Bartholomew's Notes

An announcement from the Crown Prosecution Service:

The man who made false claims of a VIP child abuse ring and received compensation for his lies has today been ordered to pay £23,960.

Carl Beech, 52, claimed that he was among many victims of high-profile establishment figures who raped and murdered children in the 1970s and 1980s.

…Today at Sheffield Crown Court, Beech has been ordered to pay £23,960 within three months or face an additional year in prison.

Adrian Phillips of the CPS said: “The compensation money given to Beech was meant to support him following the extensive, sustained torture by high profile people that he made up and described to police.

“Causing unimaginable distress to the men he falsely accused and the families caught up in his deception, he gladly took money from the authorities knowing he had fabricated the entire tale.

“Confiscating this money will not undo the harm of his lies, but it is the final step in making sure that Beech does not profit from the shameful false allegations he made.”

Beech famously used much of his compensation money to purchase an expensive car as a status symbol. According to reports, the judge who ordered the confiscation has instructed that the recovered money should be used to compensate the former politician Harvey Proctor, who lost his job after Beech accused him of child rape and murder and who continues to be vilified online by Beech’s supporters, for whom the thrill of accusation needs only the flimsiest pretext. It’s not clear why this is not mentioned in the CPS announcement.

However (and as others have noted), there’s a some re-writing of history in the above, either out of sloppiness or as a deliberate diversion. Beech did not receive any compensation for the false and lurid “VIP sex abuse” allegations that he made to the Metropolitan Police in 2014; instead, the money had already been paid to him the previous year in relation to earlier allegations made to Wiltshire Police. As reported by the BBC during his trial last year:

Mr Beech accepted that, when he first spoke to Wiltshire Police at Swindon police station, he did not tell DC Mark Lewis everything he told the Metropolitan Police two years later.

Prosecutor Tony Badenoch QC took him through the transcript of his initial interview from 2012 in which only his stepfather, Major Ray Beech, and broadcaster Jimmy Savile were named as alleged abusers, with Mr Beech telling a detective: “I don’t know the others”.

…The prosecution alleged that he had “intentionally misled officers” in order to get a crime reference number at a meeting with Wiltshire police in 2013.

He could then use to make a claim with the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority.

Ray Beech and Savile were both dead by this time, and so the CPS reference to “distress to the men he falsely accused” is obviously a conflation with his later allegations, which were more extravagant by far. Beech’s success in 2013 raises a wider issue about how easy it is to get compensation out of the authorities by claiming to have been abused, especially when the name of Jimmy Savile in invoked: there was nothing to substantiate his claim, and in fact Beech never even met Savile. This issue has now been obscured by the CPS statement.

Meanwhile, Beech has also failed in an bid to appeal his conviction for perverting the course of justice. The journalist Mark Watts, who invested all of his professional credibility in supporting Beech, tried to create a sense of intrigue around this, noting that the application was “refused by a single judge behind closed doors”. However, when asked to explain this further, he added that “That is the standard way for an application for permission to appeal conviction/sentence to be handled at Court of Appeal. A single judge, on the papers. A full hearing for an appeal is only held if the single judge grants permission.” Watts also drew an explicit comparison with US interest in Prince Andrew’s links to Jeffrey Epstein, as if that somehow validates the “establishment cover-up” conspiracy theories he promoted.

UPDATE: Responding to Watts’s Tweet, barrister Matthew Scott explains that “Beech has the absolute right to renew his application for leave to appeal his conviction & it would be heard by three judges, in open court. It seems he has decided against it.”

Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

A “huge if true” headline at the Daily Telegraph:

Exclusive: Coronavirus began ‘as an accident’ in Chinese lab, says former MI6 boss

Sir Richard Dearlove tells Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast that new scientific report suggests key elements of the virus were ‘inserted’

The initial impression here is that Dearlove has been given access to bombshell privileged information, and indeed the story has been promoted as such all over Twitter. The problem, though, is that the scientific report does not make the headline claim, and Dearlove and the Telegraph hack Bill Gardner appear to have misunderstood the significance of the word “insertions”.

Also, it should be noted that Dearlove was prompted to comment about the report by the Planet Normal presenters – Allison Pearson raises the subject, and Dearlove just happens to have read it. This suggests some prior co-ordination between the presenter and the interviewee, and details in the Telegraph article such as a reference to “correspondence seen by The Telegraph” regarding the report suggest that Gardner is in contact with its authors directly, Thus it appears that the quote from Dearlove was simply secured to bolster the story about the report, trading on the mystique of intelligence.

The scientific paper, “Biovacc-19: A Candidate Vaccine for Covid-19 (SARS-CoV-2) Developed from Analysis of its General Method of Action for Infectivity”, was published earlier this week in the academic journal QRB Discovery (or Quarterly Reviews of Biophysics Discovery, an off-shoot off a journal called Quarterly Reviews of Biophysics). It is available on open access here, and its current status is as an “Accepted Manuscript for QRB Discovery as part of the Cambridge Coronavirus Collection. Subject to change during the editing and production process.”

The title is unexpected given the incredible revelation it supposedly contains. One would have expected something more like “Evidence that Covid-19 was Man-Made and Escaped from a Lab”. But that’s because the paper is not about that, but rather concerned with a vaccine proposal. The abstract, though, does mention the following:

…We show the non-receptor dependent phagocytic general method of action to be specifically related to cumulative charge from inserted sections placed on the SARS-CoV-2 Spike surface in positions to bind efficiently by salt bridge formations; and from blasting the Spike we display the non human-like epitopes from which Biovacc-19 has been down-selected.

Gardner writes this up as follows:

In their paper, the scientists claim to have identified “inserted sections placed on the SARS-CoV-2 Spike surface” that explain how the virus binds itself to human cells.

