Eight(ish) items about Derek Draper and Paul Staines

This entry was posted on
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
at
6:54 pm and is filed
under The Political Weblog Movement.

1. The Draper ‘Downfall’ video comes to us anonymously. It a situation like this, I suspect sock-puppetry. The video gets no linky-love from me.

2. Given Draper’s wider antics and the excuse he provides for his use of the term “window lickers”…

Derek Draper – Apologies and regrets over the use of a derogatory term: At that point I thought the phrase meant someone looking in a window, like a kid at a candyshop, wishing they were inside.

… I thought you might be interested in this article from 2005:

Guardian – The lady and the scamp: Looking back on his “idiot years” now, after seven years of therapy – the last three in daily analysis – he attributes the self-destructive impulses to an unconscious need to get out of politics. “I believe now, as a psychotherapist, that most of what we do is motivated by the unconscious. And I think slowly, over a period of time, not being at the centre of power but having my face pressed up against the shop window, I’d unconsciously decided I didn’t really like what I saw. But it was very hard for me to recognise, because it was all I’d wanted to do since the age of 11.”

That article is linked prominently from Draper’s Wikipedia page, so the connection with that excuse could be coincidence, a product of the subconscious, or a lovely bit of weaselling.

3. Draper put himself in a position where he had to apologise for use of the word that Paul Staines throws about without a care in the world. He’s a fool, on top of everything else.

4. Paul Staines got in touch today to (finally) help with the ongoing uncertainty about his bankruptcy. He claimed (in a lofty, dismissive and contemptuous manner one normally expects from a bloody politician) that he was fully discharged from bankruptcy on 23 December, 2005, and that this is a matter of public record.

a) Pity nobody told these people about it.

b) We still only have Paul’s word for this. He refused to produce anything to back it up. The sniffy bastard.

c) He seemed so put out that I would dare to ask questions about it. FFS, his grand plan involves a two-bit banner-advertising network exclusive to political weblogs. WTF did he think would happen? Did he seriously think no-one would ask any questions, or does he still live in that fantasy world where everybody has to be held accountable except for him and his mates?

d) Anyone might think from his reaction that Paul doesn’t subject people to far worse treatment on the basis of even less evidence every damn day on his Guido Fawkes non-blog.

e) Staines even uses his anonymous free-for-all comments system to help baseless rumours evolve into ‘open secrets’. And he’s moaning because I’ve got some questions based on hard evidence? Forget him.

5. I’ve been thinking about it, and I can’t for the life of me work out how exactly a key member of a two-bit banner advertising network expects to benefit from a regularly-risky widely-damaging comments free-for-all that is constantly refreshed… in more ways than one. Unless it’s a matter of profit before principle/politics, of course; then it makes perfect sense.

6. I’ve noted elsewhere and wish to repeat here that Paul Staines appeared online earlier than 2005, failed miserably in his attempt to gain a worthwhile audience, and returned with a new identity. In short, he has such a boring and unpleasant personality that he had to invent a new one for his website. So far, people prefer Paul Staines’ invented personality to Derek Draper’s real one, but some might argue that this doesn’t make for a fair fight. Paul has had far more time to perfect his spin, smear, comment manipulation and censorship techniques, too.

7. Do take some time to think about how much Paul Staines and Derek Draper have in common, because there’s a lot; the early career-ending mistake, reinvention, crawling back into politics by faking it as a blogger, the endless cheating under comments, selective faux-outrage, a multi-faceted resemblance to David Brent… Staines even insisted today that he more than anyone was above scrutiny. I had to check the ‘From’ field to make sure I wasn’t getting my meatheads mixed up.

8. Finally, to close, a quick note about Derek Draper’s funding*; he’s New Labour, used to write for the Express newspaper, had his wedding snaps featured in OK! magazine, (reportedly) isn’t averse to a little adult-oriented entertainment… if anyone’s drawing up a list of possible LabourList backers, you might want to add the name Richard Desmond. Just a thought.

(*Paul Staines assures us that he’s had no secret backers. Ev-ah. He just magically emerged from a financial black hole with the capacity to blog pretty much full-time… and that seems a reasonable enough claim to me.)








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