This entry was posted on
Monday, January 17th, 2011 at
1:21 pm and is filed
under Tories! Tories! Tories!.

[NOTE – Please see the close of this post for an important update.]

The results of my information request to Bedfordshire police are in, and it doesn’t look at all good for Nadine Dorries, who has repeatedly claimed that she reported me to police for harassment in both London and Bedfordshire, and further claimed that this resulted in a police investigation into my activities.

I can now prove that Nadine Dorries made these claims without EVER making a valid complaint/report to police about my conduct, and this development changes matters significantly.

Dorries’ repeated accusations and implications that I stalked/harassed her (and was recognised by police as a danger to her) are highly damaging and downright dangerous, and now she can’t even claim that she was merely mistaken or confused on a couple of points; her entire account was an invention.

Nadine Dorries, a lawmaker still endorsed by the Conservative party, told lies about a police investigation that never took place and made repeated misrepresentations in the name of two police forces, and did so when she knew she had not even made a complaint about me (or that the police had rejected her claims to such an extent that it didn’t even generate a preliminary reference number).

Worse; she did this repeatedly for personal/political gain while knowing that she has been contributing to an actual campaign of harassment (the subject of a series of genuine reports to police and actual police investigations), and knowing that the people targeting me claim to do so on her behalf, often in direct response to her allegations. Dorries has even linked to the site of one of the main ringleaders (where he reveals the exact location of my home) and sought to make contact with this person.

There’ll be more than a few new readers as a result of this latest revelation, so it’s time for a long-overdue summary of events/circumstances before I get to the meat of this sandwich. Please bear with me.

Background and recent developments

Nadine Dorries is the Conservative MP for Mid Bedfordshire. In the past week or so, it was revealed that she was in a “romantic” (see: sexual) relationship with another woman’s husband. To defend her position, Dorries published claims that the wife of her boyfriend was a violent/abusive alcoholic who had an affair with an Australian riverboat captain. No, I’m not kidding.

Shocked to find herself still under fire, she went on to claim that her husband* also had an affair. As with many of the claims she has been making recently, this one is based on her version of events that took place a decade ago. Dorries claims she never mentioned it before now for the sake of her children.

(*It is unclear at this stage if she and Paul Dorries are still married, divorced, or if they were never married in the first place. Perhaps someone would care to ask her a direct and specific question about it.)

Dorries now finds herself repeatedly branded a liar in the Daily Mail, the same newspaper that previously supported this far-right MP, her ‘controversial’ views on abortion, and many of her attacks on political enemies… but still she continues to defend her position and attack her detractors with all-too-personal revelations, shocking distortions and wholly unsupported allegations.

This approach is entirely typical of Dorries; she plays ruthlessly with the reputations of those she perceives as enemies, mostly with deeply personal attacks containing untruths ranging from distortions to outright lies.

I know this from bitter experience; after I observed this behaviour and had the audacity to report on it, Dories accused me of stalking/harassing her, two other Conservative MPs, and her friend Iain Dale.

Anne Milton, Patrick Mercer, and Iain Dale

I want to deal with the latter series of accusations first, if I may, just to remove any doubts new readers may have, then we’ll crack on. Promise.

Dorries claimed that I stalked numerous MPs, repeatedly naming Conservative MPs Anne Milton and Patrick Mercer. She specifically claimed that I had “harangued the MP for Croydon*, Anne Milton, to the point where she had to involve the police.”

(*Anne Milton is the MP for Guildford, not Croydon.)

There was (and is) no complaint against me involving either of these MPs. The truth is that activists/associates connected to both of these MPs harassed me or others to such an extent that I had to involve the police. On four separate occasions.

Anne Milton’s lot published a series of anonymous sites/comments smearing a Lib Dem opponent as a paedophile and me as a hacker and computer criminal; as part of the latter effort they named the company I worked for (along with a list of clients), claimed I had been dismissed for downloading porn at work and made a series of entirely untrue claims about my personal life, including my wife and my children specifically. When she became aware of this, Anne Milton conducted a full internal investigation then referred the matter to police. Just kidding; she did nothing to stop it, and went on to endorse both men as candidates for local council.

Patrick Mercer’s lot published a series of anonymous comments/sites smearing me as a paedophile, then as an associate of religious extremists and a traitor to this country, then as a stalker of women who sends death threats to MPs. The latter group of – get this – amateur anti-terrorism activists (all of whom previously worked for/with Mercer) have been the subject of three investigations relating to harassment targeting not only me, but my wife and my children. The investigation into the latter events is ongoing at the time of writing. More on this soon.

