This entry was posted on
Sunday, October 24th, 2010 at
3:54 pm and is filed
under Anne Milton, Tories! Tories! Tories!.
Nadine Dorries is currently attempting to explain away an enormously damaging admission about misleading her constituents with a compelling sob story about stalkers.
This is no better than her hiding behind a human shield at the height of the expenses scandal with an hysterical if not calculated announcement about fears of a suicide (which she made just after some ill-advised comments about expenses that made her look both corrupt and arrogant).
I am here to attempt to tempt you far enough into the detail to not only establish the sob story of Nadine Dorries to be a calculated lie, but also expose a dark side of right wing blogging that the present Conservative leadership have repeatedly turned a blind eye to.
I warn you that even in this condensed state, there is a fair amount of detail, not least because Dorries’ lies involve a series of people who have intersecting personal relationships and political interests. Some of Dorries’ supporters would delight in dismissing it all as a wild conspiracy theory on that basis, but if you would care to look into the detail below you will find that anything reliant on mere suspicion, opinion or contention is clearly defined with appropriate language.
Unlike some, I do not seek to pass off an expression of opinion, belief or fiction as fact.
Unlike some, if challenged on any of the specifics, I can produce evidence that shows what I publish is both accurate and pertinent.
So, let’s begin by getting you sorted for a nice hot tea or coffee, and perhaps a biscuit.
I’ll wait while you fetch and fix.
Seriously, you’ll thank me later. You’ll at least want to hydrate at some stage.
Go. Do.
(waits)
All ready? Good. Let’s proceed with the detail:
In January 2009, I uncovered a plot to generate tabloid headlines and anti-Muslim sentiment through fabricated evidence of extremism in web forums.
The man who fabricated the relevant evidence was Glen Jenvey, then a professional associate of (and source of intelligence for) the Conservative MP Patrick Mercer; a man on the fringes of his party, who puts himself about as an expert on matters of extremism and terrorism and earns quite a bit of money on the back of this.
Mercer’s office refused to respond to (never mind act on) emails and calls alerting them to Jenvey’s actions, even after Jenvey submitted/published dozens of entirely false claims – via over 50 websites – that I was a convicted paedophile.
I am not a paedophile, convicted or otherwise, though I have been labelled a ‘nutter’ for daring to object to these damaging lies.
Mercer later denied working with Jenvey after his fabrications were exposed, but this was a lie. He now refuses to discuss the detail with me or anyone else anyone on the grounds that I am an “electronic stalker”, claiming that he has received advice not to speak to me or even about me.
I am not a stalker, electronic or otherwise, though I have been labelled a ‘nutter’ for daring to object to these damaging lies.
The source of Jenvey’s claims of paedophilia appears to be another associate of Mercer’s named Dominic Wightman (aka Dominic Whiteman, aka Richard Walker, aka Olivia James, etc. etc. etc.). Jenvey maintains that Wightman told him that I was a convicted paedophile who had escaped justice and assured him that I needed ‘sorting out’ before emailing that man my ex-directory home address. Wightman denies some of this, but his previous denials have been gross distortions if not outright lies. Obviously, that does not make him guilty of this act, only a liar, but his denials do little to counter the evidence that he refuses to discuss in detail…. on the grounds that I am an “electronic stalker”
Mercer will not say if or when he broke contact with Wightman and why (again, citing his claim that I am an “electronic stalker”; he won’t comment on Wightman’s harassment of me because he claims I am harassing him by complaining about it).
While Jenvey was smearing me as a paedophile and members of Mercer’s staff were refusing to act on the matter, Iain Dale promised to contact Patrick Mercer directly to alert him to this, failed to do so, then lied about it. It only emerged a year later that Dale had called the very same staff members that he knew were not passing messages on, didn’t mention the paedophilia smears to them, and didn’t even ask them to pass any kind of message on. Iain Dale still equates this with contacting Patrick Mercer and fulfilling his promise while refusing to be drawn on the detail, which is a gross distortion of the truth if not an outright lie.
Shortly after pulling this stunt, Iain Dale then hosted a discussion thread that was deliberately held open for no other reason that I can determine other than facilitating his libel of the Labour MP Tom Watson during ‘Smeargate’; Dale had issued an entirely false claim that Tom Watson was CCed on a crucial Draper/McBride email, which cost two newspapers an apology and a “substantial sum in damages”. Despite being forced to withdraw the claim, Iain Dale failed to retract it in a timely manner (he later lied about when he had done this), and actively exploited a series of highly questionable content and comment manipulation techniques that left his readers with the false impression that his accusation stood. The best that can be said in his defence was that he knowingly misled his readers on the specifics because he was certain of Tom Watson’s overall guilt
At the same time this was happening and the relevant discussion thread was being held open by Dale in a way that would publish any comment immediately (not standard procedure on Iain Dale’s site by any means, and risky at the best of times), two bloggers aligned with Iain Dale and Nadine Dorries, ‘Guido Fawkes’ (Paul Staines) and ‘Tory Bear’ (Harry Cole or Alexander or whatever the hell his name is), both started publishing entirely false claims and implications that I was associated with Draper and/or McBride and/or their planned smear campaign(s). On Staines’ site particularly, this involved a series of false claims and implications that I not only supported the plans of Draper/McBride, but did so in return for money.