It is also noted in the text of the paper:

It is a matter of fact that there are unique inserts in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein when they are aligned with other SARS-CoV sequences as shown in (Zhou et al., 2020)…. Figure 1 shows 6 alignments with inserts. The first 5 inserts are pointed out by (Zhou et al., 2020) and located
near/around position 72, 150, 250, 445, 471 while the insert around 680 is pointed out by (Coutard et al., 2020) as a furin-like cleavage site with cleavage between R and S. 

Relevant here is a quote from Zhou et al., whose paper was published in Nature (emphasis added):

The S genes of 2019-nCoV and RaTG13 are longer than other SARSr-CoVs. The major differences in the sequence of the S gene of 2019-nCoV are the three short insertions in the N-terminal domain as well as changes in four out of five of the key residues in the receptor-binding motif compared with the sequence of SARS-CoV (Extended Data Fig. 3). Whether the insertions in the N-terminal domain of the S protein of 2019-nCoV confer sialic-acid-binding activity as it does in MERS-CoV needs to be further studied.

This is difficult to follow for a non-scientist, but the reason that these “insertions” are not big news is that the original context demonstrates the word does not indicate human agency at work. It appears, then, that such “insertions” are a natural phenomenon. Some are aligned with other coronaviruses, others are unique.

The QRB Discovery paper is authored by Birger Sørensen, Andres Susrud and Angus Dalgleish. According to the Telegraph, a fourth author, “John Fredrik Moxnes, the chief scientific adviser to the Norwegian military, asked for his name to be withdrawn from the research, throwing its credibility into doubt”.The Telegraph also tells us that

An earlier version, seen by The Telegraph, concluded that coronavirus should correctly be called Wuhan virus; and claimed to have proven beyond reasonable doubt that the Covid-19 virus is engineered

“An earlier version” here means “an earlier version that was rejected from peer review”. So, it’s bait-and-switch: we’re supposed to be impressed that the paper was published in prestigious journal (“chaired by leading scientists from Stanford University and the University of Dundee”), but the key point stressed by Dearlove and the Telegraph did not get through. Further, the reference there to “Wuhan virus” is purely polemical, and it is perhaps relevant here that Dalgleish was a 2015 political candidate for UKIP.

The Telegraph continues:

A further analysis produced by Prof Dalgleish and his colleagues, due for release in the coming days, claims the Covid-19 virus has “unique fingerprints” that cannot have evolved naturally and are instead “indicative of purposive manipulation”.

Entitled “A Reconstructed Historical Aetiology of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike”, the new study, seen by The Telegraph, suggests the virus is “remarkably well-adapted virus for human co-existence”; and is likely to be the result of a Wuhan lab experiment to produce “chimeric viruses of high potency”,

We’re not told where this paper will appear, yet the claim is now out there with a “big name” endorsement and given a spurious authority before it can be scrutinised by others. Looks like a strategy.

As regards Dearlove’s involvement in all this, one commentator advises on Twitter:

Sir Richard was “C” at the time of the Iraq war, so when he starts talking about weapons of mass destruction we should all make sure we treat him with the respect he deserves.

In fact, Dearlove rejects the idea that the virus was created specifically as a weapon, but the general cautionary point still stands.

UPDATE (2025): This 2023 joint investigation by Byline Times and Computer Weekly has some pertinent background:

One of the world’s most prestigious general science journals, Nature, was the target of a two-year-long sustained and virulent secret attack by a conspiratorial group of extreme Brexit lobbyists…

[When] a Covid vaccine promoted by the group failed to reach any form of clinical testing, the group arranged for unfounded accusations against Nature magazines and staff to be published by the Daily Telegraph and on other right wing news sites.

…The campaign was led by former chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) Sir Richard Dearlove in conjunction with retired history academic Gwythian (Gwyn) Prins, and lobbyist John Constable of the privately funded climate change denial group Global Warming Policy Foundation. The scientific member of the group, oncologist professor Gus Dalgleish, was a prominent member of UKIP who had stood as the party’s parliamentary candidate in a south London constituency then campaigned for “Leave Means Leave”.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Staying with yesterday’s Mail on Sunday, here’s the front-page splash:

The “witness who alerted police”, and who we are told “broke lockdown rules HIMSELF” was Robin Lees, a retired teacher who was the first person who came forward to say he had seen Dominic Cummings flouting lockdown rules by visiting Barnard Castle in early April. Yesterday’s Sunday Times notes two more witnesses who say they saw Cummings in other parts of the town, and at least one other credible person (an archaeologist named Lisa Westcott Wilkins) previously stated in a Tweet to the Guardian‘s Marina Hyde that “the whole town knows it”. The witness who “admits he INVENTED story”, meanwhile, relates to an alleged second visit by Cummings to Durham later in April, although of course it serves the purposes of the Mail on Sunday not to be too clear on this point, in order to generate fog and distrust around the whole business of Cummings’s movements. The implication of the juxtaposition is “look, these witnesses are all discreditable in some way“.

The paper lays out the case against Lees thus:

Robin Lees drove from his home in Barnard Castle, County Durham, to pick up his student daughter, Elizabeth, who had been self-isolating at her boyfriend’s home in Ascot, Berkshire, after returning from an extended study trip to Canada.

…Measures announced by Boris Johnson on May 11 included an easing of travel restrictions to allow people to drive as far as they wanted. But this was only if they were going to an outdoors location and as long as the social distancing protocol was observed.

There wasn’t any change in the guidelines for allowing relatives who are not normally resident in the family home to move in.

…Mr Lees refused to say exactly when he made the journey to collect his daughter, but insisted that it was after May 11.

Is this really a “gotcha”? Perhaps Lees ought to have gone for a short walk around Ascot before picking up his daughter – absurdist legalism, but that would have fulfilled the “outdoor location” requirement for travel. However, the Mirror journalist Pippa Crerar notes that “If a student is opting to change their primary residence for the purpose of the emergency period to live back at their family home, this is permitted.” Thus it appears that Rees’s trip was in fact within the letter of the rules, and either way no reasonable case can be made that he acted irresponsibly or selfishly – and it is difficult to see why this is a matter of wider public interest, let alone front-page news.

