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Let’s begin with a brand new and very special episode from Conservative Change Channel:

CCC11-01: Jonathan Lord: ‘off the record’

I hope you enjoy a few laughs, but the guts of it is about as serious as it gets:

What the audio I have published in this episode reveals is that Jonathan Lord took NO discernable action against Mike Chambers and Dennis Paul when they involved themselves in a smear campaign where an innocent man was branded a paedophile, and he did so for entirely political reasons.

Jonathan Lord admits that he did no more than have informal conversations with these two Conservative candidates, in private and entirely off the record, because an election campaign was in progress.

(As if this is any way acceptable or his candidates didn’t smear an opponent because of that same damn election. The part-justification he gives for this decision is an insult to the intelligence; he claims he was worried about how I or others might distort it. Well, if he’s worried about my distorting any of this, he’s welcome to come out and debate the matter in public or instruct his lawyers.)

No wonder these two carried on as if they were untouchable. Dennis Paul even tried to breathe new life into the smear campaign through his personal website on the eve of the relevant election.

Because Lord even went so far as to turn a blind eye to the evidence presented to him by me and others, he allowed these two candidates to continue their pretence that they weren’t really involved in the relevant websites, which meant that damaging and dangerous accusations aimed at their opponent (and at me) remained in place for months/years afterwards.

Further, because Jonathan Lord swept this under the carpet, those who were involved (and those who turned a blind eye like Lord did; take a bow, Iain Dale) were able to excuse/disguise their disgraceful behaviour with entirely false implications if not specific allegations that I imagined or invented the whole thing as part of what they contend to be a harassment campaign against Anne Milton. Yet Lord (who recognises that I did not harass or even libel Milton) insisted that his position/decision remain off the record, even after it was explained to him how his continued silence contributed to the subsequent smear campaigns against me.

What. A. Bastard.

Now for the really important bit:

Anne Milton and David Cameron were both advised of the blogs and comments accusing an opponent of child rape at the time, and both referred the matter to Jonathan Lord for action. Today, I have published evidence that proves he took no discernable action, and that he made this decision to protect personal and party interests.

So, from the moment of this revelation, both Anne Milton and David Cameron have a single opportunity to come forward and express their disapproval at this decision, or they own an even bigger chunk of it than they already do, and risk sending the message that they are entirely comfortable with their/Conservative candidates smearing opponents as child rapists, computer criminals, etc. etc. etc. (so long as these operatives are canny enough to only do so within criminal law, during an election campaign, etc. etc. etc.).

Yet I fully expect that they and every other member of the Conservative party will continue to engage in their conspiracy of silence. After so many years, how can I have any less faith in them?

There’s even more to come. Also, since my decision to end these ‘off the record’ games, I’ve been passed correspondence that implicates another big name in the Conservative Party, and it’s not Jeremy Hunt or anyone else I have named so far. I plan to publish this as part of my new policy to shine the brightest of lights into every damn corner of this sordid affair.

[NOTE – Because I’m not a plagiarising prick like Paul Staines or Ian Hislop and I don’t take credit for other people’s work, I must begin with a BIG ‘thank you’ to Iain Marley for his excellent Excel work on the current expenses, and to Unity for digging out the Marketing Management (Midlands) Ltd data from archived expenses. Both of them are proper gents.]

You’ve got to hand it to Chris Gill, editor of Bedfordshire on Sunday; he made a pretty good show of holding Nadine Dorries to account with this little article, but it’s an underarm throw at best, and easily batted away.

This article also declares that Dorries was “cleared of any wrongdoing” but does not mention that this was after a Parliamentary investigation in which Dorries could only explain herself by saying that she had lied to her constituents about where she lived most of the time. The article also manages to completely avoid any mention of the subsequent police investigation or the fact that this matter has since been passed on to the CPS.

Do you know what this reminds me of? This reminds me of the Downing Street memos that revealed Murdoch’s flunkies and Blair’s flunkies had been coordinating objections from The Sun and the government response and the subsequent tabloid response ahead of time, so as to better maintain the illusion that this tabloid was acting in the interests of their readers, and not operating as The Downing Street Echo.

Yes, it is absurd to compare Dorries to the Prime Minister. So I’m going to do what Chris Gill didn’t do, and look a little closer at the data, then compare Dorries to every MP, just to show him how it’s done. (Assuming, of course, he wants this job done right at all.)

First of all, if you take the expenses for all MPs and apply a total to each MP, you are mere moments away from a league table of the most expensive MPs:

MPs with greatest total expenses claims (May 2010 – October 2010):

Simon Hart (Con.) – £35,256.26
Nadhim Zahawi (Con.) – £31,902
Nadine Dorries (Con.) – £31,673.17
Keith Simpson (Con.) – £29,916.44
Jane Ellison (Con.) – £28,752.82

(Source: Parliament’s searchable archive of MPs’ expenses from 2010 onwards.)

