This entry was posted on
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at
1:05 pm and is filed
under Tories! Tories! Tories!.

Finally, it’s out in the open and established beyond any doubt:

Charlie Flowers, when confronted in public about the online attacks on me…

More comments have been received regarding my posts on Charlie Flowers and the “Cheerleaders”. As any regular readers will know, this is the gang of semi-anonymous cyber-vigilantes who last year decided to post Tim Ireland’s home address all over the internet, without regard for his family’s safety, in the stated hope that he would be forced to flee the country. Threats of violence were also received, including “machete to your throat”.

Richard Bartholomew

… claims that he is knowingly acting outside of the law not on behalf of Dominic Wightman, but instead on behalf of Iain Dale, Nadine Dorries and Paul Staines:

So I ran into “Charlie Flowers” today and asked him why he was stalking Tim Ireland.

Here is some hilarious stuff that came out.

CF claims Tim Ireland was harassing me at one point! When I pointed out this wasn’t the case at all, he just flustered and tried to pretend he had a story straight on the issue

He also claims he’s not a “vigilante” because “they uphold the law”. In other words he fully admits he’s not doing it lawfully.

Thirdly, he claimed he was doing it on behalf on Nadine Dorries and had informed her and Paul Staines and Iain Dale about it.

Sunny Hundal

Iain Dale, Nadine Dorries and Paul Staines; all three of these people have repeatedly (and I would contend dishonestly) characterised my criticism of them as ‘stalking’ (both directly and by proxy, the latter most often with the assistance of Phil Hendren*), but only Iain Dale was foolish enough to go any further than a series of vague insinuations, most recently in a post that he has since deleted.

(Not withdrawn or retracted or apologised for… just deleted. As if the false accusation never happened and it’s not being used against me to this day. Right now Iain Dale is taking David Wright MP to task for deleting comments he published and pretending that they never happened, but I am assured that this is not hypocrisy because Iain Dale is not yet an MP.)

Their defence for doing this is that they are expressing an honestly-held opinion. This is very easy trick with claims of harassment against yourself (if you say you feel harassed, who’s to tell you any different?) but Iain Dale, for example, has also made quite specific accusations about my treatment of Conservative MP Anne Milton (even though he certainly didn’t get this from Milton herself and he admits that he has not read any of the detail of the weblog he presents as his ‘evidence’)

Tellingly, these three refuse to back this ‘honestly-held opinion’ with any evidence and refuse to acknowledge how easily their ‘honestly-held opinions’ might be interpreted (and are at present being used/abused) as statements of fact.

Sometimes, they even go so far as to characterise any objection I may have to their accusations/’opinions’ as sufficient evidence in itself; they accuse me of stalking, I confront them about the accusation, they yell ‘stalker’. This is the same game the Cheerleaders have been playing, as it happens.

More recently, any complaint to these people by me that Dominic Wightman, Charlie Flowers et al have been using these ‘honestly-held opinions’ as statements of fact has been dismissed as evidence of paranoia that they claim supports their case and justifies their published opinion(s).

Now, unprompted by me in any way, Sunny Hundal confronts one of the ringleaders when he happens across him at a public event and – surprise, surprise – that person turns out to be behaving exactly as described, and puts his case forward as if he is attacking me on behalf of a series of ‘top bloggers’, hilariously including Sunny in his list of targets.

Once again, Iain Dale, Nadine Dorries and Paul Staines are in a position to either cripple these attacks against me, or allow them to go on without impediment:

– Would any or all of these people care to comment on any communication they may have had with Charlie Flowers (or any other person claiming to be attacking me on their behalf, including Dominic Wightman/Whiteman, aka Richard Walker)?

– Knowing how certain uncertainties are being exploited, would any or all of these people care to clarify their position on any past ‘honestly-held opinions’ about stalking (including those that have since been deleted, but not retracted)?

(When doing the latter, Iain Dale will also need to provide supporting evidence for his quite specific claims that I have stalked both Nadine Dorries and Anne Milton, or withdraw the claims as publicly as he made them.)

If Iain Dale, Nadine Dorries and/or Paul Staines continue to remain silent instead of disowning and discrediting Charlie Flowers today, well, we’ll know what they’re all about, won’t we?

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[*Phil Hendren (‘Dizzy Thinks’) is the only person outside of this gang of ‘Cheerleaders’ who has published my private data online in an effort to intimidate me into silence. His close chum Iain Dale didn’t act or speak out against this at the time, either, though he did take the time to deny being the source of the data. Hendren now claims that he never published my unlisted home phone number because publishing it in two parts – or in ‘code’, or with one number missing from the end – doesn’t count. Phil Hendren also continues to host specific claims about me that he knows not to be true, even though he knows they are being repeated by the likes of Dominic Wightman to justify their attacks. His stated justification for allowing this to go on amounts to this and this alone; he doesn’t like me. Harry Cole (‘Tory Bear’) has been equally helpful in kicking the ‘stalker’ claims along, and has a similarly undeniable alliance with Paul Staines. The pattern is very similar; both Hendren and Cole attack targets on behalf of the ‘bigger’/Daddy blogger, and are rewarded with ongoing linky-love and other forms of patronage. What Charlie Flowers and the ‘Cheerleaders’ get out of a very similar relationship with Dominic Wightman – who also claims to have been ‘stalked’ by me while attacking me directly and by proxy – is not yet clear.]

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UPDATE (18 Feb) – Iain Dale and Paul Staines have both been contacted directly, and both have made it crystal clear that they do not wish to intervene or even comment in any way. If Charlie Flowers is lying, they could expose him in seconds with minimal effort, but they choose to remain silent. Nadine Dorries (who is an MP and therefore maginally more accountable) has made a vague claim about having forwarded some emails to police, but she does not specify who those emails were from, who she reported them to, or when she reported them (my money’s on yesterday, if at all). Her claim means nothing until she provides some specifics that allow for confirmation.

UPDATE (18 Feb) – Nadine Dorries has decided against clarifying her vague statement about a police report and has instead jetted off on a 4-day holiday. Isn’t that nice?