I am not a smear merchant, paid or otherwise, though I have been labelled a ‘nutter’ for daring to object to these damaging lies.
Iain Dale, too, had begun to publish comments suggesting I was a smear merchant in league with Draper/McBride, but was only deleting my comments complaining about it. By this stage, Dale was not only using the open thread as a weapon against Tom Watson, but as a weapon against me, and he knowingly did so at a time when his thread was one of the hottest in town, and by then turning up for searches of my name, at the same time that Glen Jenvey was known to be cruising for open comment threads in which to publish his false allegations of paedophilia, while armed with my address and threatening to use it.
Dale was ignoring emails about this, and deleting comments urging him to moderate more responsibly. I still do not know if Dale did this mainly out of ignorance or malice, as he refuses to discuss the detail… on the grounds that I am an “electronic stalker”.
Iain Dale now cites repeated phone calls made in these circumstances as evidence of my stalking him, as does Dominic Wightman. Neither person mentions the context in which the calls were made. Years earlier, Dale also published entirely false claims that I had stalked Anne Milton and Nadine Dorries. He has offered to delete these claims from his site, but refuses to issue a retraction, despite knowing that what he privately defends as opinion or hyperbole is being presented by Dominic Wightman and others as fact.
(Dale’s only response to this is a denial about contact with Wightman. This is as meaningless as his denials about contact with Jenvey; he cannot substantiate what he has published, even as opinion, and yet continues to maintain these false claims knowing that his word on the matter is being used against me in an ongoing campaign of harassment. He does not have to engage in a conspiring dialogue for this to be wrong. His politics is blinding him to the action that should be obvious; we should as a blogging community be rejecting the antics of people like Wightman, not actively exploiting them to gain advantage over rivals or silence critics.)
When Dominic Wightman’s schemes and duplicity were discovered (he had been posing as my ally for months as his harassment campaign got rolling), he went to ground and I instead found myself having to deal with a group of self-described ‘cyber activists’ led by a man named Charlie Flowers; a man who had previously worked with Wightman in his harassment of Glen Jenvey (a former associate of Wightman’s in an amateur ‘terror tracking’ venture that collapsed in acrimony and disputes over money).
Charlie Flowers began publishing my home address alongside a claim that I was in league with Muslim extremists.
I am not in league with extremists, Muslim or otherwise, though I have been labelled a ‘nutter’ for daring to object to these damaging lies.
Wightman is the most likely source of my home address and the only possible source of the relevant ‘evidence’; at present he explains this away with a fantastical and absurd claim about his computer being hacked.
Charlie Flowers, both alone and in conjunction with several people he was manipulating at the time, repeatedly broadcast my home address to people they regarded to be hostile toward me (including members of the BNP). When the accusations of association with extremists began to fall flat, they proceeded to publish my home address alongside the accusations that I had stalked Patrick Mercer, Paul Staines, Iain Dale, Anne Milton and Nadine Dorries. They further claimed that I had sent death threats to MPs, implying Dorries to be the main target.
When confronted about this, Charlie Flowers made a statement that he was doing this on behalf of Nadine Dorries and others and claimed to have informed her of his actions and intentions. When this was brought to the attention of this MP, Dorries only pretended to report him to police and instead (she claims) reported me to police for stalking her.
(Currently, Dorries is blurring the lines between claims she now makes about four unnamed people stalking her, but is heavily implying that I have been sharing her personal details on the web. This is not only untrue, it is astonishingly near to the opposite of the truth; Dorries has knowingly exploited a situation involving the publication of my home address. She has also had a man over to her home as a dinner guest who, prior to all of this, had repeatedly published my home phone number on his site – he says just to ‘annoy’ me. Further, in recent weeks, Dorries has attacked a constituent of hers who had dared to be file a complaint about this. Dorries attacked this constituent with a false allegation that this woman was a benefits cheat, and furnished journalists with the woman’s name and home address as part of her smear campaign. I do not know how Dorries came by this personal/sensitive data, but surely she should face repercussions if she came by it as part of her duties as an MP, through a letter to her or via her office/party access to the electoral role, for example.)
Later, during the 2010 election, I was invited by constituents of Nadine Dorries to a public meeting where they expected Dorries to lie about the investigation into her expenses, and the circumstances surrounding it.
