Bartholomew's Notes

From BBC News:

Political activist Tommy Robinson has been convicted of harassing two Daily Mail journalists.

…The case concerned Robinson’s response to Daily Mail and Mail Online articles from August 2024, showing him on holiday in Cyprus while riots took place in England following the Southport murders.

…Robinson had denied the charges, saying he had “panicked” and had been “scared” when the Daily Mail published a story accusing him of “stoking race riots from his sunbed”.

…He said he had “wanted to find the journalists” to “put pressure on them”.

But he told the jury he had not known they were “in fear.”

This was always a weak defence: Robinson’s actions in response to the article were obviously retalitatory, and if he himself had felt “scared” (we’ll take him at his word) it was not credible that he did not intend to cause similar fear in those he was targeting. Robinson used private investigators (unnamed by the media[1]) to track down where they lived, and then posted photographs online – including a cropped image of one journalist’s family.

There was also every reason to suppose Robinson intended to incite harassment by others: in 2019 he made a night-time visit to the writer Mike Stuchbery’s home that inspired copycat harassment by Robinson’s friend Andrew Tate, and in 2021 when the Independent journalist Lizzie Dearden wrote to him ahead of a story about his finances he responded by attending her home address in an “angry and agitated” state and accusing her partner of being a paedophile.

The 2024 story can be seen here (it was recently amended to remove an image of “Robinson and his friends”); it describes him as “on the run” after a UK arrest warrant had been issued against him after he had skipped a court appearance (2). As such, he hardly had a reasonable expectation of privacy, even without the context of his high-profile commentary at the time regarding the Southport killings (3).

A MailOnline post to the Press Awards website has an account of how Robinson was tracked down to the resport in Cyprus: Robinson’s social media posts had included images of Vienna airport, alongside a reference to  a seven-hour layover; a Cypriot Greek contectionary shop shelf; and a hotel gym from which distinctive waterslides were visible through a window. It seems, then, that despite wanting privacy and security, Robinson could not resist showing off his lifestyle and signalling his scofflaw disregard for the court. This was hubris, and Robinson should be grateful that his self-exposure was brought to his attention by journalists rather than quietly used by someone with more sinister intentions.

The Guardian has some extra detail about what happened in court:

Journalists were given an escort out of the courtroom by security after one of them was threatened inside the court by one of [Tommy] Robinson’s supporters. The man was ejected from the press gallery and later from the courtroom.

This was apparently Dave Atherton, who gives his own account of what happened here. He says he called a journalist “something” and said he would “make him go viral”, and that he was ejected for not been a “state approved” journalist (“like the Soviet Union & NAZI Germany”). However, he did not respond to a query as to whether he showed up at court with a press card. Atherton has links with various figures in London linked to Reform UK.

Notes

1. Hope Not Hate suggests that the investigator was “likely former MI5 agent Peter Keeley who spent 15 years undercover in the IRA”, given that he apparently runs “surveillance” for Robinson. Hope Not Hate has more about him here, including a reference to his autobiography Double Agent: My Secret Life Undercover in the IRA, which was published under his pseudonym of Kevin Fulton. The first edition had the rather more self-regarding title Unsung Hero: How I Saved Dozens of Lives as a Secret Agent Inside the IRA, and one notable detail is that when it was first published, the homes of book’s two ghost writers were raided by the PSNI. These were a news agency reporter named Jim Nally and Ian Gallagher, currently a chief reporter with the Mail on Sunday. This duo have also been involved with journalism relating to the Daniel Morgan murder, as noted here.

2. Robinson was due in court in relation to breaching a court injunction put in place after he was found in 2021 to have libelled a teenage Syrian refugee. He was eventually jailed for this contempt of court in October 2024. Robinson declared himself bankrupt during the 2021 trial, and although he was discharged from bankrupcy in 2022, journalists have continued to look into his finances – another reason why a holiday at a luxury resort is notable.

1. As described by Tortoise Media, Robinson “falsely claimed that people were stabbed by Muslims in Stoke-on-Trent and Stirling”; “called for mass deportations, shared demonstration posters, and described violent protests in Southport as ‘justified’; and “shared a video that speculated that the suspect in the Southport stabbings was Muslim, a widespread piece of disinformation that helped trigger the riots across the country”.

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A book blurb from former Prime Minister Liz Truss:

In this explosive insider account, former British Prime Minister Liz Truss revisits the extraordinary events of 2022 from inside Downing Street, challenging the establishment narrative surrounding the Mini-Budget and revealing a far deeper struggle over who really controls Britain.

