Further to Robin’s earlier post, here’s another interesting blast from Fiona Fox’s past:
DISGRACED former Labour politician Jim Devine persuaded a friend to call his office manager pretending to be a journalist looking into MPs expenses, it was claimed today.
But when she took time off for stress after discovering his actions had been an elaborate hoax, he told other staff that it was her being investigated for fraudulent expenses claims used to fund a non-existent gambling habit……But when she came into the office the following day, the office manager realised it was all a big hoax.
She said: “I went into work and checked my emails and I had access to Jim’s email.
“There was one marked urgent so I opened it.
“It was from Fiona Fox mostly about the Embryology Bill.
“She is the Director at the Science Media Centre in London.
“But at the end there was a PS said that ‘I phoned that poor woman in your office and left the message. Hope you’ve put her out of her misery.“
Guardian science correspondent Ian Sample commented at the time:
Few people who are familiar with the small pond that is science journalism in the UK will have failed to gulp on reading about the ex-Labour MP Jim Devine and the unthinkable bullying he unleashed on his office manager, Marion Kinley.
Devine, who was an MP in Livingston, Scotland, before being caught up in the expenses scandal last year asked an acquaintance to make a fake call to Kinley and pretend to be a journalist investigating her financial affairs. The story gets darker with every step and you can read more about it here. Devine has since been ordered to pay Kinley £35,000.
Though appalling from the off, it was not the top line that shocked many of my colleagues most. What came as a surprise was the revelation far down the story that the fake call in question was made by Fiona Fox, head of the Science Media Centre in London, a prominent venue for press conferences on all matters scientific and medical. Otherwise articulate people who read the story struggled to say more than three letters: WTF?
This is the same person lecturing about “integrity” on the BBC College of Journalism website.
UPDATE. In the comments Beeboidal points us to the BBC’s account of the Devine bullying case. No mention of Fiona Fox, of course.
She strikes me as a throughly nasty woman and totally ill-suited to the post and the heights she seems to aspire to.
Span Owls, couldn’t agree more. I read some of the posts attached to the Guardian link above and her supporters are acccusing her opponents of playing the (wo)man rather than the ball.
A bit hypocritical from the warmists who seem to think character assassination of their opponents is their only defence.
‘Impartiality’ seems be joined by a few other interesting genetic mutations spreading throughout the BBC infirmament.
It is also to be noted that BBC website report on this tribunal case
1) Is tucked away in the Scottish section.
2) Makes no mention of Fiona Fox, merely stating a friend of Devine made the phone call.
3) Following on from 2), it of course makes no mention of the Fox’s connection to the SMC, the BBC or revolutionary Leftism.
No byline to the story, but I’m sure the BBC College of Journalism is suitably proud of the writer.
Imagine how the BBC would cover this story had it been a male Conservative MP bullying his female office manager via a banker friend or James Delingpole!
DB and Beeboidal,
Good work!