[Psst! Please do note that the five most expensive MPs are all Conservatives. It is the Conservatives who are only in power because of a coalition agreement, but pretend to have a popular mandate as they impose their ideology on us under the guise of austerity measures. This is yet another indication – as if you need one – that the whole thing is a Tory con.]

Nadine Dorries isn’t just more expensive than the Prime Minister or a couple of local MPs, she’s more expensive than almost every MP in the House. Gosh, I wonder how Chris Gill and his staff at Bedfordshire on Sunday missed that one. I assume simple addition isn’t beyond them, but just in case numbers do cause confusion in his office, here is a graph comparing the recently-published expenses claims of all MPs, with Dorries highlighted:

Moving on to another matter that received no mention in Bedfordshire on Sunday; let’s look again at the very strong indications that Nadine Dorries has continued paying her close friend and neighbour Lynn Elson out of the public purse.

The following is a collation of all known payments since 2008* from Nadine Dorries to ‘Marketing Management’ (full name; Marketing Management Midlands Ltd), a company owned and operated by Nadine’s good friend, close neighbour and drinking buddy, Lynn Elson. Under that data, you will see the claims that I recently contended were very likely to have been made to Marketing Management Midlands Ltd (the amounts in bold):

Nadine Dorries – Confirmed Payments to Marketing Management (Midlands) Ltd

Pty Yr —- Date ———— Allowance Type ———- Expenditure Type —– Amount

08/09 ___ 30/09/08 _____ Staffing non-payroll ______ Agencies etc. _______ £3,290.00
08/09 ___ 30/09/08 _____ Comms Expenditure _ ____ General Costs _______ £6,554.75
08/09 ___ 01/11/08 _____ Staffing non-payroll ______ Agencies etc. _______ £3,525.00
08/09 ___ 01/12/08 _____ Staffing non-payroll ______ Agencies etc. _______ £3,450.00
08/09 ___ 06/02/09 _____ Staffing non-payroll ______ Agencies etc. _______ £3,450.00
08/09 ___ 04/03/09 _____ Staffing non-payroll ______ Agencies etc. _______ £3,450.00

09/10 ___ 06/11/09 _____ Staffing non-payroll ______ Agencies etc. _______ £3,450.00
09/10 ___ 11/06/09 _____ Staffing non-payroll ______ Agencies etc. _______ £3,450.00
09/10 ___ 21/07/09 _____ Staffing non-payroll ______ Agencies etc. _______ £3,450.00
09/10 ___ 06/10/09 _____ Staffing non-payroll ______ Agencies etc. _______ £4,025.00
09/10 ___ 06/10/09 _____ Staffing non-payroll ______ Agencies etc. _______ £3,450.00
09/10 ___ 16/12/09 _____ Staffing non-payroll ______ Agencies etc. _______ £3,450.00
09/10 ___ 21/12/09 _____ Staffing non-payroll ______ Agencies etc. _______ £3,450.00

Nadine Dorries – Suspected Payments to Marketing Management (Midlands) Ltd

Pty Yr —- Date ——- Expense Category —– Expense Type —– Amount

10/11 ___ 11/05/10 ___ Staffing __________ Professional Services (Staff) ___ £3,525.00
10/11 ___ 11/06/10 ___ Staffing __________ Professional Services (Staff) ___ £3,525.00
10/11 ___ 31/08/10 ___ Staffing __________ Professional Services (Staff) ___ £3,525.00
10/11 ___ 15/09/10 ___ Staffing __________ Professional Services (Staff) ___ £3,525.00
10/11 ___ 14/10/10 ___ Staffing __________ Professional Services (Staff) ___ £3,525.00

(Source: Parliament’s searchable archive of MPs’ expenses from 2008-2010.)

[NOTE – There was also a payment of £9987.50 (£8500 + VAT) in 2007 which prompted a complaint from a former researcher.]

1. Note the very similar amounts (one an exact match) with very similar classifications.

2. The pre-2010 payments to Marketing Management were labelled for ‘PR, media and research’, ‘public relations, media and research’, ‘media and research retainers fee’, ‘research and secretarial service’ and/or ‘media and research’. Two out of the five payments from 2010 onwards (in bold) were labelled ‘media and research’.

3. The remaining three of these five recent (identical) amounts (in bold) were simply labelled ‘MM‘ under their Short Description, presumably by the submitter of the claim (Dorries or her staff) if not the IPSA team. Dorries is the only MP with entries using this label as a part of any description. I suspect MM is short for ‘Marketing Management’.

4. Dorries has yet to deny these payments were made to Marketing Management (Midlands) Ltd, and her past conduct has shown that she or one of her little gang of thugs will issue a shrill if not overly hostile denial if there is even the smallest opportunity to highlight and capitalise on the slightest inaccuracy or discrepancy. However, the only objection raised so far (courtesy of Phil Hendren of ‘Dizzy Thinks’, another close friend and neighbour of Dorries’) has been this; “Why have you put a [Bloggerheads] imprint on an image that is a screenshot from Crown copyright content?”

