Bartholomew's Notes

Last night’s Antiques Roadshow on BBC 1 had a curious collection: an old kitchen table used by Mary Whitehouse for her “Clean Up TV” campaign, along with some of her paperwork and a portrait by John Bratby. The items were brought to Layer Marney Tower, near Colchester, by her son Richard Whitehouse, who recalled how the table would be “strewn with papers”. He also discussed, in a dryly jocular manner, the difficulties faced by him and his siblings:

We certainly felt sidelined and secondary to the campaign. It was rather unfortunate that she started the campaign when we were young teens… Yes, you know, “No sex and violence”, when that’s the only thing we were really interested in… She used to watch a lot of porn and violence, and I began to wonder.

Mary Whitehouse’s granddaughter was also on the show, and gave her own assessment:

I don’t particularly believe in what she stood for, I don’t really agree with the campaign particularly. I just think she’s a remarkable woman because she stood up for what she believed in, really, which is quite amazing.

The AR expert, Paul Atterbury, declined to put a price on the table and paperwork beyond it being “a valuable social archive”, although he valued the Bratby painting – which Richard Whitehouse keeps “behind the door” – to probably more than £5,000, “because she’s quite an important subject”.

Richard Whitehouse has spoken about his mother previously – in 2008 he gave an interview to the Daily Telegraph.

The programme was broadcast from 8pm to 9pm – viewers could then switch over to Channel 4, where there was a satirical drama in which the Prime Minister of the UK is obliged to have sex with a pig on live television in order to save the life of a kidnapped princess.

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I’ve just caught up with Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, a BBC observational documentary on what might be called the “wealth guru” subculture. The programme, by Venessa Engle, included interviews with several of the gurus:  Robert Kiyosaki of Rich Dad, Poor Dad fame, T. Harv Eker, who divulges Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, and – from the UK – Marcus De Maria. However, the main focus was on the followers, including those who have found success (and in turn become “wealth mentors” themselves) and those who are still aspiring to the millionaire lifestyle – racking up thousands of pounds of credit card debts in the process, as they attend seminars and conferences and pay for financial mentors.

The “secret” appears to boil down to “get a property portfolio and some shares”, and reviews of the show unsurprisingly drip with disdain. From the  Guardian:

“We’re going back to feudal times!” Kiyosaki tells his loving fans. “When you had the rich and you had the peasants!” On this evidence, they look more like they’re actually going back to the wild west, where roving merchants peddled the curative properties of snake oil, and gullible, wounded souls with nothing else to hope for fell for their spiel hook, line and sinker.

The Independent, meanwhile, called the programme “quietly devastating”:

It turns out wealth creation is big business, from “how to” books to pricey seminars to a board game named Cashflow (a tongue-removed-from-cheek Monopoly). It’s a nasty web where self-help-speak, capitalist theory, and religious cultishness meet. And the wealth gurus squat in the middle like greedy spiders while poor, credulous individuals get themselves completely tangled up.

As for Eker – the self-described Trump-Buddha mashup:

This odious little man is one of those responsible for Janice [a nursery teacher] believing that if she rubs her earlobes while repeating “I am a millionaire”, she’ll soon be rolling in it. He’s fond of booming over a microphone to his many wide-eyed event attendees that the universe “owes” them a million pounds. 

The overlap with religion was of particular interest: one woman from New Romney explained how she became drawn into the scene when a young relative received a terminal diagnosis and she turned to the writings of a medium:

The very first book I read on self-development, or looking beyond “what is”, was by Betty Shine, and she was a medium, and then You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay was a huge impact on me… Then I discovered Robert Allen’s Multiple Streams of Income… Just because you have money it doesn’t mean you can’t be spiritual, and I mean, money’s passive, it doesn’t come with emotions, money is just a tool, and it’s up to us how we use it.

This sounds rather like a New Age version of the Prosperity Gospel: self-help, motivationalism, an optimistic spiritual message, and a dose of magical thinking.

