L'Affaire Smeargate: The Blogosphere Responds.

Smeargate has dominated the blogosphere to such an exten that it is hard to keep track of what everyone has been writing. Which is why I have taken the step of creating a reader's digest of all the views from across the political blogging spectrum so it can all be read in one place. Don't thank me, public service is what I do. Of course if any other bloggers' responses deserve a mention feel free to put them in the comments.


Guido:

The assassination of JFK, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, 9/11- all events that act as milestones for the modern age yet pale into insignificance in comparison to McBride and Draper's plot to smear their political opponents. Guido was so shocked at the depths to which they had sunk that he immediately stopped work on a light hearted post he was working on, speculating on whether Gordon Brown has turned Number 11 Downing Street into a prison to keep Madelaine McCann in, and immediately set to work.

Guido has more emails to reveal soon.

Downing Street has repeated implied that Guido might not be the best placed person to express outrage over a smear campaign having previously labelled Brown as “bonkers”.

This is complete nonsense unlike the supposed psychotherapist Derek Draper, Guido is full of sincere concern about the Prime Mentalists’s rapidly disintegrating health, in fact the PM has even taken to referrring to himself in the 3rd person.


Derek Draper:

This is all a fuss over nothing, whilst the emails might seem to be in bad taste you have to remember that what actually happened was that Damien and I had decided to embark on a creative writing course and thought up a variety of interesting plots, and then rather foolishly we accidentally transposed the names of the characters with our Chriistmas card list and then........


Iain Dale:

Brown's response is wholly inadequate, is it too much to ask for him to come before the House of Commons wearing a sandwich board apologising for his guilt. Meanwhile what are we to make of the silence of Bob Thompson, head of the office supplies? His silence speaks volumes. When did he know and why isn’t he telling us?

Perhaps the most important lesson to be learnt from this is that I am available for appearances on a variety of media outlets, please contact my agent.


Derek Draper:

Actually what I meant to say is that Damien and I are mates, so when he learned of scurriolous rumours being spread about senior Tories he immediately emailed me so we could work together to stop it but then Paul Staines leaked the email.


Sunny Hundal:

All the right wing blogs and their mates in the media are talking about the supposed ‘smeargate’ being the moment when political blogs have come of age. I don’t see why anyone would even want to read poisonous right wing blogs which promote different views to mine, and therefore must be written by people who aren’t nearly as clever as me.

Back when I invented blogging in 2004 I hoped it would become a medium for good, but this has not been the case. Whilst the likes of Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale aren’t nearly as successful as me either in terms of blogging or in terms of growing a sexy goatee, they do unfortunately have some readers, as I have previously outlined in “why everyone should stop talking about Guido & Iain Volumes 1-12”.

Whilst liberal left blogs have been instrumental in breaking such stories as the death squads employed by the Metropolitan police against the G-20 protesters, it is perhaps necessary that we should look towards they way progressive blogs in the USA have civilised the political discourse, sites such as the Daily Kos, the Huffington Post and dieGOPscum.com have done wonders in raising the tone.

The biggest outrage here is that the Labour Party chose Derek Draper to spearhead their online media operation when there were other bloggers on the left who would have been much better suited for such a task of constructing a tediously partisan echo chamber, bloggers who are in touch with ethnic issues and trim their beards into gorgeous goatee styles rather than the Draper style tramp look. Please pay attention to me!


James Graham:

There has been a noticeable silence from myself. I complain obsessively about infringement on civil liberties but my silence on civil servants plotting to smear private citizens has been striking. I have been given a salient lesson about just how much I value freedom.


Derek Draper:

You see what really happened was that Damien had been leaked some of Paul Staines' emails and thought it would be a good idea to change all the names from Labour members to Conservative members to make a powerful point about the inappropriateness of smearing.


Oliver Kamm:

Congratulations to the Sunday Times for this scoop, it just goes to show that in the age of the blogs the serious newspapers are still the organs breaking real stories and bloggers like Guido Fawkes are essentially parasitic upon the good work of professional journalists at those newspapers.


Derek Draper:

My previous attempts at clarifying what happened might have been inadvertent lies, so let me set the record straight. It wasn’t actually my computer that the emails were sent to those of a renowned Cornish fishmonger who happens to share my name.


Nadine Dorres:

I am so outraged about the career boosting lies being spread about me that I have appeared on GMTV, Sky, ITN, BBC Breakfast, The Today Programme, CBeebies and Channel 4 news to discuss them in more detail. There may be legal consequences for Damian McBride, if his smears had been believed then my reputation as a puritanical nag would be irreparably damaged and the Panto bookings will dry up next Christmas.


Unity:

These emails expose the hypocrisy at the heart of the Conservative Party. Let’s examine Guido’s claims.

The first thing to realise is that Guido isn’t his real name, it’s Paul Staines. He lied about that so let’s see what more he has lied about. Paul Staines claims to have been sent the emails by an anonymous source.

Some context is needed here, email is a system of sending electronic messages in order to facilitate communication between users of computers, but emails are not ‘sent’ to a person, they are sent to a server which has to be accessed by the other user. So the email could not have been sent to Paul Staines at all it could only have been sent to his email account which he then accessed.

His lies don’t end there though, he claims that he ‘read’ the emails, but several software programmes exist that allow the email to be ‘read’ by the computer, as far as I am aware Staines provides no proof that this isn’t what happened here.

{several thousand words discussing the definitions of ‘computer’, ‘is’ and ‘chair’ have been edited for reasons of space}

So in conclusion Paul Staines and Nadine Dorres should resign.


Tom Watson:

If you make fun of me or imply that I had anything to do with what happened with one of my closest confidants who shared an office with me then I’ll sue you, and I've got a propah lawyah.


Derek Draper:

My earlier posts my have contained some lies that I didn't really mean. I realise now that we shouldn’t have sent emails to each other, plotting to spread rumours that David Cameron sacrificed his son to Satan but you’ve got to remember that we hadn’t actually gotten around to putting them on our website so did we really do anything wrong? Can't we all just move on and accept that everyone is partly to blame? Except me.