Excuse me while I gloss over that crime of the century and carry on looking at these expense claims…

There is good reason to suspect that all of these recently-revealed payments were made to Marketing Management (Midlands) Ltd., which is owned and operated by Lynn Elson. Has Dorries simply continued paying her close friend out of the taxpayer’s pocket while quietly redefining/relabeling her role?

Lynn Elson has a background in media sales and marketing, NOT in research. Though she may have some undeclared expertise in marketing research, this is not the same as political research, not by a long shot. Political research is a role in which Lynn Elson has no little-to-no documented experience, never mind the kind of expertise that would justify monthly retainers of this scale.

If the money was spent with Lynn Elson and/or her company, what services were provided in exchange for this money? This question is especially pertinent when you consider that Lynn Elson’s proclaimed area of expertise is PR (Public Relations), as Dorries has suffered a series of public relations disasters since the election, and Lynn Elson has been instrumental in dealing with the fallout in ways that cannot be denied.

If we are to give Nadine Dorries the benefit of the doubt and assume that near to all of this money went on research along with whatever definition she applies to ‘media’, it still doesn’t look too clever.

Take a look at the five MPs who claimed the most for media-related expenses (e.g. ads in the local paper, websites, etc.) and research combined:

MPs with highest expenses claims relating to media and/or research (May 2010 – October 2010):

Nadine Dorries (Con.) £20,033.75
Nick de Bois (Con.) £9,332.98
Rory Stewart (Con.) £9,126.97
Keith Simpson (Con.) £8,488.10
Therese Coffey (Con.) £7,764.50

(Source: Parliament’s searchable archive of MPs’ expenses from 2010 onwards.)

[Psst! All Tories at the top of the table. Again.]

Even this is being far too generous to Dorries, as most of the MPs who came within shouting distance of her under this comparison did so because of payment of an annual subscription to ‘PRU’ (the grandly-titled Parliamentary Resources Unit) that really should be halved if we’re to provide a fair comparison.

Take a look at that margin, even without this adjustment; Dorries is ahead by a remarkable amount, even when she is treated with great generosity in this selection/interpretation of the figures.

And it’s actually quite likely to be far, far worse than this looks; this comparison was made in this way because Dorries classified part if not all of these expenses as relating to ‘Research and media services’, but I doubt very much if any of this money was spent on research, and if it was, I sincerely doubt the taxpayer got value for money.

I would think the extraordinary level of expenditure alone warrants some added scrutiny by the media if not the authorities, even if the most likely recipient fails to set off alarm bells left, right and centre.

What was this money spent on? What does Dorries have to show for it? Even if it was spent more on research than media/marketing/PR, how does Dorries justify this extraordinary level of expense that is double that of any colleague coming anywhere near this level of expenditure? What was this ‘research’ for? Hopefully not something to do with her ongoing religious mission to reduce access to abortion.

Oh, and why isn’t the editor of Bedfordshire on Sunday asking these questions and/or reporting the matter of her previous expenses claims that has not only been forwarded to the police for investigation, but subsequently passed on to the CPS?

Chris Gill, the editor of Bedfordshire on Sunday, is either soft in the head or soft on Dorries. Bedfordshire is being let down by their MP, and the man who is supposed to keep her honest hold her to account.

Thank you for your kind attention, and for sitting quietly through all of this data. Here is your reward:

Cheers all.

Below is a table of recent expenses claimed by Nadine Dorries for staffing classified as ‘Professional Services’. Previous to this, such claims have been reported as payments for “PR, research and media services” conducted by her close friend, Lynn Elson, operating under the company name Marketing Management Midlands Ltd (more), and seeing as Dorries is an often-hysterical liar likely to misinterpret if not deliberately distort any attempt to confirm/clarify this point, I’m simply going to take it was read that nothing has changed since the 2010 election.

1. Note the total; £17,625 over 6 months. This far exceeds any similar expenditure from any MP I’m aware of. The challenge is on; can anyone find any MP who spends as much on PR as Dorries apparently does?

2. Again on the total of £17,625 over 6 months; some people are lucky to earn this amount of money in a year, never mind 6 months. Does this company do any substantial marketing work for anybody else? Assuming that Lynn Elson is still the sole worker/director in this PR company and all this money is going though her two-bit operation, does she need to?

3. Judging by the abbreviated accounts for the years prior to these claims, Lynn Elson’s company Marketing Management Midlands Ltd (Companies House Number: 03827061) really doesn’t do much business at all. In fact, I would think it is fair to ask if the business could exist/survive at all without regular payments from Nadine Dorries:

4. Lynn Elson of Marketing Management Midlands Ltd certainly doesn’t feel the need to advertise her services with a website, which most providers of this type of service would regard to be a minimum requirement.