Perhaps the most depressing interviewees were two teenage Kiyosaki acolytes. While some of the contestants on shows like The Apprentice have inflated views of their own business acumen, at least they tend to understand the need to come up with and develop actual business ideas. By contrast, these two were under the impression that the road to riches is a shopping trip to the estate agent with a couple of “wealth coaches” in tow.

Meanwhile, a professional investor named John T. Reed has a website rating – and debunking – a number of financial gurus here.

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The book blurb for Terry Waite: Why was He Kidnapped?, by Gavin Hewitt (Bloomsbury, 1991):

Meanwhile, on page 197:

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The website of the Government of the Russian Federation has an English-language transcript of Vladimir Putin’s recent meeting with Ephraim,  Archimandrite of the Vatopedi Monastery on Mount Athos and custodian of the Mother of God’s belt. The belt has has just completed a tour of Russian cities; it is believed that the relic has the power to help women conceive, and the St Andrew the First-Called Foundation, which brought it to the country, is hopeful that it will promote “family values” in Russia. I blogged on the background to the tour here.

Ephraim explained the relic’s power to Putin:

Archimandrite Ephraim: …I am certain that the belt of Virgin Mary has made your people’s faith even stronger. We receive telephone calls all the time, with people sharing their miraculous experiences, such as having a child after ten years of marriage. There have been 20 such cases already. There will certainly be a book on all these miracles that have occurred during the relic’s journey around Russia.   

Vladimir Putin: If this helps to solve our demographic issue, it is most welcome.

The two men also discussed Greek-Russian cooperation:

Vladimir Putin: Your efforts certainly show the bonds between our nations and will strengthen them. This will undoubtedly give an impetus for further development of the relations between our countries. Thank you very much.

Archimandrite Ephraim: Mr Putin, I am very glad to have been by your side all this time… Greece is going through a difficult period and I ask you to provide assistance to our country wherever possible under these challenging conditions. 

I’m sure that Putin will be more than willing to oblige; as I’ve quoted more than once previously, Time magazine  in 2007 described the Russian Orthodox Church as Russia’s “main ideological arm and a vital foreign policy instrument”.

I previously blogged on Ephraim in 2008, when Vatopedi became mired in a land-swap scandal involving the Greek government. The St Andrew the First-Called Foundation is headed by Putin confidant Vladimir Yakunin, and in July the Foundation’s “World Public Forum” held a conference on the need to protect Mount Athos from tourists and women.

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Last week (19-20 November) the David Horowitz Freedom Center held its 2011 “Restoration Weekend”. Reports from the event contain no surprises: the speakers were as expected, and the rhetoric predictable. The highlight appears to have been an address by Glenn Beck, who warned about the “dark, evil stuff” of the Occupy movement – he was introduced in gushing terms by Horowitz:

Until Glenn Beck came along, ex-radicals like myself were endlessly frustrated by conservatives’ refusal to look at history, refusal to connect the dots, refusal to understand that these are not idealists, but dedicated anti-capitalist, anti-liberty and anti-American crusaders who number in the millions; that they are financed by anti-American billionaires, like George Soros?; and leftwing foundations, billionaire foundations, like the Tides Foundation and the Ford Foundation; and communist unions, like the SEIU; and criminal organizations, like ACORN; and that they are part of an international socialist Left which supports our Islamist enemies in the Middle East and Asia.

The British end was represented by Baroness Cox, Douglas Murray, and James Delingpole – Delingpole attempted a write-up at the Spectator, but after the first couple of paragraphs he descends into a generic rant against against the evils of liberals and moderate conservatives (the latter denounced as “cowardly, loathsome ideological sell-outs”).

Last year’s event included a special award for Pamela Geller, although she doesn’t appear to have been present this time.

Beck followed up his Restoration Weekend gig with a showing at the Zionist Organization of America’s annual dinner, alongside Michele Bachmann, where he received the Dr. Miriam & Sheldon Adelson Defender of Israel Award and was praised in a video message from Netanyahu. The JTA, however, was more circumspect:

As for Beck, who was introduced by billionaire businessman-philanthropist and Netanyahu-backer Sheldon Adelson, he is arguably the most polarizing media figure in Jewish life. Hundreds of liberal rabbis signed a letter in January asking that he be sanctioned for “completely unacceptable” use of the Holocaust and Nazi imagery. He has urged his listeners to quit their church or synagogue if “social justice” is part of its mission. And in a two-part series that accused left-wing financier and Jewish Holocaust survivor George Soros of collaborating with the Nazis, Beck flirted with what some critics saw as anti-Semitic conspiracies of Jewish control of media and finance.

