Nadine Dorries censored by the Telegraph

To put it mildly, Nadine Dorries is not my favourite MP. She has a history of making wild claims and spurious arguments. Other bloggers have already done sterling work to expose some of her wilder claims so I won't bother going into the detail here. For anyone who is interested, I recommend Devil's Mad Nad series for some entertaining posts about the member for Mid-Bedfordshire.

But today I find myself in the curious position of having to defend her because my belief in free speech is stronger than my dislike of Ms Dorries.

Nadine's blog, in which she accused the Daily Telegraph and its owners, the Barclay Brothers, of an anti-democratic witch hunt against MPs, has been taken down after legal action by lawyers acting for the Telegraph.

Fortunately, Dr Crippen, hardly one of Mad Nad's greatest fans either, had made a copy of the article and has posted it so that we can all see what the Telegraph and its owners didn't want us to read.

It looks pretty much like a typical Dorries rant; long on opinion and allusion but short on real data. Surely the appropriate response from a powerful newspaper like the Telegraph should have been to run an article rebutting her allegations. Instead, it took the cowardly option of using its vast resources to force her service provider to remove her blog. I would have dismissed this piece as paranoid fantasy but for the fact that the Telegraph and its owners don't want people to read it. Whenever that happens, I start to wonder if there is, perhaps, a grain of truth in the allegations. It is certainly true that the Barclay Brothers are not above using their financial muscle to bully others in an attempt to influence the political process.  

Even those who can't stand the woman have leapt to Nadine's defence. Craig Murray, Peter Black, Rob Parsons, Longrider and Justin, among others, have attacked the Telegraph's action. Even Mr Eugenides grudgingly condemned the censorship.

Nadine Dorries's blog is cached here but, just in case that gets taken down too, I have followed Dr Crippen's lead and re-posted the offending article below. Read it and make up your own mind.

Winners or Losers?

Posted Thursday, 21 May 2009 at 17:04 Just park a couple of facts for a moment, which you may not agree with but are factual. The first is that MPs have always been encouraged, by whatever means possible, to draw down their ACA allowance in full. This is because it was upped in place of an appropriate pay rise. The rules surrounding the ACA were deliberately sloppy in order to maximise the opportunity that MPs had to draw. This was always felt to be the safest political method to remunerate MPs, rather than face the media backlash of a pay rise. Parliament is in chaos. The public are angry. The Telegraph has upped its circulation. There are 650 members of Parliament. In any walk of life, in whatever profession, you will find people who are dishonest. It will always be thus as long as we are all human! The Telegraph are uncovering a few cases of fraud, but not enough, so they are more than slightly embellishing some of the stories. I write as a case in point. Enter the Barclay brothers, the billionaire owners of The Daily Telegraph. Rumour is that they are fiercely Euro sceptic and do not feel that either of the main parties are Euro sceptic enough. They have set upon a deliberate course to destabilise Parliament, with the hope that the winners will be UKIP and BNP. A quick online check of the Barclay brothers and their antics on the Island of Sark is enough to give this part of the rumour credence. Another rumour is that the disc was never acquired and sold by an amateur, but it was in fact a long term undercover operation run by the Telegraph for some considerable time, carefully planned and executed; and that the stories of the naive disc nabber ringing the news desk in an attempt to sell the stolen information are entirely the work of gossip and fiction. These rumours do have some credibility given that this has all erupted during the European Election Campaign and turn out is expected to be high with protest votes, courtesy of the Daily Telegraph, or should I say the Barclay brothers. Now, if this is all a power game executed by the BBs, how would they do that? It is a fact that these men are no fools and are in fact self-made billionaires. I would imagine and believe that if any of this is true, they know the British psyche well enough to whip up a mood of public anger, hence the long running revelations in the DT. Where do I get this from? Well, at heart I am just a cheeky scouser. I like to go into the rooms of the faceless and nameless in Parliament, sit on their desk and ask pertinent questions like: who are you? What do you do? I've made friends with one or two. One in particular I am very fond of. He is a mine of very astute information; and whilst in his office yesterday, we chunnered over the 'what is this all about?' question. He reckons this is all a power game. That the British public are being worked like puppets by two very powerful men. Whipped up into a frenzy to achieve exactly what they want. His very poignant words to me were “if any of this conjecture is true, Parliament will become full of racists, fantasists, and has-been celebrities. We will be rendered impotent and may never again regain the authority to withstand the pressure, opinion and whims of the overtly wealthy. Scary stuff!

Comments

[Stephen]

The cached version of Nadine's offending post is now here. I'm with you, I'd far rather Nadine posted it than that the Barclays censor it.

[Steve]

Thanks Stephen, I've changed the link.