5. Marketing Management Midlands Ltd also appears to be run from a residential property. I would be more precise with the details, but I am currently hampered by Nadine’s propensity to fly off the handle about things like this. Of course, this wouldn’t be an issue at all if Dorries was paying these large amounts of money to a professional firm with proper offices, instead of a close friend making calls from her kitchen.

6. The first of the 5 payments of £3,525.00 is dated 11/05/2010, but Dorries was not an MP during the election that took place that month (i.e. she was a candidate from 06/04/2010 to 06/05/2010). Is this payment for services before the election, during the election, or in the 5 days after the election? Yes, I realise incumbents often continue to serve their constituents as best they can while officially classified as candidates, but if this expense arose from marketing, promotion or even research during the election period, there are some serious questions to be asked about how appropriate this claim is.

7. Prior to a belated complaint to police about my attendance at a public meeting, Dorries does not appear to have made a formal report to police about my conduct, and instead has repeatedly attempted to portray me as a stalker and danger to others in an ongoing trial-by-media. This process has involved several carefully coordinated media leaks, releases and appearances. How much of Nadine’s marketing/PR expenditure relates to this ongoing smear campaign, and if there is any expenditure of this type, is it right that the taxpayer should foot the bill for this all-too-personal vendetta of hers?

8. A similar question arises about expenses claims themselves. In late 2010, Dorries was forced to go on a PR blitz when it was revealed that she had lied to her constituents about her living arrangements. How much of this expenses claim relates to her attempts to stave off public criticism following the Commissioner’s report into her previous expenses claims?

–

UPDATE (6:30pm) – I have now confirmed that this expense was claimed/classified as “Research and media services”. At present, because the receipts have not been published, it is not certain that Dorries is still making these payments to her close friend Lynn Elson, or to/through an alternative provider. Perhaps someone would care to ask her. If I do, she’ll just use that as an excuse to go off her nut again.

UPDATE (6:45pm) – Confirmed: the address Lynn Elson’s company is registered under is also her residential address. I certainly won’t publish/publicise it, though. Not only would Dorries have kittens, but I’m not a total cloaca like some of Dorries’ supporters who use sensitive data like this carelessly and/or as a method of intimidation (see: Iain Dale and Phil Hendren).

This is an excerpt of a conversation I had with Jonathan Lord (Conservative MP for Woking ) in December 2010, in a chance meeting at a fundraiser for the children’s charity I volunteer for:

Jonathan Lord – Excerpt #1

There is one clearly-marked edit that involves claims by Dominic Wightman and his associates that I am not inclined to air, even though they are entirely untrue.

The relevant post about the single-bedroom flat that Anne Milton rented so she could put a Guildford address on the ballot paper is here. You may note in the audio that Jonathan Lord is extremely reluctant to talk about the property or even admit to visiting it, when the evidence I have seen suggests that it was used as a drop-in centre for members of his campaign team if it was used at all.

All the details I blogged about her family in this entry were a mocking reference to the stalking smears that had already begun at this stage, and I included them because all of these details were revealed in her own damn campaign literature.

Much like Dorries is now, Anne Milton was then feigning distress about a stalking campaign that didn’t exist when in fact she saw so little risk that she was waving her damn children around in public for political gain… and she was also claiming on the relevant nomination/ballot papers that she/they lived locally when in fact she had simply rented a single bedroom flat. But the idea that I was stalking her was just as absurd as the idea that she and her family lived in this poky little flat in a low-rent neighbourhood. This point may be lost of some people now that the relevant evidence has been deleted from the Conservatives.com website, but I have a copy of this document in my archives should anyone wish to challenge me on this point.

In the exchange you can hear in this audio clip, I clearly explain to Jonathan Lord how the accusation of stalking relates to the crime of harassment, and how it is perceived by the majority of people. I also relate to him the details of the single incident that – if distorted – might be (and has been) successfully presented as evidence of stalking/harassment, and yet he still agrees (off the record) that what I did did not amount to harassment.

I was blogging about Anne Milton’s campaign. Jonathan Lord was heading that campaign, and yet said nothing when Anne Milton declared as part of that campaign that I had “stalked her with a website”. He later repeatedly refused to even acknowledge that activists working under him had repeated this smear via a series of anonymous comments/websites.

To this day, he refuses to make a public statement making his position on this clear. Later in the conversation, he even reveals that Anne Milton could not at any stage (then or now) say that I had even libelled her on my site. His only complaint was that my blogging about her was ‘petty’ and ‘relentless’. It was not petty, because later in this conversation he admits there was a point to some of what I had published. I was relentless because these lying bastards would not even address the material on my website when they themselves acknowledged (privately, natch) that I had a point.

For example, I still contend that I had a point when I pointed out that Jonathan Lord should have identified himself as Anne Milton’s campaign manager when he appeared in her literature giving this shining endorsement. And, if you’ll excuse me, isn’t this deceit petty? Aren’t the extraordinary measures Milton, Lord and their activists took to disguise it petty?