Occasionally Beck has apologized — as he did after he compared Reform rabbis to Islamists — and then gone on to offend again.

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From Ekathimerini:

In a bid to ease a crisis that brought Greece closer to a default and a eurozone exit, leaders of the PASOK socialists, New Democracy conservatives, and ultranationalist LAOS party last week agreed on an interim administration under technocrat economist Lucas Papademos. Since its establishment in 2000, LAOS has campaigned on an anti-immigrant, nationalist platform.

…LAOS, which garnered less than 6 percent of the vote in the 2009 general elections, is over-represented in the 48-member Cabinet with one minister, one alternate and two deputy ministers.

…The past of LAOS’s Makis Voridis, the new minister for infrastructure, transport and networks, is… a political minefield. In the early 1980s he led the EPEN (National Political Union) youth group that was founded by ex-dictator Georgios Papadopoulos from inside Korydallos Prison. Five years later, Voridis was kicked out of the law school student union for engaging in extremist acts. In an infamous picture taken at the time, he is seen wielding a hand-made ax (he later said it was for self-defense).

In the mid-1990s, Voridis established the Hellenic Front (Elliniko Metopo), a nationalist party with close ties to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front in France. In 2005, Hellenic Front merged with LAOS and Voridis was elected to Parliament two years later.

I blogged on LAOS and its leader Giorgos Karatzeferis back in 2005 – the LAOS acronym stands for  “Laikos Orthodoxos Synagermos”, and can be translated in various ways (here’s a few: “The People’s Orthodox Rally”, “The Populist Orthodox Rally”, “The People’s Orthodox Alarm”, “The Popular Orthodox Herald Party”).

Mark Ames has further details at Naked Capitalism:

…In 1994, Voridis helped found a new far-right party, The Hellenic Front. In 2004’s elections, Voridis’s “Hellenic Front Party” formed a bloc with the neo-Nazi “Front Party,” headed by Greece’s most notorious Holocaust denier, Konstantinos Plevis, a former fascist terrorist whose book, “Jews: The Whole Truth,” praised Adolph Hitler and called for the extermination of Jews. Plevis was charged and found guilty of “inciting racial hatred” in 2007, but his sentence was overturned on appeal in 2009.

By that time, Makis “Hammer” Voridis had traded up in the world of Greek fascism, merging his Hellenic Front Party into the far-right LAOS party, an umbrella party for all sorts of neo-Nazi and far-right political organizations. LAOS was founded by another raving anti-Semite, Giorgos Karatzeferis—nicknamed “KaratzaFührer” in Greece for alleging that the Holocaust and Auschwitz are Jewish “myths,” and saying that Jews have “no legitimacy to speak in Greece.” The Anti-Defamation League is going ballistic about it; for some reason, the media hasn’t taken notice, except in Israel.

As well as formerly promoting Holocaust denial, Karatzeferis has called for the banning of religiously-offensive art. In 2003 he objected to Asperges Me, a painting which showed an erect penis next to a crucifix dripping with semen; Karatzeferis’ complaint included the detail that “the penis, that thing, looked circumcised”.

According to YNet, Karatzeferis is now moderating his rhetoric:

His conciliatory words may be connected to a secret telegram sent by the American embassy in Athens. Following LAOS’ great success in the Greek general elections in 2009 (it won close to six percent of the votes), US embassy officials wrote that Karatzaferis realizes that in light of his party’s growing influence, it is essential that it distance itself from ultra-nationalist positions and anti-Semitic rhetoric.

The telegram was made public by the WikiLeaks website.

According to a LAOS party member who briefed the US embassy staffers, Karatzaferis instructed the party’s leaders to soften their anti-Semitic comments so Washington would not object to the party’s inclusion in a future Greek government.