(During this investigation, Dorries explained inconsistencies in her account to the Commissioner by stating that 70% of what she published on her blog was fiction. After the investigation concluded – she claims in a way that exonerated her of any wrongdoing – she publicly backtracked to claiming she had only meant 30% of her blog was fiction, before going on to maintain a day later that every word she published on her blog was absolutely true. I have also recently discovered that Dorries insisted on a change to the date of the hustings (!) in a way that avoided any report of the event in her local paper prior to the election, and also arranged the timing of her arrival and departure so she might avoid any direct confrontation or open Q&A session. Dorries is legendary in political circles for her pretences at engagement when in fact she shuns it, only engaging with people who do not confront her with difficult questions. After previous hustings, she knew she was on a sticky wicket and likely to face some difficult questions at the final hustings before the election. So did her constituents. It’s why they invited me to come and get the evening on record in the interests of democracy. But Nadine is so far gone; she sees this and any attempt to confront her about her ongoing lies as a personal attack and an affront to democracy.)
Knowing full well that my home address was being published alongside a false accusation that I had stalked her and others, Dorries sought to escape that situation by twice addressing a hall full of hundreds of people and accusing me of stalking Patrick Mercer, stalking Anne Milton “to the point that police became involved”, and stalking her to the point that a formal police investigation was underway.
Dorries then not only stood by that accusation knowing it to be entirely false, she went on to build on it, using the stabbing of the MP Stephen Timms to explain her decision to close her blog and Twitter account shortly after the election, with a direct and unmistakable insinuation that I presented an equal danger to her; this included a claim that she was advised by police in this context to cease any tweeting/blogging. It later emerged that Dorries had closed her blog and Twitter account a week before Timms was stabbed. Unless her recent self-diagnosis as a sufferer of “profound dyslexia” covers confusion about which way time flows, her claim that this event prompted her decision cannot be seen as anything but a calculated lie.
Andy Rayment, Chairman of the Mid Bedfordshire Conservative Association, responded to my concerns about Dorries’ repeated attempts to portray me as a mentally unbalanced stalker (including the evidence showing Dorries to be a liar) with a curt email in which he declared that he refused to communicate with “nutters”. Dorries then revealed any concerns she may have had about me being mentally unstable and potentially violent as a sham when she gleefully repeated this correspondence on her blog.
To be clear about the accusations that some journalists might be tempted to take at face value:
– There is no evidence of Patrick Mercer making any credible report to police about my stalking him. If he had, I would have been contacted by police a long time ago. It is standard procedure. (I know this from experience, and not in the way some would have you think. The people who have been involved in the worst of the harassment targeting me have so far escaped prosecution, but all of them have received unwanted attention from police as a result of my complaints.)
– The same applies to Iain Dale, who still refuses to discuss the circumstances in which he sought to exploit my being smeared as a paedophile, and actually seeks credit for not actually smearing me as a paedophile personally. (So *much* to be proud of, Iain!) He is now incensed that I may have to resort to civil action to have him issue a retraction of his repeated claims that I stalked him and others, even though he knows he cannot possibly substantiate his claims in criminal or civil court, or even in an open debate. Instead of taking the route he insists I should take with those harassing me (i.e. reporting them to police, as if I have not done so), Iain Dale has sought to address his claims that I harassed him with accusations made primarily behind the scenes, in what can only be described as a whispering campaign.
– In Anne Milton’s case, the only person who was investigated by police was a Conservative activist then working under her (and very closely with her), who sought to target a political opponent with an anonymous and entirely false claim that his opponent was… wait for it… a paedophile. Milton won’t like talking about that, but she cannot deny it, and she cannot deny knowing about it and the evidence of that man’s involvement before going on to endorse him as a candidate for local council. (She only ‘blanked’ him after he lost; what a lovely person. Yay, politics.) On that note, I should also point out that Anne Milton is also a (hopefully former) associate of Dominic Wightman’s (i.e. the man doing the key dirty work in this ongoing campaign of harassment against me). Milton denies saying anything to him or anyone else that might give them the idea that I was stalking her, but I can prove this to be a lie.
– Nadine Dorries cannot produce any evidence of a police investigation into my stalking her, as no such investigation took place. Through her supporters – mainly ‘Tory Bear’ – Dorries now presents my presence at that meeting (where she claimed I was under police investigation for stalking her) as the ONLY evidence of my stalking her. In any case, even if Dorries thinks she is telling the truth about some of her stalking claims (which we cannot discount, as she appears to be genuinely delusional on some points, not a claim I make lightly), the lies she told to constituents pre-date any of her cited or published concerns about stalkers.