The people accusing me of stalking Milton maintain that I had no point to make and was simply fixated on an innocent woman, and here we come to what’s going to be revealed in the next audio clip.

My major beef with Milton is that she and the Guildford Conservative Association (that Jonathan Lord was Chairman of at the time) turned a blind eye to evidence that local Conservative activists had smeared an innocent man as a paedophile.

The Conservative activist Iain Dale even has the audacity to imply that I imagined all of this as part of the mental illness he repeatedly projects onto me (as he often does with others).

Well, It was real, it happened, I still have the evidence to hand and my next move with Jonathan Lord is to reveal the real reason why he took no discernable action in response to the evidence I presented to him at the time.

(Psst! Also in this same conversation, Lord admits that no internal investigation like the one Mike Chambers described took place; it was more of an informal chat. Some “stern words” in private. Yeah, big deal.)

Meanwhile, now that Jonathan Lord cannot deny knowing how some people use the accusations made by Milton and her activists at the time, I will ask him again why he does not come forward and make his own views on this known.

It is not my fault that he cannot do this now without making it clear that he saw the evidence I presented to him about the smears of paedophilia and took no action, or that he did not actually bother to look at the evidence in the first place (I suspect it is the latter). So while I know it is going to hurt him, he had plenty of opportunities to address any or all of this with minimal fuss long before now and he chose not to.

In fact, he’s digging himself even deeper by remaining silent today, and if he waits any longer it is going to look even worse for him.

FFS, he was standing right there when I was working as a volunteer with local children and it didn’t even occur to him how accusations of stalking (and the more recent accusations of paedophilia aimed at me by other Conservative activists connected to Anne Milton) might undermine that. This poisons any claim he might make that he is and was involved in politics because he is driven by any concern for the community. His true priorities are revealed when he is confronted by this situation and still spends the whole time trying to cover his arse. What a bastard.

Jonathan Lord knows what’s going on and cannot deny it. Further, he knows how these smears put me and my family in danger. And yet I have to go to incredible lengths to have him admit publicly that they are untrue. Perhaps he will regard this concern to be petty. I certainly plan to be relentless about it. If he’s going to complain that I have revealed statements that he wanted to keep off the record, I have a single-word response to that; diddums.

–
UPDATE – Jonathan Lord turned a blind eye: Jonathan Lord took NO discernable action against Mike Chambers and Dennis Paul when they involved themselves in a smear campaign where an innocent man was branded a paedophile, and he did so for entirely political reasons. Jonathan Lord admits that he did no more than have informal conversations with these two Conservative candidates, in private and entirely off the record, because an election campaign was in progress.
–

Dear Steve,

Being a long-standing member of the Conservative communications team (and currently a key member of the communications team for Prime Minister David Cameron) I would expect you to be well aware of the Conservative response to the half-baked plan by Damian McBride and Derek Draper to publish false rumours about the private lives of senior members of the Conservative Party and their spouses, because you probably helped to write it.

At the time (i.e. back when Gordon Brown and Labour were in power), it was the position of your office that the Conservative party would not stand for this sort of thing, and the Prime Minister’s office should not stand for this sort of thing.

Today, I am here to confront you with details of a long-standing smear campaign that you personally have known about for months (if not years) and repeatedly failed to act against, and I am going to attempt to compel you, and your boss, to finally take action.

Anne Milton
(Conservative MP for Guildford, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Public Health)

You may not be aware that this whole thing started with a phone call from one of your party activists to my home in the opening stages of the 2005 general election. This person claimed to work for an ‘independent survey company’ and, via an extraordinarily clumsy and obvious push-polling script, pressed several key points of the campaign to elect Conservative candidate Anne Milton. We had signed up to the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) long before this call arrived, but the person calling did not apologise and offer to remove us from their database when advised of this. Instead, they developed an evasive attitude when asked about the origins of the call, then hung up.

Happily, earlier in the call, they had given the name of what they claimed to be an independent corporation/charity (Geneva), so I shared this detail with Anne Milton when I contacted her to complain about their conduct and inquire about the source of the call. She claimed to be unaware of the organisation or the caller, and offered to look into it, though she would/should have been aware the whole time that Geneva was in fact a Conservative party call centre.

I discovered this myself at about the same time I heard from a chap who had a local Tory party representative turn up unannounced at his door, wanting to discuss a letter he had written to the local paper that dared to be critical of this same candidate’s campaign.

I then started to blog about Anne Milton and her campaign, and quickly discovered that many if not all of the people posing as average members of the public in her campaign literature were in fact average members of her campaign team. Anne Milton’s only public defence for this was absurd in the extreme (at one point she tried to blame it on the post office; I presume she meant they had mixed up party literature with generic campaign literature) and it was at this stage that she began to dismiss queries about my blog and its contents with mild implications and then quite specific claims that I was stalking her.

Anne Milton recently denied saying anything that may have even given people the impression that I had harassed or stalked her in any way, but I can prove this to be a lie.