Truss exposes the immense influence wielded by unelected institutions, from the Bank of England and the Treasury to the Office for Budget Responsibility, and reveals how the forces which brought down her government went far beyond economics.

The book – titled Bank Job: A Short Book on How the Bank of England Broke the Bond Market Brought Down the Government – has provoked some scoffing commentary, much of it, but not all, harvested from social media (here and here)

Previous prime minister have tended to favour HarperCollins and its various imprints as their publisher, but Truss in this instance has instead chosen Free Speech Press, an imprint of Fisher King Publishing run by former Eastbourne headteacher Mike Fairclough. Writing on Toby Young’s Daily Sceptic in August, Fairclough explained that

Climate alarmism, gender ideology, pharmaceutical products, censorship, illegal immigration, wokeism and the growing reach of the state are shaping our society, yet many people have become reluctant to speak openly about them… Books can help break that silence. They can give people permission to explore ideas they may have been afraid to question, introduce them to arguments they rarely encounter elsewhere and, perhaps most importantly, inspire them to find the courage to openly express their opinions.

George Orwell’s novels are the perfect example of this, which is why our first publication is a new edition of 1984, with an original prologue written especially for us by Neil Oliver.

Shades of “By William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor”. I noted some of Neil Oliver’s output here – he has a show on GB News, but it is online only rather than broadcast, meaning that his rampant conspiracising is not covered by Ofcom.

Fairclough continues:

One of the founding authors at Free Speech Press, Mike Graham, has already shown what is possible… I asked him to write a book and within a few weeks we had one.

Graham perhaps had time on his hands after being fired from Talk TV for declining to cooperate into an investigation into racist posts that appeared on his Facebook account, which he attributed to “hackers”. Graham now has his own YouTube channel, UKLive, which also hosts Truss. (1)

Fairclough himself is the author of Sovereignty: John Mappin, The Restoration of Sanity (“His close relationship with Charlie Kirk, his friendship with Candace Owens, and his associations with figures such as Tucker Carlson and Nigel Farage show how his influence reaches across continents… Arthur. Achilles. Odysseus. Mappin. The names change. The archetype endures”), published by the parent Fisher King Publishing imprint (more on Mappin here).

Other Fisher King authors include former GP David Cartland (struck off last year for harassment of doctors) and Bernie Spofforth, dining out on her experience of being investigated by police after posting disinformation about the identity of the Southport killer. (2)

Notes

1. Truss’s book includes thanks to one Charlotte Binns, who is Graham’s executive producer, for “author photograph”. Binns is also associated with David Icke and previously worked on projects for his “Ickonic” channel.

2. Spofforth (var. Bernadette Spofforth) and GB News’s Alex Armstrong were more recently in the news when they agreed to apologise and pay damages after having falsely accused Mothin Ali of rioting in the 2024 Harehills disturbances. A video shows that Ali in fact remonstrated with the rioters and tried to prevent them from starting fires.

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From the Daily Mail‘s “US Science & Technology Editor”, last month:

High in the mountains of Turkey sits a mysterious boat-shaped formation that some researchers believe could be the remains of Noah’s Ark.

…Now, an international team examining the Durupınar Formation near Mount Ararat claims it has ‘100 percent confirmed’ that the mound is not a natural geological feature but a ‘man-made object.’

…Independent researcher Andrew Jones, the founder of Noah’s Ark Scans who has investigated the area for nearly 30 years, told the Daily Mail neither the radar surveys nor drilling conducted inside the formation detected limestone or solid bedrock.

…Lauren Witzke, director of marketing and fundraising for Noah’s Ark Scans, claimed the formation’s uppermost section is deteriorating.

Claims about the Durupınar Formation have been tabloid fodder for years, although it has long been established that the formation is natural rock (we’ll leave aside the obvious problems with taking the story of Noah’s Ark as historical). Jones and Noah’s Ark Scans were reported in The Sun back in 2021, and other reports noted the involvement of “Dr. Fethi Ahmet Yüksel of the Department of Geophysical Engineering, Applied Geophysics Department of Istanbul University”. Fox News now refers to Jones being “supported” by Ağrı İbrahim Çeçen University (1).

However, the association with Witzke means that a “weird news” staple now takes on a more sinister aspect: her involvement with the far-right end of US conspiracism is notorious: when she ran for office in Delaware in 2020 her campaign was “marked by its closeness to extremists”, and her resumé includes promoting QAnon, acting as a host of Rick Wiles’ TruNews and co-producing Stew Peters’ anti-Covid vaccination film Died Suddenly. This last achievement is listed on the “Noah’s Ark Scans Team” website, where she appears alongside TruNews associate Edward Szall, who is listed as “Head of Production”.

