The Today programme (0730) does an indepth investigation of the Whittingdale story. LOL.
It’s all newspapers, newspapers, newspapers. Just why didn’t they publish the story on Whittingdale and just how much did it influence government policy on Press regulation?…asks the BBC’s Norman Smith. Trust is why this matters, its impact on government policy. The charge is this, he says, the redtops chose not to publish and you can contrast that with how they now want to publish the story about the celebrity threesome.
Yeah but…..the BBC chose not to publish and you can contrast that with their eagerness to publish sensationalist allegations of sex abuse about Tory ministers…and their reluctance to publish anything to do with Jimmy Savile.
At 08:19 we get more on this story….just why did the newspapers behave in this manner? Newspapers, newspapers, newspapers.
Not the BBC then?
The BBC reminds us that Whittingdale has always been an advocate of light-touch Press regulation…so where’s the story?
Whittingdale’s romance would hardly have been a career killer….If anyone had tried to use it to pressure him I’m pretty certain he would have said ‘Publish and be damned’…I don’t see any claim that he asked for a ‘super injunction’ to gag the media….the public would have just shrugged…it’s a nothing story really and he is highly unlikely to have been cowed into doing whatever anyone wanted on the back of it.
Still, it raises a lot of questions as to why the BBC itself didn’t reveal the story, their own involvement in Leveson wasn’t exactly minimal and with the Charter review they have a vested interest in any leverage they think they can get over the Culture Secretary. So why only expose Whittingdale after the Byline story?
Labour knew about Whittingdale in 2014 and we must presume the BBC did too. Why the silence? Did they try to use it to influence Whittingdale’s decisions?
Have to laugh at hypocrisy of the once Labour shadow Culture Secretary, Chris Bryant who trawled the gay dating site Gaydar for sex…
He said:
“I’m sorry this has happened. I’ve always been open and honest about my private life but never sought to make an issue of it. “I’m saddened that others have sought to do so. The important thing is the work that I do for my constituents as an MP. “I will not myself be distracted from standing up for the people of the Rhondda.”
It was alright for him to be shadow culture secretary once it was in the open but Whittingdale’s position is compromised by revelations of a fling 2 years ago now that that is in the open big style?
I’m sure Whittingdale will not be distracted from standing up for the People of Britain and I’m sure Bryant is saddened that people want to make an issue of Whittingdale’s private life. LOL.
Once again, the BBC running with a Labour narrative. It is outrageous; what fools they must take us to be.
Received this from a friend this morning:
As usual the Beeb was covering itself with ordure this morning with its reporting of the late-night antics of another cabinet minister, this time it was a creep called John Whittingdale, Minister of Culture, Media and Sport. In true Tory tradition (good bit of alliteration there: Ed) good old Johnny was happily amusing himself by hiring the services of Whiplash Lil until quite recently but, of course, the Minister was unaware that whipping MPs was not her “professional occupation”; does that mean she was providing her services gratis thus giving new meaning to the “pro” in “pro bono” ? Perhaps Whittingdale gets confused by all those references to The Whips’ Office in the House. The Beeb trotted out some press nonentity to explain at length to us ignorant viewers that Whittingdale’s private proclivities could not possibly be a “matter of public interest”, – regardless of the fact that said minister was sitting on top of Leveson and deciding whether or not the press could be trusted to regulate itself. No doubt when Johnny was stretched out on a bench stark naked and blindfolded with an orange in his mouth and a cucumber up his arse being lashed by an Amazon in head-to-foot shiny black plastic wielding a riding crop he was actually fulfilling his ministerial responsibilities, cogitating on which part of his anatomy or his ministerial portfolio he was experiencing, – was it Culture ?, was it Media ? (as she inevitably sold her story to the red-tops) or was it Sport ?. Nowadays, apparently, it is perfectly acceptable to have pervs in the cabinet, must make Dave, Oliver Letwin, Jesse Norman, Boris Johnson, Jo Johnson, Ed Llewellyn, Rupert Harrison and all the other old Etonians feel right at home. I recall that Profumo had to quit the cabinet when all he did was have a spot of missionary rumpy-pumpy with the gorgeous Christine Keeler (or was it Mandy Rice-Davies, or was it both ?), the poor bugger was just born 50 years too soon. Nowadays he would have been considered frightfully boring or uber-cool, take your prick (yes, I used the spell-checker).
b) I see the press are getting wound up because the IMF has, quite predictably, published their doom and gloom view of the consequences of Brexit. I don’t know about you but whenever I read a report on this subject which lists a hundred negatives without mention of a single positive I immediately smell a rat, in this case a large and decomposing French female rat. Naturally, the press and the Beeb are far too sensitive to mention a certain Christine Lagarde, MD of the IMF, former member of the French government under Francois Fillon (who he ?: Ed), vegetarian, non-drinker, non-smoker, non-everything, socialist, divorced, friend of Dom (as in Dominatrix) Strauss-Kahn, and rabidly pro-everything-EU. Is it conceivable that she had some influence over the conclusions of the IMF report ?. Can this have anything to do with the fact that her 5-year term at the head of the IMF expires on 1st July this year ?. No doubt she will then be expecting a fresh sinecure (sorry, job) with the EC in Brussels or with the French government under Petit Francois in which case she must be seen to toe the socialist EU line by supporting the Remainders regardless of the facts.
c) Another of the doom and gloom prognosis brigade is Friends of the Earth. Their schtick is that without the EU to save us we would all be condemned by now to wear gas masks 24/7, every blade of grass would be brown and dying, the polar ice-caps would all have melted, the world’s flora and fauna would all be extinct. Perhaps their obsessive support for everything EU is not unrelated to the fact that Friends of the Earth receives grants in excess of £10 million per from the EU or is it the case that only a geriatric cynic like me would harbour such suspicions ?.
d) I have received my 16 pages of propaganda from Dave and am naturally gratified to learn the HMG squandered £9.30 millions of taxpayers’ hard-earned money by giving the print contract to a company called Williams Lea, a subsidiary of Germany’s Deutsche-Post. Just shows how well you can do if you stick to the “we’re all in this together” club for printing lies, half-truths and distortions, all of it old recycled rubbish that we have hear before from Dave & Co. The good news is that according to the press this whole propaganda exercise has produced a major backlash with the Tory MPs and in the dank and vile members of the party. At least the pamphlet has served some useful purpose; I forbore to tear it into shreds to hang on a hook next to the crapper (paper too shiny for that purpose but I must admit it was a real temptation) and contented myself with scrawling “bullshit” over the first page with a black marker pen and have posted it back to D Cameron Esq, 10 Downing Street, London SW1A 2AA.
There, now I feel much better,
No-Good Boyo