Further, I can prove the involvement of two of her activists in the publication/promotion of a series of anonymous comments/weblogs that not only repeated this smear, but also smeared me as a bad father, a computer criminal, and an undesirable alien.

There was also an anonymous weblog published/promoted by these same activists that smeared one of their direct political opponents as a paedophile. I referred these matters to your party office (CCHQ) and to the Parliamentary office of David Cameron. My complaint was referred back to the local association for action. They took none. Both of the activists involved were subsequently endorsed by Anne Milton and the local association as Conservative candidates for local council.

Jonathan Lord
(Conservative MP for Woking)

At the time, Jonathan Lord was Chairman of the Guildford Conservative Association. Initially, he sought to excuse his inaction by saying that the target of the ‘paedophile’ smear had not complained, and that the action of anonymously accusing him of paedophilia and publishing personal phone numbers and details of his whereabouts was not against the law as far as he could see.

Obviously, this is poppycock, even if we are to accept a highly selective interpretation of harassment law. What Draper and McBride did wasn’t a criminal act and the Conservative party came out hard against all of what they had planned, even though only one proposed target (Nadine Dorries) came out and complained about it.

Lord also claimed at the time that he took no action because I had not written to him about the matter. Again, this is purest poppycock. I had emailed him about this, and email is a perfectly valid form of written communication, and far more efficient when providing URLs of a series of live blogs/comments that should have been the focus of his concern. It was a stupid requirement that I put this on paper, and I interpreted the request that I do so as a form of subtle intimidation; Lord’s office had so far protected the people who had published details about my private life, and offered no explanation for the earlier unannounced visit to the home of a critic, and Lord should have been well aware that I would be hesitant to offer him or anyone else in his office my home address in these circumstances, even if he was so impossibly backward as to think my sending him a hyperlink on paper would be preferable to sending an email.

The further excuse that Lord currently offers for his inaction was given on an off-the-record basis during a chance meeting at a fundraiser for the children’s charity I volunteer for. I will return to this point later in this letter, but for now let’s just say that it doesn’t do him any favours, and an off-the-record admission about this matter is about as much use to me as a chocolate teapot when certain people are contending publicly and privately that I lied about some or all of it.

Iain Dale
(Conservative Party activist. Failed as Conservative candidate for Norfolk North, rejected as Conservative candidate for Bracknell and Maidstone & The Weald.)

Iain Dale was advised of the smear campaign targeting an innocent young man as a paedophile, and yet flat-out refused to take a stand against it, despite positioning himself as a leading/principled blogger at the time. Dale later alternately implied and claimed that I had imagined if not invented the whole thing, and also began publishing anonymous comments from Conservative activists supporting Milton, repeating the claims that I had stalked her.

When confronted about these and other comments he allowed on his site (but only against his political enemies, natch), Dale began to repeat the smear himself, and soon cottoned on to how neatly self-reinforcing it was.

Please excuse me as I paraphrase to elucidate:

X: “Y is a stalker!”
Y: “How dare you! Where is your evidence?”
X: “Well, look who’s here; it’s the stalker!”

Dale also went on to claim that I had not only stalked Anne Milton, but that I had gone on to stalk another Conservative MP; Nadine Dorries. He could not then and cannot now support either allegation, but he refuses to retract or even defend what he has repeatedly published on his site and shared privately with fellow Conservatives.

He will, however, repeatedly cite phone calls made at a time when he was knowingly libelling Tom Watson as a smear merchant while exploiting a smear campaign that falsely named me as a convicted paedophile*, and via a significant lie of omission he uses this to support a claim that I stalked him, too.

As part of this effort, Iain Dale also repeatedly claimed to have reported me to police for harassment. Recently, he was forced to admit that he has never filed such a report, but he continues to maintain that I am guilty of harassment, and is often forced to cite my response to his allegation(s) as evidence that supports his initial accusation(s).

(*A popular theme among Conservatives, I’ve noticed. I’ve often wondered why.)

Patrick Mercer
(Conservative MP for Newark)

Both the man who carried out the smear campaign falsely accusing me of child rape and the man who I believe initiated it were close associates of Patrick Mercer, and worked in close association with that MP as (please, feel free to laugh) amateur anti-terrorism operatives.

Mercer was at this time Chairman of the House of Commons Sub-Committee on Counter-Terrorism. When I confronted him with evidence that his source(s) had been fabricating evidence of Islamic extremism, Mercer’s office repeatedly refused to comment or take action.

Following contact with Iain Dale (see: the paedo-smear campaign against me that Dale sought to exploit) Mercer himself then responded by answering questions from third parties by claiming that I was an “electronic stalker”.

Like Iain Dale, both of these men claim to have reported me to police for harassment, but cannot provide evidence of ever having done so; most likely the complaints they speak of amounted to nothing or they are making the whole thing up. The latter is almost certainly the case with one of these men, as he has gone on to make entirely false claims on behalf of local police about my involvement in a range of crimes (which not a crime itself, you may be surprised to learn).

