Though I didn’t know it at the time, Dominic Wightman appeared in my life in early 2009 with the express intention of using me to damage the reputation of two former associates who held evidence of his previous attempts to deceive others during his doomed career as an amateur anti-terrorism operative.
He also intended to smear me as a paedophile for reasons I can only make educated guesses about at this stage.
Last month I published evidence suggesting that Wightman or a member of his immediate family had donated money to the campaign(s) to elect the Conservative MP for Guildford, Anne Milton. (I have been deeply critical of Milton in the past, and the most damaging evidence I hold against her involves her disgracefully standoffish position following a smear campaign where two of her close allies smeared an opponent as a paedophile.)
Wightman’s reaction was immediate; a single sentence amounting to “So what?” accompanied by a 1,900 word essay explaining how he had ‘won’ the fight, the battle and the argument and therefore did not need to write anything further about me.
(Please note that I regularly link to my sources as a matter of course, but I will not link to any of Wightman’s material while he continues to broadcast my home address alongside entirely untrue and downright dangerous claims about myself and others)
Anne Milton has so far refused to take a public stance on Dominic Wightman beyond some vague denials, but I fail to see how she can do so when I can now produce an email where Wightman claims quite specifically to be acting on her behalf (see below).
This correspondence comes to us from Adrian Morgan, a former contributor to the website venture Dominic Wightman moved on to after his amateur anti-terrorism initiative collapsed.
Just as he lied to me in order to convince me to attack his former associates, Wightman lied to Adrian Morgan in order to convince that man to help him in his attacks on me*.
But even when convinced by Wightman’s lies, Morgan protected himself and others by an adherence to ethics that should be obvious in this exchange, and when Morgan discovered the truth, he immediately parted ways with Wightman and made his reasons for doing so quite clear:
“In future I will not be associated with Westminster Journal while it is used as a vehicle for character attack, sock-puppetry and bile.” – Adrian Morgan (source/background)
(Psst! Wightman was desperate to have Morgan remove the word “sock puppet” from his statement, but it was the discovery of a sock puppet that was clearly Wightman’s work that alerted Morgan to Wightman’s lies. I will write about this and Wightman’s repeated use of false identities in a future post.)
Wightman’s original motives remain a mystery, and he is obviously trying to put one over on his former website partner in this exchange, but his intention to harm my reputation because of what I could reveal about him is crystal clear, as is the thinking behind his eventual decision to claim that he had ‘downed’ me by accident rather than design (highlights in bold are mine):
From: Dominic Wightman
To: Adrian Morgan
Date: Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 10:07 AM
Subject: Re: After a lot of thinking…..I am going to do the following:
WRITTEN: 7
1. Islambase take-down (done yesterday) Author: me
2. Tamil Tigers Take-down (Friday) Author: me
3. Muslim Schools take-down (Friday) Author: me
4. Black Red alliance take-down (Friday) Author: me (help would be appreciated)
5. Spinwatch take-down (In a few weeks post thorough research) Author: us? / you
6. Tim Ireland take-down (Sunday – a day before he releases a vicious take-down on me) Author: Dan Chambers, a pal.
7. Tim Ireland psychological evaluation (Friday): author: a psychiatrist pal.AUDIO: 5
1. Vigil repudiation piece
2. Insolvency ad Ilham Frandsen
3. On Jenvey
4. On Starkey – attack
5. On ExtremismVIDEO: 1
1. On Spinwatch and the Black-Red alliance
I am happy to do the repudiation piece on Vigil and say yes I got that partly wrong. I am also happy to be humble about the Insolvency. I am also willing to be soft on Jenvey because of his illness. My position on extremism will also be very middle of the road.
HOWEVER:
Tim Ireland lives 3 villages from me and my local supporters (including the MP) want Ireland downed. He has already admitted to me I am the sole reason he’s not written on hs blog for 2 months. He is a vicious bully and I will not sit back and get slaughtered by him without telling the world how to silence a big bully, how I did it, that I am not particularly proud of how I did it but that yes I did it. There MUST BE a mix here of eating humble pie and sabre-rattling or I will be walked over. I must also bring the right wing blog alliance on my side and to do this I need to show that I have been capable of bringing down the most famous left wing blogger, albeit temporarily, that ever existed in the UK. If I do nothing, people will make me out to be Jenvey II which I am not. A mix of showing teeth in the Starkey take-down and in the Ireland take-down will present an image of someone who is not prepared to be meddled with, who keeps his cool and who has a rare thing these days – a spine. My Wellington publish and be damned approach will work better than agreeing with this flotsam. I agree where agreement needs to be met there should be agreement made. But I am not going to lie down on this one.
My responses must be brutal and concise. Where humble the tone must be just right. I would like your help on this, Adrian, as a friend, even if you only partly agree with my strategy.
Think about it and let’s talk later. Hope your day is not as bad as you thought it might be. Sunny here in Surrey and there is a cool calm around my desk.
To war.