Those bringing “Noah’s Ark Scans” to wider audiences alongside Fox News (which avoids mentioning Witzke) include Dinesh D’Souza, who sees its work as dovetailing nicely with his new book The Stones Cry Out: Biblical Archaeology, Prophecy, and the Last Days, and online MAGA commentator Benny Johnson (2), who posted a video entitled “Scientists Go INSIDE Noah’s Ark For The First Time!? Drone Robot Finds ‘Rooms’ In Ark 100% Confirmed”.

Notes

1. Jones contributed a chapter to a 2024 book entitled Mount Ararat and Noah’s Ark: History, Myth and Land, which was based on the “7th International Ağrı Mountain and Noah’s Ark Symposium, hosted by Ağrı İbrahim Çeçen University on October 19-21, 2023”. In 2018 a Turkish academic opined that Noah may have used a mobile phone, which was seen by some as sympomatic of an “increasingly religious, anti-intellectual turn encouraged by the government”.

2. Johnson has recently become better known to British audiences for an interview with Nigel Farage, during which Farage imagined doing a deal with Trump over Diego Garcia:

I’d have gone in and said, “Right, you know what, mate? Chagos, it’s yours. Diego Garcia, in perpetuity… In return, just please stop talking about the Falkland Islands.”

This apparent willingness to give up British sovereignty to appease Trump was mocked in particular by Kemi Badenoch. Despite the plain meaning of “Chagos, it’s yours”, Farage blustered in the Daily Telegraph about a “ridiculous lie”, claiming that he had merely said he would “guarantee the United States’ use of the Diego Garcia base, in perpetuity, to secure the Falklands”. He also cited the “the White House, the State Department, and the Department of War” as having understood this to be his position, adding that they “blasted Badenoch for trying to use this critical national security issue to score domestic political points”.

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This one has received a lot of commentary online already – from the Daily Mail, 13 October:

An Oxford University lecturer who was in a relationship with Tory peer Michael Gove is facing trial on child abuse image charges.

Dr Lola Salem… was charged by Thames Valley Police in May this year along with Henry Hopwood-Phillips, a historian and geopolitical analyst. They both wrote for the The Critic magazine as freelance contributors.

Hopwood-Phillips, 39, founded a Singapore-based political consultancy that specialises in analysing China’s geopolitics.

In June he admitted two counts of taking an indecent photograph and two counts of distributing indecent photographs of a child at High Wycombe Magistrates’ Court.

According to the article, Salem says that she was sent four images (Categories B and C) unsolicited, and that she reported them to the police. However, the backlog means that her defence will not be heard inside a courtroom until March 2028 – a concerning delay of 18 months that is apparently not untypical these days.

It is not clear how much significance we should attach to the description of Hopwood-Phillips as “taking” an indecent photograph, rather than “making” it – the latter term is usually used to refer to creating a copy. In the past day or so he has deleted his “Byzantine Ambassador” website and associated presence on Twitter/X; his writings and those of Salem remain on The Critic website, although in one instance an article that was formerly billed as co-authored is now attributed solely to Hopwood-Phillips. His associations formerly included the Traditional Britain Group, and 10 years ago the BBC News noted his contributions writing “travel and restaurant reviews” for a website, now regarded as a hoax, called Pravda International.

The charges against Salem were first reported on 10 October, but the articles then mysteriously disappeared: Mic Wright notes that pieces were deleted from the websites of the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and GB News, and that an article on LBC went the same way while he was writing.

None of these earlier pieces made the connection to Gove, although it was widely pointed out on social media – not least because of some now-obvious reputational management masquerading as journalism from a couple of weeks beforehand, when it was reported in the Daily Mail‘s gossip column that Gove and Salem had split up “some time ago”. Why were the earlier articles about Salem pulled, and why did such a more detailed account, bringing Hopwood-Phillips into it, then unexpectedly appear on the Daily Mail website a couple of days later? Such anomalies, of course, are manna to conspiracists, who are seldom inhibited by laws against passing prejudicial comment on live legal proceedings.

An article by Salem has also been deleted from the website of The Spectator, of which Gove is the editor – this was noted by Popbitch, under an intro that referred to “scandalous stories that won’t disappear off the internet for mysterious and nefarious reasons”. Salem has linked to it from her Substack.

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