(H/T World War 4 Report)

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UK Christian Right lobby-group Christian Concern reports:

There have been reports that ‘Occupy’ activists in America have started targeting Christians, in a new development for the protest movement.

On 18 November ‘Occupy Springfield’ activists organised a demonstration outside a Christian coffee house, set up by Pastor Scott Lively as an inner-city Christian mission to Springfield, Massachusetts…

Although his focus is on helping people live by Christian principles, Dr Lively was targeted because of his pro-family activism. Occupy Springfield has publicly stated that one of their goals is to close down his mission completely. They put an advert in the local paper, the Springfield Republican, attacking the pastor and accusing him of ‘hate crimes’. The signatories included well-known homosexual activists.

The text is mostly sourced from Brian Camenker’s MassResistance (var. Mass Resistance), which organised a counter-protest to defend Lively, and which denounces Occupy as “anti-American, pro-Muslim, and particularly hostile to Christianity and traditional values”.

For some reason, Christian Concern is somewhat vague as to the nature Lively’s “pro-family activism”, but he most famous as the co-author of a book entitled The Pink Swastika. For the uninitiated, the Southern Poverty Law Center has some background:

Written by fundamentalist activists Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, The Pink Swastika says that rather than being victimized by the Nazis, gay men in Hitler’s inner circle actually helped mastermind the Holocaust.

“While we cannot say that homosexuals caused the Holocaust, we must not ignore their central role in Nazism,” write Lively and Abrams. “To the myth of the ‘pink triangle’ — the notion that all homosexuals in Nazi Germany were persecuted — we must respond with the reality of the ‘pink swastika.'”

Lively is particularly popular in Latvia, and a Russian-language translation of the book has been promoted in Latvia by Pastor Alexey Ledyaev, the head of the anti-gay New Generation Church in Riga. Christian Concern’s director Andrea Williams met Ledyaev’s “administrator” and other New Generation figures at a church in Northampton in November 2010.

Lively is also sympathetic to the anti-gay crackdown in Uganda; back in February, he wrote a column for WorldNetDaily in which he explained that Uganda was “being murdered”:

The murderers are the lavender Marxists, the now-global network of sexual revolutionaries bent on remaking the entire world in their own perverted image, whose juggernaut has toppled even once-mighty Britain, crushing under their lavender boots after eight centuries the symbol of its Christian power: the Magna Carta, whose first principle had proclaimed “The English church must be free!”

…Uganda is the only country in the world with a national holiday commemorating its rejection of sexual perversion. Every June 3 it honors the 22 young men and boys who were tortured and roasted alive in 1886 by homosexual King Mwanga, because they refused to submit to sodomy. Is it any wonder, then, that Uganda has reacted violently against the army of agitators, led by George Soros, who now seek to re-homosexualize Ugandan culture?…

Despite railing against homosexual “murderers” who have understandably provoked a violent reaction in a country which has been “thriving in Christian revival”, Lively has since clarified that he doesn’t support the proposed Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which includes the death penalty for “serial offenders”.

Lively heads Abiding Truth Ministries, and his website is Defend the Family. That site is currently promoting an article by a certain Kevin DuJan on HillBuzz, who complains that the media has been unfairly targeting Herman Cain over allegations of sexual harassment while ignoring evidence that Barack Obama is gay:

During the 2008 election, I campaigned for Hillary Clinton in the Democrat primaries. Repeatedly, I heard over and over here in Chicago that Barack Obama is gay and that his marriage to Michelle is one of mutual convenience.  In the black community, this is called “being on the down-low”, where a closeted gay male weds an often-times gruff and demanding woman (typically without other male suitors of her own) to take public scrutiny off them both and afford the pair a successful life they’d never achieve separately.

There are, apparently, a lot of such relationships forged at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago — where Barack Obama’s pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, oversaw the coupling of down-low gay black men with sour and caustic black women.

…Apparently, he went most often to this Andersonville neighborhood bathhouse on Wednesdays, and while there he was rumored to seek oral sex from older white men.  According to the gossip, Barack Obama would never reciprocate in these encounters, but enjoyed being pleasured by older white guys. 