Best,
Dom
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From: Adrian Morgan
To: Dominic Wightman
Date: Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 2:25 PM
Subject: Re: After a lot of thinking…..I must advise a note of caution about point 7 – a “diagnosis from afar” by “a psychiatrist”.
I know such things happen – nowadays it is individuals like Raj Persaud (a plagiiaristic sore on the arse of humanity) who descend to such unprofessional behaviour.
Diagnosis from afar may be adequate for historical figures, but it is the most insidious methodology going for character assassination.
I don’t care if you have a professional psychiatrist writing it – I would not be responsible for my conduct if you did this. I would campaign for the psychiatrist to be disbarred for unethical conduct. I got my mother’s psychiatrist to abandon his role as Chairman of the Local Alzheimers Society after a vigorous letter-writing campaign.
And you cannot seriously expect to publish something like that unless such a “psychiatrist” gives his name to such a low venture – to not name your source would look like blatant media manipulation. I would openly condemn it, once it was published.
“Diagnosis from afar” was instituted by Lyndon Johnson’s backers in 1964 – a magazine in the US called FACT sent a questionnaire to 12,000 US psychiatrists to ask if they thought Republican candidate Barry Goldwater was mentally unstable.
Goldwater lost the election. The un-named psychiatrists never called in a shirink to diagnose the behaviour of Lyndon Johnson who used to curl up in a ball under his bedcovers, crying like a baby and gettig his secretary to cuddle him until he slept.
You must – now more than ever – engage in some form of ethical conduct – and journalistic integrity.
If you think Tim Ireland is unhinged – do it is an opinion piece, with supporting evidence – your emails.
To atempt to use his apparent illness as a tool to attack him, using a pseudo-professional “diagnosis” (an “argmentum ad verucundiam” or “logical falllacy of appealing to authority”) is not only unethical – it is morally repugnant.
A
Instead of challenging the evidence I retain/publish that shows he is a liar and a serial abuser of false identities, Dominic Wightman has sought to smear me as a bully and worse.
He has failed to make any of the smears he has invented stick, and has subsequently sought to build on smears begun by his fellow Tories (‘bully’, ‘mentalcase’ and ‘stalker’ have all been tried before under the guise of ‘fair comment’ by Iain Dale and a series of Total Politics employees and assorted hangers-on) and carried them on their behalf to entirely unacceptable extremes that these people continue to gain from while feigning victim status (!) and pretending they play no role in the affair.
Many of these people, including three Conservative MPs and a wannabe, continue to defend as statements of opinion that which they know Dominic Wightman asserts to be fact. They continue to do this despite knowing how harshly this lie is pressed on their behalf by Wightman and the associates he shared my home address with (highlights in bold are mine; this is from an exchange where Richard Bartholomew was threatened with violence):
Charlie Flowers
I’ll tell you something for nothing Jacques, the first Cheerleader who runs into Richard Bartholomew in real life is going to slap him upside the cheek- 1) for his 2-year harassment campaign on my friends, 2) for his aiding and abetting the 10-year campaign of the woman-stalker Tim Ireland. Tim Ireland put women in genuine fear of their lives, and Bartholomew helped him and backed him up. The man is filth.
47 minutes ago · 2 peopleDeanbcfc James
they need fear instilled as they have done. that one filming the tory bird was a proper nasty stalker. ob should do something.
45 minutes ago · 1 person
(Psst! Hilariously, one supporter of Dorries seeks to justify the repeated use of the word ‘stalker’ to describe me on the basis that I use the word ‘thug’ to describe Flowers and anyone like him who seeks to intimidate others by publishing sensitive/private data such as home addresses and/or home phone numbers on their website in an attempt to intimidate critics. It’s an absurd challenge that would amount only to ‘tit for tat’ if there were anything in it.)
The latter comment is a clear reference to the lie pushed by Dorries and her supporters that my being invited to a public event constituted stalking, and I shall be returning to this topic as soon as is possible.
Today, Conservative MP Anne Milton is in a position where she will at least have to make it clear if Dominic Wightman acts on her behalf or not.
Tomorrow, more correspondence will be revealed that will put another Tory MP (Patrick Mercer) in a similarly difficult position.
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[*I am unlikely to get anywhere with Wightman under civil law, as he has already avoided a debt he “did not agree with” by going bankrupt, and it is reasonable to expect that he will repeat this stunt. I won’t spell out the other stunts he could pull for fear of giving others ideas, but the fact that civil action would carry a considerable expense I could never retrieve should be enough. Addressing his antics through criminal law has proved equally difficult because he often convinces others to take risks on his behalf when he is not using false identities through foreign web providers. Again, I won’t be spelling out the details, because it does not serve the public interest to have the relevant techniques and loopholes described in any detail. Wightman has been spoken to by police about his conduct toward me and others, but pretends that the opposite is true; i.e. as if my communication with police has resulted from his complaints about me. He is even reckless enough to tell lies on behalf of specific police officers, and still his Conservative associates refuse to contradict him when he claims to be acting on their behalf.]