In contrast, Dominic Cummings and his wife Mary Wakefield by their own (revised) account travelled from London to a second home outside Durham while they suspected they were infected, used local health services and took a trip to Barnard Castle (“He parked on our street and was seen at leisure right where we walk our dogs. Infected, he touched the gates we all have to touch to move through that area”, according to Westcott Wilkins). They also initially lied about it, via a piece for the Spectator that was designed to give the false impression that they had spent the whole time in London.

The Mail on Sunday‘s focus on Lees and his mundane task of picking up his daughter (“seen at the family home last week”, we’re gratuitously told) is a good example of the tabloid strategy of appealing to readers’ sense of resentment by supposedly exposing hypocrisy: If you are angry at Cummings because of this man’s testimony, you are being played for a fool even though it’s true. You are invited to demonstrate your superior discernment by disregarding what Cummings did and instead expressing censure at Lees. (1)

On Twitter, of course, this disapproval has taken vicious form, including Tweets that conflate Lees with the false “second trip” witness (a man named Tim Matthews [2]). Some of this was inflamed by the health minister Nadine Dorries, who posted a screenshot of the story alongside the commentary “I’m stunned to see how little any of this… [is] mentioned by mainstream broadcasters”. Thus we see someone whose priority ought to be on health messaging instead focusing on how the letter of the rules might be weaponised at the expense both of a private individual and the public interest for the benefit of her boss’s apparently indispensable adviser. (3)

Indeed, much of the discussion about whether Cummings and Wakefield’s decision to travel was covered by Section 6 of the relevant legislation has been at the expense of a primary messaging imperative, which is that people who know or suspect they are infected have a special responsibility to stay home so as not to risk spreading the virus. The government’s decision to instead emphasise the apparent great leeway afforded by the “reasonable excuse” provision may yet prove catastrophic.

Notes

1. Another example of this kind of thing is to accuse progressive-minded public figures of hypocrisy due to having some personal wealth. Two recent Mail on Sunday articles have deployed this strategy against the Labour leader Keir Starmer, although both articles were dishonest. One article falsely implied that Starmer’s late father was a factory owner, based on a reference he had made to “my factory” in the sense of “my workplace”, while the other infamously extrapolated a hypothetical value for a field owned by Starmer should greenbelt  legislation change, to suggest he has a £10 million asset.

2. Cummings has denied the second trip, and no decisive evidence either way has emerged. According to the MoS:

The claim that Mr Cummings made a second trip north, which he denied, was reported from an unnamed source in The Observer newspaper last week.

On Monday, its sister paper, The Guardian gave details of a second witness making the same claim, reporting that: ‘Tim Matthews, a runner, has since come forward to claim he saw Cummings later that day [April 19].’

The Guardian erred in reporting Matthews’s claim as fact, referring to an app that “marks the area where he saw Cummings at 3.45pm on 19 April”. The separate “unnamed source”, meanwhile, also featured in the Mirror.

3. Conservative MPs were reportedly asked by whips to Tweet in support of Cummings last week. Dorries avoided doing so by staying off Twitter due to an eye injury, but later declared the matter was “case closed” when Durham police said Cummings had not broken the rules by residing at the property in Durham (a statement which doesn’t quite pronounce definitively on his journey there).

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

A headline at the Mail on Sunday tells us what to think:

Repellent cowards: Left-wing writer and teacher at a top girls’ school target Michael Gove’s family with appallingly abusive tweets

Politicians, of course, receive a great deal of uncivil commentary on social media, but some instances are deemed more significant by tabloid journalists than others. In this instance, Gove is a politician that the paper supports, but more to the point is that Gove’s wife Sarah Vine is a commentator with the Daily Mail, sister paper to the MoS. Thus “vile trolls” must be shamed before the nation as a matter of revenge.

The story starts reasonably enough with the case of Andy Dawson, a man who has received a police caution for Tweeting at Vine that he would like to physically assault Gove in front of his family. The story is newsworthy both in itself, and also because Dawson is a public figure – he hosts a podcast with Bob Mortimer, and he has written for the Daily Mirror and the Guardian (three old commentary pieces for the latter paper – enough to make him a “Guardian journalist” according to the MoS). It was a malicious joke made in anger rather than a credible threat, but it crossed the line.

However, the paper then introduces someone else:

Elsewhere on Twitter, a teacher at a girls’ secondary school discussed the Goves’ 17-year-old daughter ‘like a piece of meat’ while targeting her parents with vile abuse.

Alom Shaha, a physics teacher at Camden School for Girls in London, said the 17-year-old should ‘actively campaign against’ her father before accusing Mr Gove and his wife of supporting fascism.

Mr Shaha said in his tweet: ‘I would love to see a f****** 12-year-old of one of these b******s leave home and claim asylum saying they don’t want to live with fascists.’

Shaha in fact wrote several Tweets, responding to a clip of Helen Whately MP on Question Time:

I’d like to see the children of these people, if they have them, denounce them. Although perhaps their children are also of the same bent… Mic says Gove’s daughter distances herself from him on TikTok. She should go further and actively campaign against him.

Shaha also said that he was “shocked that any self respecting teenage offspring of these bastards doesn’t publicly shame them”, adding that “I can only conclude they are as awful as their parents.”

In my view, teachers ought to conduct themselves on social media with a bit more dignity than this, but this was a general rant that was brought to Vine’s attention by third parties. Shaha has a blue tick, but I’m not convinced this was a matter of national public interest, and I doubt it would have passed muster without being tagged onto end of the Dawson story. It’s also excessive and vicious to characterise this as discussing the daughter “like a piece of meat”, which is Vine’s allegation – such a phrase implies degradation, and has sexual overtones.

The story continues:

In both cases Ms Vine… tackled the trolls head on.

She also took on a third, who claimed in an exchange with Shaha that the Goves’ daughter ‘distances’ herself from her father on TikTok.