Neither Anne Milton or Patrick Mercer are willing to speak up and contradict Dorries for reasons that should be obvious (they would subsequently have to face the consequences of their actions and those of their associates/activists), so they leave me exposed to these accusations for entirely political reasons, but they cannot and will not support Dorries with evidence of my stalking/harassing them, because there is none.

The same applies to wannabe-MP and friend of Dorries, Iain Dale, who was recently forced to admit that he hasn’t reported me to police for harassment either, despite repeated claims of this action that he has used to assure others of my guilt. (Dale’s position on ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is entirely flexible depending mainly on if he is talking about his political enemies or his political allies.)

Dale has also repeatedly been in a position where he could prevent the harassment targeting me and has repeatedly sought to worsen the problem rather than resolve it, even to the extent of refusing to cooperate with a series of police investigations.

Iain Dale refused cooperation when I was being smeared as a paedophile, he refused cooperation when one of the people targeting was confirmed by police as a suicide risk and greatly agitated by claims published on Dale’s blog that Dale knew to be false, and he refused cooperation when others targeting me were threatening to come to my home and start a fist fight. He even initially refused cooperation when he was informed that the campaign had extended to targeting my children, and only consented to a carefully limited discussion in the face of the overwhelming negative publicity that followed my going public with this. He now pretends that a single useless offer he made between police investigations amounts to cooperation during all of them, and that he was unaware of the people targeting me prior to this offer of ‘cooperation’. This too amounts to nothing more than yet another bunch of lies from one of the most petty and deceitful bastards I have ever known.

Iain Dale is also the main public source of the earliest accusations that I stalked Anne Milton and Nadine Dorries. He continues to publish this on his site as a statement of fact while privately defending it as opinion based on evidence he refuses to discuss, never mind produce. Further, the accusation of “electronic stalking” made by Patrick Mercer appears to be based mainly on Dale’s claims, and not his own personal experience. Dale is also more than likely to have influenced Dorries’ decision to rely on this smear in the face of mounting evidence that she lied about her expenses claims.

Iain Dale has the audacity to present all of this as a ‘no smoke without fire’ situation when he knows damn well that he is the primary source of the smoke.

Now, getting back to Dorries, as promised:

Dorries did not tell anything near the truth when she made these accusations; if anything it is near the opposite of the truth. The same applies to her accusations about my stalking/harassing her; in accusing me of stalking/harassing her, Dorries has provided ammunition for the people harassing me.

This is not a matter of her word against mine or my opinion differing from hers; I can produce evidence and crime reference numbers in support of everything I put to you here and in earlier posts; Dorries, by contrast, will only answer questions about her accusations by repeating the accusations and hiding behind them; i.e. she will often claim he cannot discuss the evidence of my stalking her because I am stalking her.

Here is a perfect example:

“I have had to report him to the Met police on two occasions, and one of them is under investigation, and I’m really sorry, but this is a case.” – Nadine Dorries

But none of what Dorries has claimed about this is true. It is a calculated, damaging and highly dangerous smear that she has repeatedly broadcast to hide her lies and corruption from the public. Most of these lies have to do with some difficult questions about her expenses.

Dorries lying about her expenses and/or living arrangements

During the 2010 General Election, Nadine Dorries was under investigation by the Parliamentary Standards Authority for her expenses claims. To avoid damaging admissions at events where she faced questions from the public, Dorries would tell the electorate things that were technically true but wholly misleading. (An example; she would say she did not have a mortgage and therefore could not have ‘flipped’ homes… when the matter being investigated in her case was rental payments and the suspected switching of ‘main’ homes for immoral/illegal monetary gain.)

It was in these circumstances that I was invited by constituents to attend the final Mid Beds hustings event before polling day and record/broadcast the event on video.

I later discovered that Dorries had made a series of demands of the organisers of this event that would result in her arriving late and leaving early, without facing any direct questions from the public, and without having to face a write-up of the event in local papers before the election. This alone was extraordinary behaviour in relation to an event designed to accommodate more than one self-important candidate, but when Dorries discovered that it was me operating the camera equipment she went ballistic, instructed her staff to call police and demanded that I be thrown out.

When this didn’t happen, Dorries interrupted the meeting (twice) to claim that I was guilty of stalking other MPs and under investigation by police for stalking her, before storming out.