As I blogged a few days ago, Christian Concern has also recently made links with the Tennessee Freedom Coalition, which in turn supports the English Defence League.

However, Christian Concern has also been busy cultivating mainstream links: it co-organised a conference that took place just yesterday and today, featuring

[Phillip] Blond, the acknowledged driving force behind David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’… Lord Glasman, Professor John Milbank and Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali.

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“Harry Cole” is young conservative activist who edits a couple of websites and who appears in the media as a pundit from time to time. Yesterday, he used Twitter to make an accusation against Tim Ireland:

 …he tried to get us to run fake evidence of his madness. Deeply odd. (1)

…anyone with a basic grasp of photoshop could see it was knocked up (2)

…I was emailed photos purporting to be of his medication…(3)

…I was then informed by a reliable source that they were fake and that it was an attempted sting by non-other than @bloggerheads (4)

Cole was indeed sent a photo purporting to be of medication, but not from Tim. As Tim explains:

In January 2010, during a police investigation that resulted from Dorries’ complaint/’report‘, some fabricated evidence emerged. It was quite damaging stuff. The anonymous originator claimed to have fished it out of my bin; a box of prescription medication made out to me (specifically a powerful anti-psychotic drug). Bedfordshire Police investigated its origins until they hit a dead end.

Further:

Police were advised of the following by a medical professional they interviewed as part of their investigation, and I was present when it was said; the medication involved is a carefully controlled substance to the extent that you cannot pick up even an empty box like it by digging through bins at the back of Boots; the original picture that was used for this forgery was most likely accessed by someone who had been prescribed this medication, or enjoyed a position of trust with someone who had been prescribed this medication.

Tim pointed out that this amounted to “protecting a bastard who has been targeting my wife and family”; Cole’s reaction was to pretend that Tim had accused him of this, and to declare that “you can shove your allegations up your arse”.

The Blog that Peter Wrote has further discussion here. Cole has contributed to the comments; he continues to pretend that Tim had accused him of threatening his family, and – having begun the whole row with his bogus “sting” allegation – he now complains that

Ireland is deluded with his giant conspiratorial web, that I’m frankly bored of being slightly tangled in. 

I think all reasonable people will be repelled by such a display of childish spite. It’s also sad to see someone who has so obviously had his integrity and empathy corroded by his older role models: his day job is working for Paul Staines, and last year he and Staines smeared a disabled woman as a benefits cheat at the behest of Nadine Dorries MP.

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The latest issue of Private Eye magazine (1302, p. 32) has an article about yet another tragedy resulting from a bogus accusation of Satanic Ritual Abuse, focusing on a mentally-ill woman who “was found dead in mysterious circumstances in 2005” after years of estrangement from her family. The woman, named Carole Myers (formerly Carol Felstead), had been persuaded by therapists that

Her parents were supposed to be the High Priest and High Priestess of a Satanic cult who dug up graves and performed ritual sacrifices, including murder.

The article names four therapists who had treated Myers, beginning in 1985:

Carol’s medical records reveal that these therapists included Dr Fleur Fisher, a former head of science and ethics at the British Medical Association; Valerie Sinason… then a child psychotherapist based at the Tavistock Clinic in London; Dr Rob Hale, a consultant psychotherapist, psychiatrist and adult psychotherapist, based at the Tavistock; and the late Vera Diamond, then a Harley Street self-styled psychotherapist who specialised in mind numbing relaxation therapy and deprogramming brainwashed cult victims.

A 1991 letter from one consultant psychiatrist to another mentions Carol’s “emotional distress because of the work she was doing with Police in re-living distressing details of the alleged satanic ritual abuse she suffered as a child”, when in fact there was no police investigation. However, her family has since asked police to look into the allegations against them, and the Eye quotes a 2009 letter from Det Supt Grant Lander of Wandsworth police:

The relationship Dr Fisher developed with Carol in my opinion was misguided. There is absolutely no evidence that I have obtained in my investigation that showed Carol ever suffered abuse by yourself or by any members of your family.