And here’s where the victim narrative falls apart. The alleged “third” troll has identified himself as Mic Wright, and the reason he’s not named is because he told article’s author, Nick Constable, that he would take action against unless he was given right of reply. That right of reply would have required Constable having the explain how exactly Vine was supposedly “tackling the trolls” – which was by dropping a paedo-smear. As Vine wrote:

I see that ⁦@brokenbottleboy⁩ describes himself as ‘100 per cent deviant’ which perhaps explains why he likes to obsess about teenage girls with teachers like ⁦@alomshaha.

This, of course, was open season for a pile-on by actual trolls, who obliged Vine by sending goading paedo-themed abuse.

But all Mic had done was to make a joke about that Gove’s daughter is “distanced” from her parents, inspired by a light-hearted Tatler article mentioning how she was in self-isolation over suspected Covid-19. Mic’s commentary on this was to suggest she might rebel in the future “given time” – a reasonable possibility given some other details mentioned in the article. This is the sort of thing we might imagine Ian Hislop saying on Have I Got News For You, where it would be received as witty snark rather than the “appallingly abusive” outpourings of a “repellent coward”.

Rather than provide readers with a full account that would have undermined the perennial “vile trolls target public figure” tabloid trope, the article’s author resorted to vagueness. I would argue that this is suggestive of bad faith.

UPDATE (2 June): Taking their cue from Vine and the Mail on Sunday, a couple of other conservative commentators have now joined in on Twitter. First up, Lydia Suffield, a young freelance writer for the Telegraph, made the false claim that Mic had “joined in with mocking and potentially violating the privacy of a Cabinet minister’s teenage child”; and when Mic politely remonstrated with “Now you know what you said is untrue, I presume you’ll delete this, Lydia”, a Conservative (unless he’s still suspended) Essex County Councillor named Stephen Canning then interjected with “Mic you really should leave the young female children of MPs alone and stop trying to intimidate young women on twitter, it ain’t a good look.”

This is of course a bad-faith strategy by which bad actors work together to establish a reputation-destroying smear as “common knowledge” about a target. Were it not for Canning’s blue tick and Suffield’s meeja profile this would be instantly recognisable as “vile abuse” by “trolls”.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

UPDATE (4 January 2023): The woman at the heart of the allegations, Eleanor Williams (also known as Ellie Williams) has now been convicted of perversion of justice. She was not named in the MailOnline article I discuss below, and as such I didn’t name her either in case there was some legal impediment.

A Tweet from Amy Fenton, a journalist at The Mail, a local paper in Barrow in the north of England:

Staying off Twitter for a bit. I’ve done what any self-respecting reporter would do. But I will NOT tolerate anyone threatening my daughter. I’m now under police protection. Ppl who have threatened me (eg attached) need to know – this is not acceptable. It is illegal.

The attached image shows a Facebook comment from someone going by the name Roger Crozier, who writes “Slit Amy Fenton’s throat while saying Islamic prayers for her”.

The Mail‘s editor, Vanessa Sims, has written of “increasing levels of abuse, intimidation and threats the team at The Mail have received” and of “a gang of 12 men to gathering outside The Mail offices shouting intimidating slurs and demands upon my reporters.”

Sims’s editorial is headlined “A message from the Editor after a Barrow woman is charged with perverting the course of justice”, and she refutes claims of “conspiracy between the press and the police to cover up crimes”. This appears to be a reference to three articles in particular.

On 21 May, Fenton wrote that

POLICE in Barrow have confirmed a lengthy investigation has found ‘no evidence’ of a gang of men exploiting young women in Barrow.

In a video statement, Detective Chief Superintendent Dean Holden, head of crime and safeguarding at Cumbria Police, revealed an investigation has been ongoing for over 12 months.

The video was recorded ‘in response’ to a series of Facebook posts made about sex abuse allegations.

Det Ch Supt Holden reveals ‘an individual has been charged with some offences’.

Two days later, Sims wrote up a court appearance, which explained that a “19-year-old has been charged with seven counts of perverting the course of justice relating to seven allegations made between 2017 and 2020” and noted she had been remanded into custody.

On the same day, however, Sims also reported 

EARLIER this week a teenage girl took to social media to report allegations she had suffered horrific physical and sexual abuse.

The woman in her late teens claimed she had been beaten, burned, drugged and trafficked for sex throughout the north of England by a gang of Asian men.

She posted graphic pictures of injuries including bruises, scratches and burn marks.

The report further clarified that this was the “series of Facebook posts made about sex abuse allegations” alluded to on 21 May.

The two 23 May reports were not explicitly linked, but they followed a 21 May article published by MailOnline, the online stablemate of the national Daily Mail (but no relation to The Mail in Barrow), that combined the two strands under the headline “Girl, 19, is charged with perverting course of justice after telling police she was drugged and raped by Asian sex gang in Cumbria”. Photos of her injuries were included, along with the extra descriptive detail that she had “black eyes”.

Unfortunately, the first impression given by the article was that the woman had been promptly charged with perverting the course of justice after presenting these injuries to police. However, a closer reading of the MailOnline text indicates that this was not the case:

Last night Cumbria Police confirmed it was investigating an incident of physical and sexual abuse that was reported by a woman in her late teens on Tuesday evening.

…Cumbria Police revealed on Wednesday that they had launched a 12 month investigation into claims of sexual and physical abuse by an organised gang…

…Today the force said the only charges to arise from the investigation was against a young woman. In a statement it said: ‘Cumbria Constabulary can confirm that a 19-year-old woman, from Barrow-in-Furness, is subject of ongoing criminal proceedings.

‘She was charged with seven counts of perverting the course of justice on 26th March 2020 and was released on bail.