To this day, the only evidence Dorries has presented to support this accusation was my presence at the same event where she claimed a police investigation was already underway.

Please keep this attempted distortion of time in mind, because it is a favourite tactic of Dorries. In fact, what follows is a clear example:

Dorries closed her site and Twitter account almost immediately after winning her seat in the subsequent election. When confronted about the Flitwick event by the local press, she said she had been forced to close her online presence on the advice of police, and sought to portray me not only as a stalker, but as a person with a violent, criminal character; she claimed to have received advice specifically about me and the danger I presented to her, but only decided to close her web accounts after the stabbing of the MP Stephen Timms. It was soon established that Dorries closed her web accounts a week before Timms was stabbed; it could not have been part of her decision-making process, and was clearly included to damage me further and make her sob-story more compelling.

Months passed, and it turned out that Nadine Dorries was indeed being investigated by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards for potential expenses fraud. The main issue raised by the Commissioner was her blog; entries on it repeatedly gave the impression that Dorries resided mainly in the constituency, when she had made substantial claims on the basis that her constituency home was her second home.

Dorries explained this discrepancy to the Commissioner by claiming that 70% of her blog was fiction, and that she had given a false impression to her constituents (and her local association) about her living arrangements for entirely political reasons; i.e. to give the impression she lived in her constituency and spent a great deal of time there.

Crucially, Nadine Dorries made no mention of stalking in this decision-making process when presenting evidence to the Commissioner. The only mention of anything approaching harassment involved some unpublished claims about her neighbours who dared to testify that she stayed in her ‘second’ home most nights, and a moan about a Telegraph reporter paying her ‘undue’ attention.

But when the Commissioner’s report was published, Dorries was surprised (!) by the backlash in response to her self-confessed deception of the electorate. She then claimed that she meant “30% fiction” all along, and then back-pedalled to the point where everything on her blog was true, with the exception of some minor changes for the sake of security. It was at this stage that she relied heavily on a story distributed widely in the media about an ongoing problem with stalkers that necessitated little white lies about where she was exactly and what she was doing specifically. As part of this story, Dorries claimed to be the target of four stalkers and named me as the primary stalker.

Here we return to the tactic of time distortion; the entries that Dorries claims were edited to throw stalkers of the scent were published BEFORE any concern she claimed to have about stalking. Further, Dorries sought to make much of a single visit to her constituency by myself and another critic, but there is no evidence of Dorries facing anything like the pursuit that would necessitate the kind of tactical deceit she describes. (Though she had earlier implied that the late Frank Branston, then the Mayor of Bedford, was lurking inappropriately outside her constituency home.)

Also, much if not all of the information queried by the Commissioner would be entirely useless to anyone wanting to physically pursue Dorries, not least because so much of it was published after the fact.

Further, prior to this claim and many times after this claim, Dorries has been woefully indiscreet about her comings and goings, often giving advance notice of her movements. She has also spoken mockingly and gleefully of my concerns about this being dismissed by the Mid Bedfordshire Conservative Association chairman as the work of a ‘nutter’. These are not the acts of someone who is genuinely concerned about someone wanting to do them a damage and operating according to specific police advice; police do not often advise that you poke such people with a stick.

But there is more damning evidence to do with the claims she has made about this supposed police advice, and the last segment of it arrived in the mail recently.

Dorries lying about police involvement/investigations

Nadine Dorries claimed she reported me repeatedly to the London Metropolitan Police for harassment. Dorries also claimed that she reported me to Bedfordshire Police for harassment, and even made an entirely nonsensical claim on behalf of their Chief Constable (see; “triggering section 5 of the Public Disorder Act”).

I made FOI/DPA request to both forces so I might see what they had on file about me. Last year, I blogged about the response from the London Met, who showed NO record of ANY complaint/report against me.

The result from Bedfordshire police is in… and they too show NO record of ANY complaint/report against me. [see: UPDATE]

The one, single, solitary scrap of data that Bedfordshire Police revealed was exactly what I expected to see; the information I volunteered when I approached the police officer who attended the hustings event at Flitwick (i.e. where Dorries claimed I was already under investigation by police for harassing her).

In fact, the only evidence Dorries offers today that I stalked her is my presence at the event where she claimed I was already under police investigation.

