I have just been commenting over at Samizdata, on this.  Johnathan Pearce links to this article, and Guido Fawkes himself commented that the Telegraph got that story from his blog two days ago, while somehow neglecting to mention the fact.  Indeed..

My first comment, with some links added:

Yeah (Guido), just what I was going to say.

The spat between Guido and the Telegraph is almost as much fun to watch as the one between Gordon Brown and the rest of the universe, prompted by Guido.

The way Guido is treated in the article JP links to amounts to a blatant lie.  By omission, admittedly, but still a lie.  Guido is mentioned, but not as the source of the story!  The DT (perhaps henceforth the Daily Telegraph should be known as the Delirium Tremens) just happened to hear about the story, from some completely random and different source!  Tossers.  One of the best things about the blogosphere is that this kind of lying by the media can be nailed up and hung out to dry. 

In general, I like how media people are now reported, accurately, as active participants in these stories.  They are, for example, active participants in power politics, because journos are junior members, sometimes quite senior members, of political cabals.  When the newspapers were unchallenged by blogs, newspapers all wrote about themselves as mere observers of events, rather than as often being also shapers and provokers of events.  Another lie, this time a seriously big one.

Don’t miss Guido’s classic comic vignette of him having a run-in with a bloke from the New Statesman, who, Guido makes quite clear, is part of the Derek Draper gang but doesn’t want it talked about!  I’ll bet he doesn’t.

Janet Daley, bitterly looking for points to make to defend her beloved old DT, today makes the point, already made by Tim Montgomerie, that Guido may be an uberblogger, but he chose (had to choose?) an old-school dead-tree newspaper to actually break the stuff.  Yes, good point.  Guess: something to do with the libel laws?  After all, when the News of the World published these emails, full of smears, that was the first time they were really, you know, published.  Just passing on what we’ve read isn’t a libel defence, is it?

See also Toby Young, whom Guido links to, on how Guido probably waited to see if these smears would actually materialise of their own accord.  As he says, Guido then saying where the smears came from would really have been an explosion.

It is becoming clear to me that this story is actually only non-trivial because so many people already know that this is the kind of bastard Brown is, and has been all along.  And these are the kinds of bastards he has knowingly used all along.  It is not an aberration, this is business as usual. And, we know.

If it had only been an aberration, sacking the emailers might have more than sufficed.  In fact, their defence, that we only emailed about it, we never actually did it, might also have worked.  But, everyone knows that this is a mere symptom, and now the questions just will not stop.

Brown made his first mistake immediately, long before this embarrassing non-apology thing.  Instead of simply saying that he knew nothing of the emails, which was very probably also a lie but rather hard work to nail, he made what could prove the fatal error of going further and saying that in his opinion this kind of thing had no place in politics blah blah.  Lie.  Brown is so used to flannelling thus, that he didn’t realise until too late just what he was attempting to say.  As we all know, he does this kind of thing, and his henchmen do this kind of thing, all the time.  We all know it.  In Brown’s opinion, this sort of nastiness is central to politics.  And this lie about his opinions opens up the entire can of worms (see in particular Iain Dale for news of the worms in Scotland and Wales) for the dog pack to bark at Brown about.  (Sorry for the metaphor mixing there.)

Brown is nothing if not a stubborn old bastard, but I really think that this time his resignation might only be days away.  That is, we might be only days away from about half a dozen Labour Big Beasts saying: GO!!  Oh, they’ll be polite.  They won’t say: fuck off you mad bastard.  They’ll say: great and noble as you have been, indeed are, your position has, because of to the scurrilous nature of what passes for political commentary these days, blah blah blah, your noble work saving the world, blah blah blah, tragedy, blah blah blah ...: go.  The point being, if the Labour Party does not sack this horrible man, then that makes them terminally horrible too.

And the good news is that this might cause all the financial chaos to be dealt with just that tiny bit less catastrophically.  Remember all that?

And now, I think I’ll copy all that and stick it on my personal blog.

Another commenter also queried why the DT refers to Guido’s as a “the Tory blog”.  And JP asked, in general, of the DT, what gives?  Here’s my second comment:

The Telegraph, what gives?

Well, I don’t know the full story, but here are two bits of it, I think.

First there is the already well-understood problem being faced by all newspapers nowadays, that their advertising revenue is falling off the cliff.  It’s not so much that blog reporting is snapping at dead-tree heals (oh god more mixed metaphors) so much as blogs pouring into territory already being vacated by the newspapers for other reasons, money reasons.  The DT has, simply, sacked lots of rather good journos, and tried to replace them with fewer and worse ones.

But second, the pro-Labour rot, if rot it be, set in a long time ago.  Remember when New Labour ex-heavyweight Sion Simon used to write for the DT?

Some time around 1997, before or after May 1st, the DT had a big think, and decided that the old ruling class that they used to stick up for, the one that wore tweed suits and went to posh schools and shot things at the weekend, had now been replaced by a new ruling class.  As indeed it had.  Should the DT stick with the mere principles it had used to defend the old ruling class (things like sticking up for free markets, at least in animal killing and the like), or go with the principle that the DT sticks up for the ruling class, whoever it happens to be?  They decided, at the very least, to hedge their bets, and to make nice with the new ruling class.

Hence their present very half-hearted and incompetent water-carrying for the present government.

By the way, of all the stuff now going on, the thing that would most have pleased the late Chris Tame (JP has already mentioned the possibility of him gazing down happily on all this broohaha) is the way the DT is now getting such a sandbagging, and at the hands of a hardcore libertarian, who is a type of person the DT has spent decades pretending did not exist (because both ruling classes, the old and the new, preferred this pretence also).  As an earlier commenter notes, they are still, pathetically, keeping on with this pretence, by calling Guido a Tory.  Never mind the idiotic ideological animus this reveals, still; it is insanely inaccurate reporting!

The general public won’t now be noticing, but its core readership (the people who do not care for the present ruling class one little bit) are definitely noticing all this patheticness, and this spells doom for them.

Chris really hated the DT. I think you can see why.