‘She has subsequently been arrested on 20th May for breach of her bail conditions and has been remanded in custody, court date to be notified. ‘

This strongly implies that the new “incident” post-dates her being charged; it is not quite clear if the images are allegedly the result of what happened, or are older images newly uploaded. One may be tempted to speculate about how this “incident”might relate to the charges against her, or to seek out what the woman herself says about it on social media, but a newspaper must handle the matter cautiously at the moment. As Sims explains:

The UK law dictates strict rules the press, including The Mail, must follow when reporting ongoing legal proceedings such as these.

Often The Mail team knows much more than what we are legally allowed to publish but we are duty bound to follow rules so not to prejudice ongoing police investigations or court cases.

Such restrictions are well known – more than once in the past they have been flouted by Tommy Robinson, who then frames the legal consequences of his actions as state censorship and persecution. Robinson showed up at protest in support of the woman that took place yesterday – judging from clips on YouTube he was well received, although the woman’s family have rejected his involvement, telling The Mail:

“We want to make it clear that this has nothing to do with us and we do not want him involved.

“We are a peaceful family who condemns any form of racial hatred.”

Also supporting the woman is the respected advocate for grooming gang victims Maggie Oliver, who has used Twitter to promote a social media “justice” campaign set up on the woman’s behalf. Referring to the MailOnline article, she wrote “Far easier to blame the victim than embark on a complex investigation”, which gave the false impression that Cumbria Police are not investigating her apparently new injuries; and asked about why the story has not received wider coverage, Oliver suggested that “the authorities are very powerful and close down MSM”. The campaign has published further details and claims, including the suggestion that  one of the alleged gang members had boasted that the local paper was in his “pocket”. Oliver’s efforts to promote the campaign have now been commended by the celebrity television presenter Rachel Riley.

The Mail has also highlighted the impact of the allegations on innocent Asian business owners residing locally.

Note on the woman’s name

It appears that the woman has waived her right to anonymity – the justice campaign uses her name, and her social media posts both use her name and show her face (substantiating the facial injuries described by MailOnline). However, her name is not used in most of the mainstream media reports about her, and in the above I follow their lead for the time being. It may be that there is some other legal impediment to naming her that is being ignored on social media, or that posting on social media is not sufficient as a formal waiver if she were to object.

The terms “woman” or even “young woman” perhaps fail to convey the particular vulnerability of a 19-year-old who is still a thresholder adult, but “teenager” or “girl” could be misleading in other ways.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

From the Independent, and widely reported:

Conservative MPs including a health minister have shared an edited video of Keir Starmer from a “far-right” Twitter account.

The footage, dating from Sir Keir’s time as director of public prosecutions in 2013, was taken from an announcement of new guidelines on charging grooming gangs.

But it had been edited to remove the start of the interview where he was asked to give examples of the “wrong approach”, making him appear to justify failing to believe child victims.

The three MPs manually RTed the Tweet with added comments of their own; both the original account and the MPs endorsements of it have now disappeared, although without the grace of a corrective for the benefit of their followers or an apology to Starmer.

Each MP handled the matter differently: Nadine Dorries simply deleted the Tweet without explanation; Maria Caulfield appears to have deleted her entire account (although there has been some suggestion it was suspended); while Lucy Allan (previously blogged here) chose to double-down on the general point while not naming Starmer again directly. Allan thus provided a short quote to Aaron Banks’s website Westmonster, in which she stated that “In standing up for victims of CSE in Telford I have had to challenge police, council, and CPS (vigorously).” She did not go into any detail, but the point was merely to create the headline “Telford MP slams establishment failure on Child Sexual Exploitation” as a self-promoting diversion from her mistake. (1)

The account that provided the misleading news clip went by the name Njames World (@NJamesWorld), and it had in excess of 25,000 followers. (2) Other Tweets from the account still visible in  Google Cache include the opinion that Priti Patel is “useless” as Home Secretary for failing to prevent the arrival of illegal immigrants; that we should remember that the Nazis were Germans, as this explains modern Germany’s position on Europe; and that illegal immigrants are “scumbags from all over the world”. He also suggested Starmer’s clapping in support of the NHS was done “for the cameras”, rather than because he genuinely cares about the NHS – a claim that also appeared elsewhere.

At LBC, James O’Brien has argued that the MPs promoted the Tweet because they were dismayed by Starmer’s performance in holding Boris Johnson to account at Prime Minister’s Question Time; but although Dorries in particular has a history of Trumpian lashing out (sometimes in concord with bad actors on social media), this explanation is unduly conspiratorial. The simple fact is that many MPs are superficial and careless, and easily manipulated into amplifying misinformation. This has been very obvious ever since the heyday of the satirical TV show Brass Eye.

Why on earth would Keir Starmer appear on TV to justify not prosecuting grooming gangs? Why would nobody have noticed the significance of it, apart from some semi-anonymous Twitter account? Two very obvious questions that went over the heads of MPs who saw what looked like an easy bit of point-scoring. But how did such rubbish even find its way into their Twitter feeds in the first place? What kind of trash is informing their decision-making on a daily basis?

Footnotes

1. I previously discussed media reports about “grooming” crimes in Telford here.

2. It has been suggested that “NJames World” was someone named James Edding or James Edwin, allegedly a far-right activist with “links” to National Action. However, the only source for this claim is one John O’Connell, and his claim is undocumented. This seems to be a pattern with O’Connell: last month, he made headlines with claims about “128 Twitter accounts” supposedly impersonating NHS staff, but the only evidence he provided was one account that was obviously a parody rather than an impersonation. O’Connell refused to be drawn further, saying that he would produce the evidence once it was “gold plated”. That has not happened so far.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

From Le Monde, 2018:

Il va de plateaux de télévision en colloques, de sessions de formation dispensées à l’Ecole nationale de la magistrature à des interventions auprès de psychiatres ou de commissaires de police, ce qui ne l’empêche pas de continuer à interroger des criminels récidivistes un peu partout dans le monde. Dès qu’il s’agit de crimes et de faits divers sanglants, Stéphane Bourgoin est appelé à témoigner de son savoir acquis auprès de plus de soixante-dix « serials killers » (surtout américains) qu’il a interrogés et filmés depuis presque quarante ans. Auteur d’une cinquantaine de livres et de documentaires sur le sujet,

Alas – from the Guardian, yesterday:

An online investigation has exposed French author Stéphane Bourgoin, whose books about serial killers have sold millions of copies in France, as a serial liar…. But in January, anonymous collective the 4ème Oeil Corporation accused him of lying about his past…. He… acknowledged that he never trained with the FBI, never interviewed Charles Manson, met far fewer killers than he has previously claimed, and never worked as a professional footballer – another claim he had made.