(BTW, it was a public event, I was invited by locals, I had the permission of organisers, and I have plenty of witnesses to support this. So even if she can establish that I have a functioning time machine, she’s got nothing to go on.)

Dorries has repeatedly failed to produce any of the reference numbers that would have resulted from a valid report/complaint, and now I know why… she NEVER made one.

This is the final piece of the puzzle, and it makes everything Dorries has said and done about this look a thousand times worse.

Dorries has not only repeatedly lied about reporting me to police for harassment; when she claimed there was a police investigation as a result of one of her complaints, she knew this to be a calculated, deliberate lie. There is no room for confusion on this front (unless we are to accept that Dorries is so delusional as to be unfit for office).

Worse still; I am the target of actual harassment that is at present the subject of an actual police investigation, and Dorries knows this and knowingly contributes to the problem with her lies.

Dorries contributing to actual harassment

One of the subjects of this investigation has repeated the claim that I stalk/stalked Nadine Dorries and others alongside details of where I live. There have been further publications related to this same campaign of harassment making false claims designed to disrupt my marriage and my family life, and others accusing my children of criminal damage. One of the most alarming publications involves an account where the main ringleader targeting me describes giving locals a guided tour of my street so they might see the front door of the stalker living in their midst. This same account provides the reader with everything they need to turn up at my house should they decide to take an interest. The same author has accused me of involvement in religious extremism, hardcore pornography and paedophilia.

Many of you may be unaware of a further complicating factor; I now do extensive volunteer work with a children’s charity. The people who supervise my work are fully abreast of this situation, and very understanding, but I have already been in a position where I have had to explain a few things to some curious young Google users, and I am sure it is only a matter of time before concerned parents/guardians take an interest. Worse, I have been unable to blog any details about the work I have been doing in support of this charity because of a series of bastard Tories intent on destroying my reputation because I dared to expose their lies and corruption. (‘Big Society’, my arse.)

Nadine Dorries has gone beyond refusing to cooperate with the relevant police investigation (see: Iain Dale); she has involved herself with the primary subject of that investigation, even inviting email contact, and linking to the website where he reveals the location of my home.

Further, there can no longer be any doubt that Dorries told a deliberate lie about police reports that were never made and a police investigation that never took place, and it is clear she has done this repeatedly to avoid the fallout from questions arising from her expenses claims.

(NOTE – The Sunday Times yesterday reported that this matter has now been referred to the CPS by police. This is not the only police investigation that Dorries has been the subject of recently.)

Dorries has even gone so far as to suggest that I have been following her around, further implying that police gave her advice because they feared I might be/turn violent. She has done this knowing that there are people out there repeating her claims alongside my home address in the hopes of prompting violence against me and/or making me fearful of same.

If Nadine Dorries has ever received any advice from police about harassment, it was entirely generic. If she hasn’t invented the relevant conversation, she has wholly misrepresented it.

If Nadine Dorries ever called police to complain about my conduct, even with the lily-gilding that’s inevitable with any account given by Dorries, it never went to the stage where any officer suspected a crime may have occurred. If it had, Dorries would have been provided with at least a preliminary reference number if not a crime reference number.

Dorries was challenged to produce any such reference number. She failed to do so. Eventually, she promised to go and ask a Chief Constable for something she should already have had on file and/or could get within an hour by calling the switchboard like a lesser mortal. I suspect she responded to this challenge by making a further attempt at a complaint in order to generate a reference number so she could again play games with her magic time machine. Here, I invite you to read between the lines of the post by Dorries that followed this promise with another series of entirely false allegations and further accusations of harassment:

“I am an elected member Tim. You harass me on an almost daily basis, including my staff and my Chairman. I am expected, even though you aren’t one of my constituents, to take it. I am expected to tolerate your inappropriate level of intense attention, as were the MPs you harassed before me.” – Nadine Dorries

The best Dorries can say is that she complained about me to police very recently, only to be told that my behaviour was entirely within reasonable and legal boundaries. And yet she and her dirtbag mates continue to spread the lie that I stalked/harassed her and others. I suspect she will later attempt to defend it by claiming she meant ‘harassment’ in an entirely different sense, but there is no escaping the fact that Dorries talked about this as if it were the subject of a police investigation, when she had no reason to think or even suspect that an investigation was in progress.

What Nadine Dorries has repeatedly broadcast is a calculated lie that she had repeatedly sought to rely on so I might serve as her alibi for her failure to properly account for her expenses claims; she did it at Flitwick to avoid going on the record about her expenses claims, and she did it again as the closure of the Commissioner’s investigation into those same expenses claims.