As for the circumstances of Carol’s death in 2005, she “was found dead in her flat [in Wandsworth] following a 999 call to the Met Police by Dr Fisher while she was on a train to Manchester”. Fisher then “told the police, Battersea Coroner’s Office and the housing association which owned Carol’s flat that she was Carol’s next of kin and executor, and she started to arrange her cremation”. The family, which had begun to re-establish contact with Carol, was not told for two weeks, although they managed to halt the planned cremation. The coroner had recorded an open verdict on the cause of death.

Further details are available from a website created by Carol’s family.

The Eye also notes that Carol was Sinason’s “first such patient in the UK”; Sinason “has since said in an interview that over the next two years she and Hale treated 51 ‘ritually abused patients'”. Private Eye has followed Sinason’s work over a number of years: in 2006 it was reported that she had “offered her expertise” in the case “Adam”, the murdered West African boy whose torso was found by the Thames in 2001; in 2008 she delivered the keynote talk at a conference of London childcare workers, on the subject of “ritual abuse and Dissociative Identity Disorder”, and she contributed to a book entitled entitled Forensic Aspects of Dissociative Identity Disorder.

I gave an overview of the “Satanic Panic” saga here.

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Last week, Tim Ireland published extracts from a letter which Nadine Dorries MP had sent to the Chief Constable of Bedfordshire Police in July 2010, in which she asked for the police to act against four individuals who were subjecting her performance as an MP to unwelcome critical scrutiny. The four individuals were:

– Tim Ireland: Tim undertook a long voluntary interview with police which established that he had not broken any laws, although he was warned that because of her reaction to his presence at a public event he would be well advised not to attend any future events involving Dorries. Dorries and her allies have since tried to spin the fact of the interview and this advice as proof of stalking.

– “Mrs Humphrey Cushion“: “Mrs Cushion” is a constituent who has criticised Dorries on Twitter and on her blog. Last year, she was on sick leave from her carer job awaiting operations on her feet for arthritis – Dorries (helped by Paul Staines) tried to smear her as a benefits cheat, and Dorries’ bogus harassment complaint led to a visit from the police. Again, no further action was taken, but the police visit frightened her children, and it took place while she was in pain and lying in bed recuperating from the operations.

– Chris Paul: Paul is a Labour blogger whom Dorries accused of hanging “around outside” her house due to “sexual” interest. In fact, there was no evidence of either.

– Linda Jack: Jack had the temerity to stand against Dorries for the Liberal Democrats in the 2010 General Election, and Dorries accused her of being part of the “group”.

Tim notes an anonymous comment posted to Paul’s website from around the same time as the letter was sent, and which boasted of imminent police retribution. This added a fifth person as part of the conspiracy:

– Peter Hand: Hand was a former Dorries staffer who had reported one of her expenses claims to police (the police investigated, but declined to proceed due to insufficient evidence).

At the end of last week, Tim published further details from the letter, and yesterday he published a follow-up report which she sent to police in November 2010. Further accusations abound:

– “My house has now been broken into twice; I didn’t report it the second time”.

Further details about this were provided in a email which one of Dorries’ associates sent to Tim and to others last year: it was claimed that her front door had been removed from its hinges and a filing cabinet disturbed.  Given the incredibly low bar at which Dorries runs to the police and media with the cry of “stalker”, it is remarkable that she didn’t make more of a fuss about a truly criminal act which – if it actually happened – was clearly aimed at compromising her duties as an MP.

– “I have spoken to lawyers at Carter Ruck and they tell me that Tim Ireland is well known and that Guildford Police have dealt with a number of complaints regarding similar behaviour with others. He is apparently a well known computer hacker”.

Tim writes:

I contacted Carter-Ruck about the extraordinary accusations Nadine Dorries made in their name. I was curious to know what evidence they could produce to back the assertion that I was a notorious computer hacker with multiple complaints against me, but I didn’t get very far. 

Further:

Carter-Ruck were asked about the mysterious circumstances in which I found myself accused of harassment without so much as a letter from their office, but they had no comment to make about that, either. I do not recall ever being warned by Carter-Ruck about the appropriateness of my behaviour toward any of their clients, and seemingly neither do they.