Shades of Paul Harrison, whom I discussed here. The 4ème Oeil (“Fourth Eye”) Corporation website can be seen here; the story hit French media on 6 May, when Bourgoin came clean in an interview with Paris Match.

Bourgoin has also admitted making up the existence of a former wife who was supposedly murdered by a serial killer in the US. It appears he appropriated material from two South African police officers, Micki Pistorius and Derick Norsworthy, and an FBI agent named John E. Douglas.

Bourgoin’s Wikipedia entry provides a useful overview of his career – as ever, the site must be used with caution, but there are links to sources. Of particular interest is the extent of his work with police:

En conséquence de son intérêt particulier pour les tueurs en série, Bourgoin est conférencier pendant près de 10 ans — jusqu’en 2007 — au Centre national de formation de police judiciaire de l’école de la Gendarmerie nationale française et à l’École nationale de la magistrature en 2015 et 2018. Il a donné 5 cours à l’École nationale de l’administration pénitentiaire.

It should be noted, though, that that some professionals he advised maintain that he has exceptional insight into the subject.

Bourgoin’s fascination with serial killers appears to have developed out of an interest in horror and fantastic fiction. In the 1980s he translated some works of Robert Bloch, including Bloch’s 1962 novelisation of his own film The Couch, cannily retitled by the French publisher as Psychopathe (although in 2011 Bourgoin also provided the preface for a French edition of Bloch’s classic Psycho). He also translated a study of H.P. Lovecraft by Frank Belknap Long, and wrote books profiling the cinema of Roger Corman and Terence Fisher.

Bourgoin did live in the US in the 1970s, but rather than being trained by the FBI he was writing screenplays for films starring the pornographic actor John Holmes.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

From a column by Matt Ridley and David Davis MP in the Daily Telegraph (and reproduced here):

Is the chilling truth that the decision to impose lockdown was based on crude mathematical guesswork?

…It is not as if [Neil] Ferguson’s track record is good. In 2001 the Imperial College team’s modelling led to the culling of 6 million livestock and was criticised by epidemiological experts as severely flawed. In various years in the early 2000s Ferguson predicted up to 136,000 deaths from mad cow disease, 200 million from bird flu and 65,000 from swine flu. The final death toll in each case was in the hundreds.

The link there is to a previous article, which outlines criticisms by Michael Thrusfield, professor of veterinary epidemiology at Edinburgh University, and Alex Donaldson, head of the Pirbright Laboratory at the Institute for Animal Health, both in relation to the foot-and-mouth disease modelling. The various figures quoted above, though, derive from a short list that has appeared on the Telegraph‘s “Politics Live” feed a few days before.

However, I’m sceptical that we can extrapolate a general theory of Ferguson’s incompetence based on one high-profile controversy, and the other examples of Ferguson’s “track record” – a short selective list chosen by the two authors based on UK media familiarity, so nothing about his work on influenza, Ebola or ZIka – are not fairly presented. A computational biologist named Nicolas Bray has pointed to the sources:

On BSE/vCJD: As quoted by Bray, this comes from a 2000 article in Nature: “We show here that the current mortality data are consistent with between 63 and 136,000 cases”

On bird flu: Bray describes this as a “context-free quote which appears to be discussing a *potential* bird flu pandemic”. Source is a Guardian article.

On swine flu: “the worst that might realistically happen”. Source is paragraph 82 of a Science and Technology Committee Parliamentary transcript.

On vCJD, the team of which Ferguson was a part revised its estimates as new evidence came in. As described in by Philip Yam’s book The Pathological Protein: Mad Cow, Chronic Wasting, and Other Deadly Prion Diseases:

Assuming an incubation period of less than 20 years, the U.K. will probably experience only several hundred vCJD cases, according to an August 2000 estimate by [Roy M.] Anderson and his colleagues. Their estimate for the maximum number of cases was 136,000 — and that number assumes an incubation period that can be as long as 60 years. “This would make it unusual, but it cannot be ruled out,” remarked Anderson’s colleague Neil M. Ferguson, especially considering that kuru can incubate for more than 40 years. In 2002, the team lowered its estimates, giving a range of 50 to 50,000 vCJD deaths between 2001 and 2080; in February 2003, it dropped its estimate further, to 10 to 7,000 deaths.

According to a Guardian profile of Ferguson, the team

came up with an estimate that was incredibly broad for the likely number of human deaths – between 50 and 50,000 – but that was at a time when some were predicting 2 million people would be infected. There were calls for the sort of NHS resources now going into Covid-19 to be directed towards vCJD. Ferguson and [Christl] Donnelly’s modelling helped defuse that. In the end the UK had about 170 cases.

This works against the media narrative Ferguson as a man whose “track record” consists of sensationalist scaremongering predictions that are then proved to be wildly off-base.  Ferguson’s work, like anyone’s, is open to criticism, but why resort to misrepresentation?

The focus of Ridley and Davis’s article is on the alleged shortcomings of computer coding used in the Imperial College model of Covid-19 infection. It is difficult for non-scientists to make informed assessments here, although I will note informal reactions from a Berkeley biologist named Michael Eisen that the critique amounts to a “ridiculous attack”. Eisen writes that “Nobody thinks the Imperial model is flawless, but its top-line COVID predictions are the result of basic math – the model just fleshes them out”, while Bray adds that Ridley “doesn’t even realize that, as a stochastic model, it’s *supposed* to produce different outputs”.