Further, Dorries and her supporters appear determined to continue to smear me as a danger to her and others regardless of any attention I may grant her (see: the 70% defence) and the stated intent of at least one individual is to harangue me to the point where I am forced to leave the country.

Finally, to be clear on this point, despite all the accusations from this small circle of far-right Conservatives, there has never been a single, credible complaint against me about anything like this, even to the point where police have taken a mild interest. I have an entirely clean record, and unlike some of Dorries’ more ardent supporters, I do not have a hostile/irrational nature or a history of violence.

Will the Conservative party continue to turn a blind eye?

Here I will remind you that Dorries is supposed to serve the public as a lawmaker, but I have contacted CCHQ about this and been repeatedly fobbed off; the Conservative Party are aware she has lied about a police investigation that never took place, and they continue to endorse her. It’s clear she will sail through any complaint process with the all-too-accommodating Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, and there is no point reporting her conduct to a Speaker whose authority she rejects.

I’m really quite surprised and alarmed that the system does not work better to protect the public from MPs bound to serve them even when those MPs go entirely off the rails, but here we are; if CCHQ continue to pretend that none of this is happening, I am left with no option I can see but civil action against Dorries. This activity may have to extend to concurrent/further action against Dale, Mercer and Milton.

The problem with this remaining option is that Dorries is notorious for battling mere criticism with counter-accusations, and I suspect she is likely to counter-sue. Even if every one of her counter-accusations turns out to be entirely unsupportable, I would need to take a very long journey through a time-consuming legal battle to establish that, and even with a firm likely to take this case on a pro bono publico basis (no comment on specifics, sorry), this will involve an enormous investment of my time.

I am confident that the evidence supports everything I have published about Dorries (and others), but to establish this I would need to complete this long journey; the prior deceitful conduct of Dorries and her supporters (Dale in particular) makes it clear that any cessation prior to victory in court will be portrayed as a victory for Dorries and a vindication of her position, which will leave me right back where I started; with Dorries and a small gang of Conservative wannabes and hangers-on gleefully repeating a smear that puts me at risk, and puts my family at risk.

The staff of Baroness Warsi, Conservative Party Chairman, are aware of all of this bar the most recent revelation (even though they pretend otherwise). I will be contacting them again today in an effort to have them moderate Dorries behaviour and force a public apology, or withdraw the whip.

If this effort fails, it is very likely that my next conversation with you will be about long term plans for fundraising so I might have the time/capacity to take Dorries on in the courts.

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UPDATE – I’m sure you’ll be amazed to learn that the staff of Baroness Warsi fobbed me off yet again today. The same thing happened in 2006 when I contacted Anne Milton’s office (and then CCHQ) with evidence that her activists were smearing a young man as a paedophile. The same thing happened in 2009 when I contacted Patrick Mercer’s office (and then CCHQ) with details of his associate(s) smearing me as a paedophile. I know what comes next if I dare to press the point; Warsi and/or her staff cry ‘stalker’ either privately or publicly. Meanwhile, I’m supposed to take my medicine and keep my mouth shut and Warsi gets to pretend that she was never informed, the poor dear. The ‘Tory scum’ chant appears wholly justified from where I’m standing.

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IMPORTANT UPDATE (20 Jan) – It turns out there is, at present, a police investigation. Police had not contacted me about it until yesterday (19 Jan 2011). It relates specifically to the hustings event at Flitwick. There is no crime reference number for this as yet, because there is no crime. I was perfectly happy to speak with police and answer their questions (and I still am), but there is very little I can share publicly about it at this stage, and police didn’t raise anything that I haven’t already published/addressed (as text or video), so you’re not missing much.

Obviously, this revelation does not change or undermine the central thrust of this post or the vast majority of what I specifically assert in it. If it had, significant changes would have been made to the headline and body of this post to reflect this. For now, this update will suffice, as nothing has changed about the following:

Dorries made her accusation about there being an investigation in progress at a time when no relevant police force can confirm her ever having made a complaint. I still intend to hold her to account for that, as you should.

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FURTHER UPDATE (19 May) – That investigation closed with police finding NO evidence of harassment or stalking, but Dorries, inexplicably, continues to imply otherwise. Nadine Dorries has been making most if not all of this ‘stalking’ nonsense up, and it is well past time for her to stop.

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