Smears: down memory lane
11:30 am - April 13th 2009
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Paul Linford, 3rd October 2006:
It wasn’t all Osbourne’s fault. The word was put into his mouth by the Blairite journalist Mary Ann Sieghart who has penned her own piece justicative HERE. Sieghart, who was once so close to Mr Tony as to aspire to a job in the No 10 policy unit, gaily reassures us that “autistic” is an epithet that “plenty of politicians and journalists” have used about the Chancellor. “He does, after all, have an obsessive personality and rather low emotional intelligence. That is why the audience laughed: Mr Osborne’s joke resonated with them.”
In other words, because it’s Gordon Brown we’re attacking, that’s okay then.
Iain Dale, 6th October 2006:
I have finally found a column by Mary Ann Sieghart that I can’t disagree with. It was she who interviewed George Osborne at the Tory conference when he made his quip about Gordon Brown and autism. Read her column HERE. Paul Linford, however, seems to have had a sense of humour failure HERE.
Anyone who knows George Osborne knows he has a wicked sense of humour and is also a great mimic. Let’s hope this experience won’t have put him off being spontaneous. This whole episode was manufactured by bored journalists wh had nothing better to write and love a bit of faux outrage. Again, the lesson for the Conservatives is to keep the media beast fed and watered. If you don’t, don’t be surprised if it turns round and bites you.
Iain Dale, 13th April 2009:
Some may see this as a schoolboy spat between two bloggers with egos the size of a mountain. Maybe. But my experience is important as it demonstrates how the Number Ten lie machine will target anyone whose reputation it wishes to damage.
…
Perhaps this sort of affair is symptomatic of something more deep-rooted at the heart of government. All administrations flag after a while. They become gaffe- prone. People go off-message more frequently. A sense of malaise is almost palpable. It’s what happens when empires crumble.
hat/tip: Chicken Yoghurt
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Reader comments
Hell, this is nothing new. John Bull, a journal, in 1915 smeared Ramsay MacDonald, using his illegitimacy to support claims that he’d been elected to Parliament under a false name. You could probably find clay tablets from Sumer smearing Gilgamesh.
And is there any surprise that a partisan commentator such as Dale practices blatant hypocrisy and possesses a selective memory?
I thought the one thing we’d taken from this weekend that we on the Left have to rise above using the other side’s conduct for justification. n’est pas?
Question is, was Osborne seriously suggesting that Brown was autistic or was it just a joke in bad taste? If the former then there’s definitely hypocrisy here.
So, he’s a hypocrite.
Or he’s seen the light.
Either way, it’s douchebags at the heart of New Labour at fault this time, and crying about what people said three years ago isn’t going to change the fact that this time it’s your party wallowing in the shit.
This isn’t a story about the media or right-wing bloggers, it’s about the fundamental shittiness of those who concocted the stories in the first place.
Shoot the messenger all you like.
Brown is toast.
Why does nobody understand that, on the internet, if you disagree with a point of view it’s really not a clever idea to have almost all of your posts for the last few days linking to its arch proponents?
Yes indeed Dale is a hypercritical little Tory shit.
And the Tories are so outraged about this, outraged, OUTRAGED, DO YOU HERE, That they are keeping it in the news for days, and days, and days.
Nobody smears like the Tories, and nobody feigns outrage like the Tories.
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