A defence of Ferguson’s work on Covid-19 by Bryan Appleyard appeared in the most recent Sunday Times.

Donnelly and Ferguson’s 1999 monograph Statistical Aspects of BSE and vCJD: Models for Epidemics can be browsed on Google Books.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

From Buzzfeed, 29 April:

Right-wing media and conspiracy theorists have seized on a series of grants awarded over the course of six years to study coronaviruses to undermine Dr. Anthony Fauci… The narrative moved to the spotlight at the White House when, during a press conference on April 17, a reporter with Newsmax asked President Donald Trump about the grants, totaling $3.7 million since 2014.

…The Daily Mail, a British tabloid known for publishing unreliable stories, first reported the $3.7 million figure on April 11. The paper wrote a story on the funding, parts of which went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Although the article stated that there’s no evidence the novel coronavirus leaked from the lab, it implied a correlation between the grants and the pandemic: “The revelation that the Wuhan Institute was experimenting on bats from the area already known to be the source of COVID-19 — and doing so with American money — has sparked further fears that the lab, and not the market, is the original outbreak source.”

The story actually appeared in the Mail on Sunday, but the paper shares its website with the Daily Mail and Mail Online and the three titles are frequently conflated. The MoS boasted of its role a week later:

Last week, this newspaper also disclosed that the institute had undertaken corona-virus experiments on bats captured more than 1,000 miles away in Yunnan, funded by a $3.7 million grant from the US government.

…Our revelations led to Donald Trump being quizzed at a press conference last week about the leak theory, to which the President replied: ‘We are doing a very thorough examination of this horrible situation.’

The result was that Trump ordered the cancellation of National Institutes of Health funding to the EcoHealth Alliance in New York, which had been cooperating with the Wuhan institute.

In fact, though, only about $100,000 a year went to the institute, through collaborative efforts. Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth, has now spoken about this in an interview for CBS’s 60 Minutes:

I can’t just show up in China and say, “Hi, I wanna work on your viruses.” I have to do this through the correct channels. So, what we do is we talk to NIH, and they approve the people we can work with in China. And that happened. And our collaboration with Wuhan was preapproved by NIH.

The 60 Minutes segment undercuts claims that the virus was created by human manipulation (it lacks tell-tale markers), or that it was a natural virus that escaped from the lab. On this latter suggestion, Daszak explains:

The closest known relative [in the Wuhan lab inventory] is one that’s different enough that it is not SARS-CoV-2. So, there’s just no evidence that anybody had it in the lab anywhere in the world prior to the outbreak.

The lab escape theory has also been heavily pushed by the Mail on Sunday.

In Daszak’s assessment:

This politicization of science is really damaging. You know, the conspiracy theories out there have essentially closed down communication between scientists in China and scientists in the U.S. We need that communication in an outbreak to learn from them how they control it so we can control it better. It’s sad to say, but it will probably cost lives.

Or as the CBS headline puts it more bluntly:

Trump Administration Cuts Funding for Coronavirus Researcher, Jeopardizing Possible COVID-19 Cure

This has apparently so upset Trump that he has issued a Tweet accusing CBS of defending China for business reasons.

CBS traces the grant cancellation back to a 14 April appearance by Matt Gaetz on Tucker Carlson Tonight; but that was already several days after the MoS article, which was part of a series written by the paper’s political editor Glen Owen. Owen’s journalism consists to a large extent of conveying political messages from people in government, such as a piece just yesterday undermining Health Secretary Matt Hancock, apparently for the benefit of cabinet rivals (and perhaps even Boris Johnson himself).

Why was Owen tasked with the job of probing virology in China and coming up with sensational stories (e.g. here and here)? It is reasonable to suppose that the material was suggested to him by a political contact, and given that his series kicked off with “Downing Street says China faces a ‘reckoning’ over their handling of coronavirus” on 28 March, citing “Boris Johnson’s allies”, we may suspect Downing Street sources. Classic Dom?

Footnote

Last week also saw a flurry of interest in a supposed “leaked intelligence dossier” reported in Australian media. As reported by the UK Guardian,

[Intelligence] sources… insisted that a “15-page dossier” highlighted by the Australian Daily Telegraph which accused China of a deadly cover up was not culled from intelligence from the Five Eyes network, an alliance between the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

…One told the Guardian they believed the information that appeared in the News Corp title was most likely to have originally come from the US: “My instinct is that it was a tool for building a counter-narrative and applying pressure to China. So it’s the intent behind it that’s most important. So possibly open source leads with a classification slapped on it.”

The Australia Daily Telegraph report was the subject of an ABC Media Watch segment that can be seen here. According to the Sydney Morning Herald (link added):

The episode highlights the danger of mischaracterising the work of intelligence agencies. Some of the footnotes in the document contained references to US media reports that were based on unsubstantiated assertions from the US government – the same kind of circular intelligence which resulted in the “children overboard” affair in 2001.

One wonders if British media reports also featured. The origins of the dossier are obscure, but it is thought to have emerged from the US Embassy in Canberra. Did a staffer there cobble it together, or was it a freelance effort by some third-party bad actors that was pressed into service? Either is possible.

The dossier has also been heavily promoted by the US Christian right, with one neo-Pentecostal prophet claiming that “on April 23, the Holy Spirit showed me China is hiding information that needs to be released in the next 30 days”. She claimed that the dossier was a “partial fulfillment” of this.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

A headline at the Daily Mail:

Hypocrisy of the media luvvies and FT reporter who turned his paper pink with shame

The article, by Richard Pendlebury, starts with the resignation of the Financial Times reporter Mark Di Stefano following the revelation that he had hacked into recent Zoom staff meetings at the Independent and the Evening Standard. However, Pendlebury’s focus is on how some people on Twitter had expressed commiseration for how Di Stefano had ruined his career:

As he disappeared into digital exile, a flurry of tweets from the great and the good at the BBC and the Guardian, as well as hard-Left activists and even a Press reform campaigner, expressed sympathy and support for him. But by so doing, they turned what had been a scandal about one man’s ethical failings into a wider debate on the double standards of some in the liberal media.