The November “report” repeats some of the accusations in the July letter, but there’s more:

– Tim and Ms Cushion have been “us[ing] Twitter to deploy people to bombard the Office of the Standards Commissioner, three times last week I believe and place numerous FOI requests about myself”.

Tim writes:

Dorries really needs to learn the difference between a subject access request under the Data Protection Act, an information request under the Freedom of Information Act, and the act of sharing the task(s) of data entry and analysis of information already in the public domain…  Dorries claims that I sent her and her staff “numerous offensive emails” and other “vile” and “abusive” and “explicit” messages, but she refuses to reveal them, even when legally compelled.

– Tim has “fed a negative an untrue story about my blog to Sky News blogs recently who published it, without fact checking. One of the journalists has since apologised, but it was too late”.

Tim again:

The ‘Sky news blog’ article she speaks of was fact-checked. Dorries’ objection was that it wasn’t checked against things that she merely pretended were facts. The author stands by the piece and is very clear that he certainly didn’t apologise to Dorries about any of it.

– “He has bombarded my staff with phone calls, to the point whereby my staff in the constituency office have had to unplug the phone. This prevents constituents from being able to contact my caseworker”.

Tim explains:

In good faith, I sought to alert Dorries to the dangers resulting from the public accusations of stalking she had made… Dorries not only portrayed my attempts to contact her about her unsubstantiated accusations of stalking as evidence of my stalking her (!), …

Bedfordshire Police were made aware of every scrap of relevant correspondence, and agreed that it did not amount to stalking, or even harassment. That may seem difficult to understand if you read what Dorries writes here and take any of it at face value, but Dorries has been using repeated lies and distortions about the frequency and content of attempts to communicate.

It seems to me obvious that if Dorries’ office had really been obliged to unplug its phone, that would have been sufficient to launch a proper police complaint at the time – instead, Dorries raises it as a vague detail in a general complaint sometime later.

It should be noted that Dorries does not have a particularly distinguished record as a constituency MP: her blog is primarily dedicated to expounding her views on abortion and sex education and attacking opponents; beyond a few ceremonial photo ops there is little about what she actually does for local people. The only local subject she has discussed at any length is her opposition to plans to build an incinerator, and she appears to have only recently become aware of (let alone got to grips with) the legal difficulties around cancelling the project.

– “I made a speech about abortion in which I mentioned the new charity “Forsaken”. The next morning they had Tim Ireland on the telephone making accusations about their organisation and myself”.

Again:

The content about ‘Forsaken’ can’t be anything but an outright lie. No calls were made to the Forsaken organisation at all, even Forsaken themselves were very clear about that, and the fact of the matter was made clear to Nadine Dorries on the morning this ‘report’ to police was written. This is important because unlike some tales that begin with a kernel of truth*, Dorries is basing this claim on evidence she cannot have seen and won’t have been told about. More detail on that little event here and here.

I have blogged on the background to this myself here.

I hope it is now established beyond reasonable doubt that Dorries makes vexatious complaints to smear opponents and discourage democratic accountability. Perhaps it is significant that none of her usual defenders have chosen to respond to Tim’s posts on the subject.

Dorries’ accusations of “stalking” against Tim have been used by a number of other individuals for their own purposes. These include:

– Some other politicians, in particular Patrick Mercer MP, who wishes to deflect questions about why he continued to use talking points from bogus “terror trackers” even after evidence of duplicity had been brought to his attention, and Anne Milton MP, who was embarrassed when Tim discovered that two of her activists were smearing a political opponent in 2005. More on all this here.

– On-line political opponents such as Iain Dale. A botched attempt by a certain Jack Hart to jump on the same bandwagon can be seen here.

– A group of on-line vigilantes who have subjected Tim to a campaign of harassment and threats after he looked into bogus postings being made by non-Muslim provocateurs on Islamic web forums. Dorries has endorsed one individual related to this group. I’ve been targeted by the same thugs for daring to support Tim. Sporadic attacks occur even to this day

– A couple of journalists, including one who didn’t appreciate Tim complaining about being used as a source without credit.

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