This entry was posted on
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at
11:46 am and is filed
under Tories! Tories! Tories!.

Short version: The #KerryOut/kerryout.net campaign is a nasty, baseless attack, and the person behind it – Harry Cole (Conservative blogger and protégé of Paul Staines) – has responded to this criticism with… a nasty, baseless attack.

I first want to make it clear to you that Iain Dale’s recent accusations of stalking have been the culmination of an ongoing (deeply) personal smear campaign that he saw fit to escalate when I was being smeared as a paedophile* by another man. Iain Dale lied about specifics and hid relevant details from his readers while publishing claims I was “clearly psychotic”. Plenty of his mates** were happy to chip in, both on and off the site. Iain’s behaviour was completely out of order, lower than low, and he even sought to use the plight of a genuinely unbalanced and (then) suicidal individual*** to his advantage.

At no stage did I contact Iain (or anyone else) without good reason, or without genuine urgency, or outside of any legal boundary. And while he refuses to admit fault publicly, Iain Dale has since deleted the post in which he made his false accusations.

Similarly, while Tory MP Patrick Mercer relies on the ‘stalker’ lie to avoid questions about the same people who smeared me (!) he has not repeated it.

The only people still pushing any of these outright lies about my being a paedophile or a stalker are:

1. The ‘Cheerleaders’, some anti-social associates of Dominic Wightman who recently have begun posing as me, claiming I’m a bank manager of a small regional branch, and sending my home address to Nigerian scammers. Yes, really. It’s my third complaint to police inside of a year, and all of them have resulted from the same bloody story.

2. Joseph Obi, a medical visionary liar, scoundrel and conman with an all-too-familiar habit of smearing anyone who dares take a stance against any of his dishonest/unsavoury antics (and when I say ‘anyone’, I mean bloggers, journalists, the entire General Medical Council… anyone). Obi is based in Ireland and lives behind a moat of rented mailboxes. Currently, using the US-based Blogger.com, he none-too-subtly implies that I was forced to flee my home because I was on the run from paedo-bashing mobs.

3. Harry Cole (aka Tory Bear), the ‘pioneering’ campaigner behind #KerryOut.

My safety and the safety of my family have been put at risk by these dangerous smears, the issue is ongoing (not everything gets blogged), and early this morning Harry Cole showed that he was willing to throw these smears about in order to do nothing more than ‘win’ an online argument… in an effort to defend his attack on Labour MP Kerry McCarthy, no less!

While this clearly establishes what a malicious, unscrupulous and dishonest person he is, I will go to the effort of outlining my main criticism of his latest attack campaign, #KerryOut, regardless:

Harry Cole and his backers have been repeatedly challenged (not just by me) to justify their attack on Kerry McCarthy and use of terms like “disgraced MP”. They’ve come up lacking every time they’ve bothered to try (i.e. when they haven’t responded with simple insults or smears/whataboutery directed at their critics). All they have to offer is a minor complaint on expenses, a personal objection to a voting pattern/record, and the fact that this MP once blocked Iain Dale on twitter. Certainly nothing that justifies singling out this MP or describing them as “disgraced” or “corrupt”.

There is no substance to the #KerryOut attack. There’s a lot wrong with it, but the main issue is that the driving force appears to be little more than personal malice, and what it amounts to at the end of the day is a smear.

Confronted with this, and unable to respond with anything of substance/relevance, Harry Cole cried ‘stalker’.

It was foolish to expect anything more from Harry Cole, I suppose, but I honestly thought he would at least put on the pretence of civility and reason when defending himself against charges of being nothing but a rowdy little mudslinger with no sense of decency, fair play or proportion.

–

[*Iain Dale was knowingly libelling Tom Watson at this time…. i.e. while seeking to aid the existing smears against me with pretend calls to MPs and his ‘stalker’ crap. These too are circumstances that Iain Dale has told many lies about, both during and after; but he feels safe because the newspapers got sued and he didn’t.]

[**It was in April/May 2009 during one of two peaks in this smear campaign that Harry Cole decided to take his shot and unfairly associate me with Derek Draper at the height of ‘smeargate’ (just as his mate Staines did on his site). Cole had no basis for doing so, and no justification; he was just kicking me while I was down and trying to smear me as a smear-merchant… while I was busy being smeared elsewhere. Nice. He now complains that #KerryOut is being unfairly compared to the Draper/McBride smear action. Diddums.]

[***No names, sorry folks… but I can prove it without revealing names if Iain wants to call me on it. Iain knowingly exploited a person who was a suicide risk at the time, repeatedly refused to remove claims that he knew to be untrue from his site that were being used to agitate this person, and then implied that my concern for this person’s welfare could be interpreted as a threat against him personally. It is one of the clearer indications that Dale was not under the false impression that he was being harassed/stalked, but rather knowingly lying about it for political gain.]