Is Dodgy Dave heading for a Tricky Dicky sticky End?
One of the most reliable things in life is what behaviour patterns tell you about a person. If someone will knowingly lie to the readership of the Daily Telegraph about what a piece of opinion research means, then he or she is likely to do other things of equal or greater mendacity. Not being British – but being paid to lie to the British about the most important decision since June 1940 – suggests two things. First, the recipient is a mercenary whore; and second, the paymaster is a pimp.
The whore and pimp in this case are Lynton Crosby and the Conservative Party respectively….and disrespectfully. When I posted the Crosby piece last week, I’m sure most readers just thought I was a market research anorak sounding off; when the post about Cameron the parrot went up, doubtless most in the Remain camp thought it was just more Brexiteer propaganda. Well, it wasn’t and it isn’t: the misuse of research “results” to start a bandwagon can get you thrown out of the Market Research Society; paying direct marketeers to pretend they’re researchers will get you thrown out of the Marketing Society; paying electioneer specialists to masquerade as researchers can get you thrown into jail…especially if you lied about your election expenses in doing so.
When the election expenses story broke, I paid scant attention to it. It is rare in the UK for any person to go to jail for political expenditure during an election: accusees are usually given the benefit of the doubt. The fight to win a seat is kick-bollock-and-scramble non-stop for weeks…..it’s easy to make a genuine mistake in that context.
When I saw the Twitter-screaming going on, it was the usual conclusion-jumping suspects on the Left: keen to big up a minor offence, and then run away like jack-rabbits if the Carter Rucks and Alistair McAlpines head into town.
But the day before yesterday was a turning point, and it centred around this ‘whistleblower’ piece at The Canary – a site whose outlook I occasionally share, and I do respect most of the professionalism that goes into it. It changed the nature of the crime from petty theft to grand larceny: equally to the point, it pointed fingers firmly at Crosby in particular and Camerlot in general:
It would be a very odd election ops director who didn’t get involved in appointing RM. It would be a very sloppy Party leader who didn’t personally sign off a sum approaching £90,000. As a new broom sweeping clean, it is quite likely that Crosby initiated and led the hiring of RM…it took place, after all, some two years after his appointment.
And what RM is supposed to have done is, clearly, break the Representation of the People Act. At this point, the alleged fraud ceases to be trivial. Cameron the double-talking neoliberal conscience-free corporate parrot hired the shifty track record of cringe-worthy Crosby….now they’re being savaged by a conscientious Canary.
The Canary’s follow-up piece the next day was a classic use of well thought-out serial investigative journalism. Having established the strong likelihood of electoral fraud, the site now (for once, rightly) accused the BBC of ignoring a big story, and instead attacking Jeremy Corbyn. It also brought in the history of regime change in the newsroom following the appointment of former Newscorp journalist James Harding.
So now we follow the arrows of corporate coup from defrauding democracy to taking over the national broadcaster via two known allies of the Tory Party….Newscorp and HSBC. And this too loops into the sterling work done by lone bank bounty hunter Nick Wilson who’s been banging on about this entire bank/corruption/media blackout/Tory links web of cronyism since God was a girl.
Events are now building. The Conservatives’ hot denials have not been given additional credence by the Party’s attempts to interfere with police work through the Courts, and/or slap injunctions on well-founded and informed speculation. Not only have all these attacks been thrown out by the judiciary, it now looks odds-on that Nigel Farage’s General Election defeat will be declared null and void. For the first time in British history, the Government of the Day – demonstrably lying its ugly head off about the Brexit risks during a tense referendum – finds itself the subject of widespread police investigations that might well, ultimately, toss the possibility of ongoing widespread fraud into the referendum campaign itself. The revelation that polling cards have been wrongly sent to foreign migrants working in the UK may well have been an innocent cock-up. Or not.
If nothing else, District Judge Barron’s especially pointed words, on granting an extension to the fraud investigation, will have made it clear to the Conservative Party élite that they have a major fight on their hands:
In a society where many of us are losing faith in liberal democracy’s ability or will to resist the creeping corporate surveillance State, it is reassuring to see that large parts of the judiciary have not, as yet, lost the plot.
There is still a long way to go. The phone hacking affair was swept away with obvious CPS collusion, Andy Coulson’s obvious perjury was dismissed by a Beak before the jury could make their own minds up, while the Daniel Morgan murder, the Elm House investigation and a host of other suspiciously connected police investigations were obstructed by all manner of inappropriate means used by corporate fascists. But one senses the frontal-lobe driven power-freaks overreaching themselves – as they always do in the end.
There exists a very powerful group of people in the UK – across banking, the media, retailing, politics, and Internet Service Provision – who do recognise where the line is…but have no qualms about crossing it. They also grasp that only when ‘respected’ mainstream media start publishing serious allegations will Middle England be shaken out of its assumptive acceptance torpor.
This is how it was with Nixon. David Cameron may well be heading for his Nixon moment.
Related from a recent Slogpost: the political awareness of Middle EnglandU
The Slog 