This entry was posted on
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at
6:39 pm and is filed
under The Political Weblog Movement.

[Psst! See also: what Iain still describes as a spam/DOS attack]

Yes, I called and emailed Iain. A lot.

And I regard that to be entirely fair, because he had a lot of explaining to do.

He still does:

1.

On 18 March 2009, Iain Dale agreed to get in touch with the Conservative MP Patrick Mercer and warn him that ‘terror expert’ Glen Jenvey was a loose cannon, falsely accusing me of being a convicted paedophile, and likely to do him significant political damage. Despite my explaining it to Iain that I needed him to do this because I was having trouble getting past Mercer’s staff, Iain decided that he would not contact Mercer directly and would instead talk to his staff… who did not pass his message on.

Some people (mostly anonymous people) have been suggesting that it was Iain’s business if he didn’t want to get involved, but he did get involved. Further, he promised to do a specific thing to help, didn’t do that, and then lied about it.

Regardless of what Iain was thinking when he contacted Mercer’s staff instead of Mercer himself as requested, I responded to Iain’s eventual ‘contact made’ email by leaving him in no doubt that I now believed that Patrick Mercer was aware of Jenvey’s actions. Iain knew this wasn’t the case, but he let me carrying on thinking it.

Why? Was he hoping that I’d falsely accuse Mercer of being a willing participant in the smears? Or did he simply not think or care enough about the incident to help me properly or correct me when I was falsely under the impression that he had completed an agreed task?

I let this go at the time, partly because I had police and ISPs and webmasters and newspaper editors to chase, plus I had only just ‘met’ Mercer and couldn’t be sure who was telling the truth when I finally reached Mercer myself and he claimed it was the first he’d heard of any of it.

Later, I confronted Iain about all of this, but he refused to discuss it beyond this single email that raised more questions than it answered.

2.

One of the questions raised by Iain’s brief description of the action that he did take was why exactly Patrick Mercer’s staff weren’t passing my correspondence on or even discussing the issue with their boss.

– When I produced proof of Glen Jenvey falsifying evidence of extremism, they didn’t pass any of it on.

– When I produced and later authenticated audio of Glen Jenvey boasting about several things, including his use of an alias (‘Richard Tims’) that he had earlier denied using, they didn’t pass any of it on.

– When I named Jenvey’s accomplice – the younger brother of a man who sits on Mercer’s executive committee – they didn’t pass any of it on.

– When, after I named Jenvey’s accomplice and anonymous claims that I was a paedophile immediately started appearing and were also reliably linked to Jenvey, they didn’t pass any of that information on, either!

But only Iain knows what was said to whom on that last and quite crucial occasion… and he’s not talking.

He even repeatedly refused to take my calls when I was literally begging him to cooperate with me, just to the extent of helping me fill two gaps in the revised statement I was due to give to police after the Easter weekend.

A claim popped up at one stage that Iain was sharing information with Jenvey, but I had every reason to distrust it and said so to Iain. I repeatedly explained to Iain that I would probably only be including his name and contact details in the statement if he left me with no choice but to put this data in the gaps left by the account/answers he refused to give me.

In other words, Iain forced me advise the police that they would have to ask him personally what happened that day if they wanted to know, because your mother Iain isn’t speaking to me. Pretty rich from a man who often complains bitterly about wasted/squandered resources paid for by the taxpayer, and extraordinarily childish and petty to boot.

Iain later made this false claim (in comments here) as part of his justification for the ‘parish notice’ hissy fit;

“[Tim] has told the Police that I am conspiring with the person who has been smearing him.”

This is not true. Further, Iain knows that I suspected him only because I was amazed at how evasive he was being (still!), and that I called and emailed him many times at one stage because he refused to even acknowledge receipt of an email that explained this point to him in some detail:

I was trying to avoid including Iain Dale in the statement, but his refusal to communicate left me with no choice (regardless of what I may or may not believe about what his intentions are/were).

3.

More recently, Iain Dale has been refusing to confirm or deny if any of Glen Jenvey’s paedo-smears were submitted to his website, and if so, when.

I mainly need this to draw up a complete picture of when and where these smears appeared. I do not blame Iain for allowing the smears to go live any more than I blame any of the other webmasters who found themselves hosting these smears, but he and Paul Staines are the only likely recipients refusing to confirm or deny receipt of these smears.

4.

As the ‘smeargate’ campaign spiralled out of control, Iain Dale was making false claims based on single sources and seeing them into print, and many lazy journalists were taking what was claimed on various right-wing blogs and either airing it with a half-hearted health warning or taking the claim(s) at face value.

Meanwhile, familiar faces started appearing on the Paul Staines order-order.com website repeating ugly claims that I’m secretly in the pay/employ of Downing Street, the Labour party and/or the government/party via a certain Cabinet Minister (the same one Dale was publishing false claims about).

Several claims also rewrote history to the extent of painting me as a supporter of Derek Draper, when the opposite is true and was true even before ‘smeargate’.

I took the position that I was no longer going to stand for these false claims, especially in the current climate, on the websites of Paul Staines or Iain Dale or anyone else likely to be taken far too seriously by the press.

At the same time that Iain Dale was making out that I had no good reason to repeatedly call and email him (and pretending that I was threatening him with anything other than calling him to account, publicising his antics and/or greatly complicating the techniques he uses to have others do his dirty work for him under comments), Paul Staines was deleting all such claims from his website. Yes, that Paul Staines. Everybody who is anybody in British political blogging knows how difficult it is to get Staines to take such things seriously without a legal letter, and that he is not likely to want to do me any favours.

So surely Iain Dale can appreciate that I might have a point about any similar claims published on his website… but he doesn’t even want to talk about it.

–

Iain has taken this long past any point where he can contend with any credibility that I’m having a go at him just because he’s a Tory and/or that I’m jealous of his success and/or that I’m just trying to get at him because I’ve been hiding my medication inside lumps of uneaten gristle and the voices keep telling me that he’s the Antichrist.

He’s also got a nerve pretending (yet again) that I have been unreasonable about this at any/every stage rather than quite upset at one final stage after being dragged to the end of my tether by his continued pretence of ‘ignoring’ me while publishing false claims about me in his website.

And yes, he damn well owes me some answers.

I don’t plan on quitting until I get them, and here’s one good reason why:

When Usmanov knocked me offline, a couple of jackals took it upon themselves to take the opportunity to make false claims about me when my website was down.

The sharp-eyed among you will have noticed that there are others who have a grudge against me who are also taking advantage of the Jenvey smears.

Regardless of how much of any of this results from Iain Dale taking advantage of the Jenvey smears etc., I cannot afford to send a signal that I will allow any false claim about me to stand unchallenged on any widely-read site that enjoys mainstream credibility.

Iain Dale must respond. He’s the editor of a mainstream magazine (that brands itself as politically neutral, no less). What choice does he have?

I’ll be in his face and complicating his every effort to play this down and carry on with business as usual until he does. What choice do I have?

(Psst! If anyone wants to play the peacemaker, please keep in mind that the path to a resolution involves what Iain has been avoiding all this time; dialogue.)