This entry was posted on
Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at
1:48 pm and is filed
under The Political Weblog Movement.

Please excuse me while I quickly post a response to a letter that just arrived in the post

Open Letter to Rubenstein Phillips LLP, Solicitors

Re: Your client (Iain Dale) and your recent letter

Dear Sirs,

1. I take offence that you would expect me to act in the manner of Nadine Dorries (or your client, for that matter) and publish your CONFIDENTIAL letter immediately and without due warning, cause and/or permission, but feel free to tell your client to make good on his threat to publish that same letter in full himself, as I suspect I may have already repeated parts of your letter by using the words ‘to’, ‘the’ and ‘or’.

2. However, in your letter, your client states many things that simply are not true, and he publishes such claims at his own risk.

3. If your client (an expert blogger) is aware of any libel on my site, he has yet to challenge a single claim that I have made under comments, as is the norm. Let him come forward and identify the alleged libel, or take me to court over it (i.e. instead of discussing it), or shut the hell up.

4. Thank you for confirming that, while he has claimed/implied otherwise elsewhere, Iain Dale has NOT at this time instigated any kind of police investigation against me. I would be interested to know when (and in what context) he issued a ‘report’ to his local police, as the devil is usually in the detail with your client.

5. I needed your client’s input on a police statement being prepared for an investigation that is now in progress. I wished to give an accurate account of an important event that he took part in. Here, I refer you to those sections of the relevant Act that have to do with “preventing or detecting crime” and other reasonable circumstances.

6. Your client was in a position to help prevent a crime, but did not do what he agreed to do, and then lied about it. I needed his full account of the relevant telephone exchange for the statement I was preparing for police at the time, but he then refused to talk about that or anything else. I have already explained this to your client, but instead he persists with false claims/implications that I have made a false allegation against him.

7. Thank you for your kind invitation that I stop contacting Iain Dale of my own free will and without any actual legal compulsion beyond your opinion that an offence has been committed. I will happily pledge to never again telephone or email Iain Dale directly ever, ever, ever – if he removes each and every claim about me on his website that he cannot substantiate (including claims published as comments), agrees not to publish such material again, and further agrees to take more care in comments to the extent of ensuring that all comments published by him are read by him or by a member of his staff (not just for my protection, but for the protection of others).

8. I fully reserve the right to submit comment(s) on any article/comment he publishes about me or involving me on his website, or about anything he claims when he is contributing to any external website.

9. The Iain Dale Fan Club will close up shop at the moment that Iain Dale apologises on his site for repeatedly publishing false claims about me while denying me a right of reply, agrees not to do it again, and re-introduces the ‘Registered Users only’ setting on his Blogger.com-hosted website (he knows why I regard this especially to be a fair expectation). The Iain Dale Fan Club is in no way a DOS attack, and doesn’t even begin to approach the type/scale of DOS attack claimed/imagined by your client. It is instead a perfectly legal braking mechanism that only prevents Iain Dale from cheating in a certain way using comments. If he’s no longer cheating in that way, then the brakes serve no purpose, and I can relax. Simple. Finally, on a personal note, I am greatly amused at any reference to it in a legal letter, but I only earn points if you mention the group by name. If it wouldn’t be too much trouble…?

10. I will even quietly drop the Mercer/call matter to the best of my abilities* if Iain agrees to the above terms. We can leave it at ‘Iain was in a unique position to help someone being smeared as a paedophile and did sod all’, as we have already arrived at and successfully held this position once already, and quite successfully, for years. It’s a downright disgraceful state of affairs, but I know from bitter experience that it is a bearable state of affairs.

11. If Iain Dale seriously believes that I criticise the likes of Nadine Dorries just to get at him, then he’s as confused and delusional as she is.

12. This is only here so your client doesn’t suspect that I went to ’11’ on purpose.

Cheers

Tim Ireland
www.bloggerheads.com

(*There is no telling at this stage how relevant Iain’s call/role was and I have little control over what develops during the course of the investigation.)

Comments are open, but do behave. Iain’s lawyers are watching.