To be clear on this point:
All of the events Nadine Dorries describes as ‘stalking’ took place after the lies she told constituents about the amount of time she spent in her constituency.
Further, she gave the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards an entirely different reason why she engaged in this deceit:
I often posted comments on my blog relating to [name of town] in my constituency. Since I first rented in the constituency, I made a song and dance about being at the property. I have mentioned it on my blog a number of times. This was done to comfort my Association. The previous MP only visited the constituency occasionally—sometimes only as often as once every six weeks—and they were keen that I reversed that impression. His lack of time in the constituency contributed to his de-selection. – Letter to the Commissioner from Ms Nadine Dorries MP, 25 January 2010
When Nadine Dorries claims or implies that she lied to her constituents about the amount of time she spent in her constituency only so far as to alter a few key dates and locations to throw stalkers off the scent… She. Is. Lying.
Nadine Dorries is lying because she has dug herself into a deep hole after a series of earlier lies, and she appears to have lied not only to her blog readers, constituents, and a series of journalists following this up, but also to John Lyon, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.
I am willing to be interviewed about or challenged on any or all of this, and can produce evidence to back up everything I relate and describe, including the crime reference numbers relating to the two police investigations into this (ongoing) campaign of harassment against me, that recently got so ugly as to involve anonymous and entirely false accusations of criminal damage against my children.
If you press Dorries or Dale or Mercer or anyone else about this, they will refuse to talk to you or lie to you, but they will not be able to produce any evidence* to back up what they claim outside hearsay and opinion from their circle of deceit.
(How this works: Dorries claims I stalked her and points to what Iain Dale says as evidence. Iain Dale claims I am a stalker by pointing to what Nadine Dorries says as evidence. At one stage, Iain Dale even went so far as to declare that I only criticised Nadine Dorries as a way of getting at him. He even has the audacity to suggest that there is no smoke without fire when he knows damn well that he is the one generating the bulk of the smoke.)
Make no mistake; this is nothing more than a smear campaign involving people with aspirations of influence that far outweigh their integrity.
Calling the police and accusing someone of stalking does not make the subject of your claims guilty of stalking.
Hell, even Jenvey was calling police and accusing me of harassing him while he was publishing entirely false allegations about my being a paedophile.
Dorries is no better. She knowingly exploited a situation that put me and my family at significant risk and in considerable fear of danger, and heightened this with a damaging and self-serving lie about a police investigation that never took place.
And Nadine Dorries did this for no other reason than political gain; at best, to talk her way out of a corner.
I have never been approached by police about any complaint of harassment aimed at me, which is standard procedure for them following any credible complaint.
I have never been investigated for stalking or harassment or been issued with any kind of warning by police about my behaviour in this respect.
I have no criminal record for violent crime or any other kind of crime.
Nevertheless, I have been the target of entirely false allegations of stalking (and worse) made by people attempting to mask or excuse their lies and corruption.
Three of these people are Conservative MPs, and one of them is a member of Cameron’s cabinet.
If you’ve read this far, I’d like to ask you to do something about it by (a) writing about it, (b) getting the word out on Twitter, (c) filing a complaint with the Conservative Party, and/or (d) writing a letter to David Cameron at 10 Downing St.
Thanks for your time.
–
[*As should be clear from an earlier passage, if Anne Milton is able to produce a crime reference number, it will not relate to an investigation of my conduct, but an investigation of the conduct of one of her activists. While it did not culminate in a prosecution, that investigation did NOT clear the relevant activist or his associate(s) of wrongdoing, despite what Anne Milton or Iain Dale may imply. I am in possession of that same crime reference number should Milton attempt denying any of this.]
By FTC October 24, 2010 - 7:30 pm
Don't forget, in the hustings Nadine Dorries told a room full of people that you run "a deeply offensive website" in an attempt to discredit you.
Nadine should explain herself on that point in particular. At what point does an investigative blogger publishing facts become "deeply offensive"?
She's a disgrace.
Keep up the good work Tim. I'm a long time reader, first time commenter, and although I don't have a blog or twitter I will do soon where you can rely on my support.
By Tim_Ireland October 25, 2010 - 9:29 am
I'm sure there are many things I have published that she is deeply offended by, but she risks portraying this as pornography of some sort when it is in fact material likely to shock only one MP dangerously lacking in self awareness. It's not unlike Iain Dale getting the vapours when you catching him on a devious lie and dare to call him a liar. Without a scrap of context, he will go on to speak of of this as a 'vile attack'.
By hybridanglo November 8, 2010 - 10:40 am
Done (b), (c) & (d), Tim.
Might attempt (a) when have a little more time and/or confidence in that area.
Regards,
Mark.
By Anon March 31, 2011 - 12:37 pm
Some people really do get stalked, crying wolf is dangerous and disrespectful in so many ways.