Mercer currently wishes to distance himself from these men and their actions, but he refuses to retract his entirely false claim of harassment that he made in response to my concerns and the concerns of others about these men and their conduct.

Nadine Dorries
(Conservative MP for Mid Bedfordshire)

By the time the 2010 general election came around, Nadine Dorries had begun privately repeating the smear initiated by Iain Dale; despite endorsing similar blogs targeting Labour MPs, Dorries maintained that my blogging about her amounted to stalking/harassment, and further claimed that I had, under my own name and via a series of false identities, sent her abusive messages. None of this was true, but this allowed her to answer any questions raised on my website about her conduct in much the same way as Milton, Mercer and Dale had previously.

However, (a) you would think she would know better after the Draper/McBride incident, and (b) by this time Dorries was aware that the claim that I had stalked her and others was being published alongside my home address on a series of anonymous websites by some self-styled cyber-vigilantes associated with Mercer’s amateur anti-terrorism operatives.

As with previous attacks from this quarter, an attempt was made to distribute my home address to people likely to be hostile to me, and/or in a way likely to make them hostile towards me. This began with the claim that I was a convicted paedophile, then carried on with a claim that I was a willing ally of religious extremists, but with the increasingly specific/public outbursts of Nadine Dorries, these people were able to make claims that appeared to be substantiated by a Member of Parliament.

One key entry included my home address alongside the claim that I had stalked women and sent death threats to MPs, and both of these claims relied heavily on the increasingly irrational if not disgracefully calculated outbursts of Nadine Dorries.

Knowing this to be the case, Dorries stood up in front of a hustings meeting in May 2010, claimed that I had stalked Patrick Mercer, claimed that I had harassed Anne Milton to the point that police became involved, and further claimed that I had stalked and harassed her to such an extent that a police investigation was currently in progress.

At the same time, Dorries was under investigation for expenses claims relating to a property that she officially classified as her second home, but had difficulty explaining why she had made repeated entries on her blog that gave the impression that it was her main home. It is on record and entirely clear from the subsequent report that Dorries told the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards that she had deceived her constituents about the location of her main home for entirely political reasons (i.e. to give the impression that she lived primarily in the constituency). She thought this put her in the clear and was entirely unprepared for the backlash that followed this revelation. She responded by again claiming that I had stalked her, and further claiming that police had specifically advised her to give misleading accounts of her whereabouts for reasons of security.

I have no history of stalking Nadine Dorries in any physical sense, and she had no cause to believe this, even if she is so dim-witted as to have allowed herself to be convinced that I was stalking her electronically. Worse, Dorries used my attendance at a public meeting in May 2010 to defend her claim that I had physically stalked her in the many years/months previous to this, and used Conservative activists aligned to her to spread this claim on blogs and in the media though a series of entirely strategic claims and distortions that not only stretched the truth to breaking point, but challenged the very notion of time and space.

Months after her hustings outburst, after being challenged to provide evidence to support her claim that a police investigation was in progress, Dorries sought to initiate a police investigation after the fact, and succeeded to a small extent in that police are now investigating my presence at a public meeting that I was invited to. This alone, while it is a complete waste of police time, did not cause me alarm… but Dorries then went on the leak news of this to a supportive local newspaper, leading to an entirely biased article that has set off my attacker(s) all over again, and once again allowed them to base their ongoing revenge attack on the word of a Member of Parliament who is in turn endorsed by a mainstream party (i.e. your party).

Rachel Whetstone
(Former Political Secretary to former Conservative leader, Michael Howard, currently European Head of Communications for Google.)

The bulk of the anonymous attacks on me (i.e. those that police are extremely reluctant to investigate/prosecute because of the potentially needless expense involved) are/were enabled by services owned and controlled by Google, including Blogger.com, YouTube and Gmail, and their search engine’s response to the public side of this smear campaign. While I recognise that Google do not have complete control over my attackers’ choice of provider(s), I do take issue with Rachel’s attitude and conduct regarding this matter:

– Rachel refuses to acknowledge that UK police regard the repeated false claims of paedophilia as a crime (harassment) and subsequently refuses to remove them. She has since referred me to the generic help desk based in the US, and they currently advise me that I can have them removed ‘simply’ by proving a negative (i.e. that I am not a convicted paedophile) in a US court.

– Rachel also cannot or will not explain why, when Blogger.com staff claim to have a turnaround time of 48 hours for removal of sensitive data such as home addresses published in bad faith, why it took over 3 months to remove the data in my case, not just on Blogger.com, but on YouTube as well. Further, she cannot explain why their search database with continue to store and distribute this data long after it has (eventually) been removed from Blogger.com/YouTube pages under their control.

– After she repeatedly refused to even discuss the detail of either of these matters, I dared to ask Rachel if her position had anything to do with her politics. She immediately took the position that she refused to discuss any of it because I had dared to ask this question. (She’s wasted at Google; get this woman back into politics!)