Those lined up for a Daily Mail tweet-shaming for showing a bit of sympathy include Emily Maitlis of BBC Newsnight, the left-wing journalists Ash Sarkar (doesn’t work for the BBC, but is a “regular BBC Question Time panellist”, which is near enough) and Aaron Bastani, Pippa Crerar (“formerly of the Guardian and now political editor of the Daily Mirror, which has had to pay out huge sums to settle phone-hacking claims of its own”) and Paul Lewis of BBC Radio 4’s Money Box, as well as Peter Jukes (discussed further below).

It should be pointed out that while the Tweets cited by Pendlebury might be regarded as unduly generous, none of them condoned what Di Stefano had done or expressed the view that the outcome was unfair. The latter, though, was the opinion of Alex Wickham, a former colleague of Di Stefano at Buzzfeed. As noted by Tim at Zelo Street, Wickham wrote:

Glad there is so much support already for Mark, who is a superb reporter and one of the best, most decent people I know. This is an absolutely ridiculous and appalling outcome.

Wickham got his career start in journalism with Paul Staines’s Guido Fawkes smear-site, although since joining Buzzfeed he has re-invented himself as a creditable mainstream journalist. Others who dodged Pendlebury’s censure included the Press Gazette‘s Dominic Ponsford (“Big slip-up this, but he who never made a mistake never made anything – I am sure @MarkDiStef will bounce back from this in due course a lot wiser as a result” – here); and there was also this Tweet from an Australian journalist named Peter Ford:

Hope you learn from this. You’ve orchestrated campaigns against many people,including myself,in the past. You’ve encouraged pile ons and a cancel culture against anyone you consider ‘conservative leaning’. Despite this I hope in time you bounce back as you’re clearly not a fool.

Pendlebury quotes the first half of this Tweet as evidence that those expressing sympathy are disregarding previous instances where Di Stefano had caused harm – but he ignores the last sentence, which is comparable to other expressions of goodwill.

Perhaps Pendlebury takes the view that the charge of “hypocrisy” only applies to left-wing or liberal supporters of press reform, although most people can understand that someone arguing for press reform might also respond to the predicament of an individual journalist who transgresses in sorrow rather than in anger, particularly if they have had personal dealings with them. Further, Maitlis and Lewis are on the list simply because they work for the BBC. The article, then, can be seen as belonging to the bad-faith genre of the Daily Mail vendetta, rather than journalism in the public interest.

Peter Jukes is the “Press reform campaigner” referred to by Pendlebury, and although he’s only part of the story it’s possible that he was the primary target of the article:

…But perhaps the most unlikely goodwill message came from Peter Jukes, author of the phone hacking éxpose The Fall Of The House Of Murdoch and an early supporter of Hacked Off. Mr Jukes is now director of Byline, the media organisation funded by motorsport tycoon Max Mosley…

Mr Jukes tweeted: ‘We’ve had many disagreements but I’m still sad to hear this, Mark. Be well”.

Pendlebury goes on to note that Di Stefano was soon after accused by a BBC News researcher named Hannah Bayman of having infiltrated a private WhatsApp chat of women BBC workers two years ago. Di Stefano had published content from this as “leaked messages”, but it doesn’t appear that there was much suggestion at the time that he had stolen them. This does now appear more likely (although he denies it), and Pendlebury adds:

It may be that Ms Bayman’s tweet – retweeted a number of times – caused Mr Jukes to do an about-turn. On Saturday night he tweeted of his original message to Di Stefano: ‘For various reasons I retract this…’

The “hypocrisy” narrative thus collapses completely – there was some (arguably undeserved) sympathy for (but still strong disapproval over) someone who appeared to have made an error of judgement and crossed the line, withdrawn when further evidence suggested a determined repeat offender.

But why does Pendlebury write that Bayman’s Tweet “may be” why Peter retracted his sympathy, when Peter responded directly to her with an explicit explanation? He wrote (as again noted by Tim at Zelo Street):

This puts things into a different context, especially with the trolling of  @carolecadwalla. One has to ask, since @janinegibson was his editor at both @BuzzFeedUK and @FT if she knew anything about this.

This is the real issue on which “a scandal about one man’s ethical failings” becomes “a wider debate”. Pendlebury notes in passing a “source” as saying that Di Stefano was Janine Gibson’s “golden boy”, but this doesn’t seem to be an avenue that the Daily Mail is interested in pursuing.

For some reason, Pendlebury’s screed was not uploaded to the Daily Mail website, although can be read on Press Reader, which disallows cut-and-pasting of extracts (I had to manually transcribe quotes above). The article also appeared in the print edition, and a legible photograph of it was uploaded to Twitter by Daily Mail hatchet man Guy Adams. Adams has expressed the belief that press critics had declined to criticise the Financial Times for Di Stefano’s hacking because the FT had supported Remain rather than Brexit, and he in particular denounced the group Hacked Off for supposedly not having referred to the incident.

When Adams was shown that this last point was incorrect, and that Hacked Off had indeed made an unequivocal statement on the matter, his complaint then was that they had failed to make more of it, arguing that “if a popular newspaper had done this, you’d have been on about it non stop for the last week”. This was addressed to Hacked Off’s Evan Harris, who responded:

Let’s consider the *facts* (look it up), shall we, Guy?
FT: One reporter. 2 instances. Victims – newspapers. Discovered. Culprit gone.
Tabloid hacking scandal: Dozens of executives. 1000s of cases. Victims – inc families of dead children. Covered up for years. Culprits promoted

A valiant effort, but given the ludicrously disproportionate and selective Daily Mail full-page spread I don’t think putting things in perspective is likely to have any effect.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »