, who headed forces in Wiltshire and Cleveland, has been given a contract with Rupert Matthews, who runs the Leicestershire force.

…He was appointed by Matthews, a former MEP, on the recommendation of Andrew Bridgen, the Conservative MP for North West Leicestershire. Bridgen regularly publicly defended Veale during the inquiry into Heath.

As well as being a former MEP, Matthews is the author of works such as UFOs: A History of Alien Activity from Sightings to Abductions to Global Threat and Roswell: Uncovering the Secrets of Area 51 and the Fatal UFO Crash.

As chief constable of Wiltshire Police, Veale infamously squandered £1.4 million in the futile pursuit of child sex abuse allegations against Heath, who had died a decade beforehand. Dramatic leaks to the Mail on Sunday‘s political correspondent Simon Walters claimed that Veale was “120 per cent convinced” that Heath was guilty, although the final report turned out to be a damp squib. Veale denied leaking to the media, although as soon as the report was out he gave interviews to Walters and also to Mark Watts, a journalist heavily invested in the claims of Carl Beech.

A bizarre coda was that Veale was soon afterwards found to have lied about the circumstances in which his work mobile phone had been destroyed, although he was cleared of an anonymous allegation that “he had collaborated with a Conservative MP to leak the details and covered his tracks by destroying his phone”. The IOPC accepted Veale’s account that he had accidentally destroyed the phone in a moment of annoyance while playing golf, and had lied to avoid “media attention”. By coincidence, the phone had come to grief a day after the Mail on Sunday had run a story with the headline “Police: If Ted Heath was alive today we’d quiz him under caution on child abuse claims” – a sensationalisation of routine police procedure with the intention of implying “no smoke without fire”.

Veale failed upwards by then becoming chief constable of Cleveland Police, but as noted by The Times he “later resigned over allegations of serious misconduct”. According to an update at the end of the article, the IOPC has passed a report to Cleveland’s PCC, but says it is “not in a position” to share its findings. Veale’s supporters within the conspiracy theory milieu claim that the Cleveland allegations are the revenge of the establishment; certainly, it’s possible that Veale was ousted improperly, but if so then the context is more likely to be local corruption (Veale was the third Chief Constable of Cleveland Police since Sean Price was dismissed for misconduct in 2012).

It’s not quite clear why Andrew Bridgen, who has no connection with Wiltshire, was such an enthusiast for the Heath investigation – however, he has also written in support of old allegations against Greville Janner in Leicestershire, and it may be that he saw the Heath case as being the some kind of thing. His writings on Janner in turn form part of his campaign against Keith Vaz, who has been accused of having “protected” Janner.

The regular rent-a-quote MP also has links with the conspiracy milieu: earlier this year he was criticised after giving an interview to none other than Anna Brees, and her former associate Jon Wedger previously claimed in 2018 that Bridgen had “made contact” with him.

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