Rachel also pretends to be entirely ignorant of (and above) much of the detail of this ongoing smear campaign, but Michael Howard’s wife Sandra Howard made a key diary entry on the Conservatives.com website that would have been cleared for publication by Rachel Whetstone (assuming she was doing her job properly). This diary entry carried the specific claim that my action of blogging about Anne Milton amounted to “stalking her with a website”, and it named Anne Milton as the source.

OK, so Rachel isn’t currently a Conservative activist or operative in any formal sense, and she stands the best chance of anybody in convincing people that she’s not corrupt, and is instead merely incompetent (a holding position much like that of your former colleague Andy Coulson, as it happens), but she is your wife so I would hope that you might be able to sway her opinion somehow, perhaps with a casual conversation over breakfast, not least because these ongoing smears threaten my safety, the safety of my family and my work with a well-known children’s charity. (Not very ‘Big Society’, now is it?)

If it is not about politics for Rachel and she claims that she is only doing her job, then perhaps you can convince her to get on with that job; she has yet to clarify Google’s position on what they do and do not regard to be legal with respect to their Terms & Conditions of use, and she has yet to explain why it took months in my case to remove content that they claim is normally removed in a couple of days. On the latter point, if it’s a universal problem and not specific to me, then she may need to do a little follow-up work to make sure Google doesn’t become the provider of choice for those engaging in harassment and other forms of bullying.

Conclusion
(10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3….)

As you did previously with ‘Smeargate’, I would expect that you still maintain the position that the Conservative party would not stand for this sort of thing, and the Prime Minister’s office should not stand for this sort of thing.

Further, because I can provide plenty of evidence to support everything I assert in this open letter, I invite you to challenge me on it, or insist that you (finally) take a stand against it.

That, or you can instead take the position that the Conservative party WILL stand for this sort of thing, and the Prime Minister’s office SHOULD stand for this sort of thing. If you do so, I’d appreciate a cogent argument explain why you’re above the conditions of civility you impose on others.

How silly of me; I almost forgot the ‘third way’. Obviously, you may also choose the path taken by so many other Tories before you and insist that you do not have to take a position either way because I am stalking you.

I am wary that you are likely to try this, which is why this public letter is going to be my only letter to you if you choose to be a cloaca about this; after I have made reasonable efforts to ensure that it has reached you, I am going to give you 48 hours to respond, and then we’re done; we will have nothing further to say to each other, because I will know exactly where you stand if you don’t even have the balls to challenge me to produce evidence.

If you fail to respond, then I will know that you intend to stand by the actions of your activists, your MPs, one of your boss’s cabinet members, and your wife, and I shall act accordingly.

Now, now… don’t be judging me by the standards of your fellow Conservatives; I have no intention of embarking on a new career in the dark arts. I will instead be bringing extended periods of light to the party.

This process will begin with the fundraising required to launch one civil action after another against people who cannot possibly hope to substantiate what they have claimed in court. I’ll need to generate publicity for this, which is why I’m so glad that I’ve held some of the chunkiest nuggets in reserve.

If I do not get a satisfactory response from you in 48 hours, I will start going public with everything I am legally entitled to reveal, starting with everything shared with me off the record by Jonathan Lord (oh, and also a damning conversation with Jeremy Hunt, who needs to be especially wary of digital recording equipment given his portfolio).

To be clear; every courtesy I’ve ever extended to Conservatives will go out the fucking window, including confidentiality. I will pause only long enough to side-step those rare Tories who have already taken a public stance against this and I will release every scrap of text, audio and video that I have captured or collected (often secretly) since it became clear to me that Tories would be standing by their own on this for as long as they could keep the details from the media.

With the safety of my family at stake, how can I do less? I’ve played nice for long enough. I even tried backing off once, and that’s when your dirtbag activists took it up a notch.

I cannot stress enough that this would only be the start of a mere fundraising process; not only would I need to make these revelations as entertaining and as engaging as possible in order to raise as much money as possible, but once I raise the funds required to do so, it is my intention to take civil action against one target after another in as public a fashion as possible. And I’ve got letters and email and audio and video that some of these people can’t even begin to guess at.

If I am to be forced to dedicate myself to this shit sandwich your fellow Tories have made for me, I am going to make sure that you and everyone associated with your party is forced to take a big, juicy bite. Nom nom nom nom.

Alternatively, you can simply maintain the position you and your boss David Cameron claim to have held all along; that politicians should invite scrutiny from bloggers like myself, and that there is no place for smears like this in politics.

I sincerely hope to hear from you well within 48 hours so we can settle this matter as cordially as possible soon after that. If this cannot be done, I hope you recognise why I will be pulling out all the stops and dedicating myself to the task of clearing my name while exposing the rot at the core of your party, and I wish you luck in the inevitable attempt to smear me in response, because you are going to need it with the paper trail I’ve got and the fair warning you’ve received.

Cheers

Tim Ireland

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