Nice of the BBC to hand over £185,000 of 'our' money - I don't recall slandering McAlpine, why should *I* be paying?

Nov 15, 2012 at 11:26 PM Dave_G

Why should you care? You'll pay your licence fee whether or not McAlpine is compensated.

Martin, it was actually two days later, after he'd read more of the emails, that he wrote Pretending the climate email leak isn't a crisis won't make it go away and said of Phil Jones:

I feel desperately sorry for him: he must be walking through hell. But there is no helping it; he has to go, and the longer he leaves it, the worse it will get. He has a few days left in which to make an honourable exit. Otherwise, like the former Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, he will linger on until his remaining credibility vanishes, inflicting continuing damage to climate science.

But he didn't remain of that opinion. One insightful account on Climate Audit that didn't let him off the hook for the change was penned in July last year.

On the earlier piece, on 23rd November 2009, which ended with the ridiculous straw man of the Knights Carbonic conspiracy, I thought there were helpful reflections the next day, the day after and the following week. Careful readers may notice I have left my customary modesty in the wardrobe this morning.

The good thing about someone saying the right thing is that one can hold them to it. Monbiot's full apology for wrongly smearing Lord McAlpine, as reported in the Telegraph, is I think striking for a number of reasons. Of course, as Barry points out, it would have been better if he had never committed the offences in the first place. But then there would be no need for an apology. Now there is, for many thousands of useful idiots on Twitter, and Monbiot is the first to deliver, just as he was the first well-known name I noticed there back on November 5th. Time for something to burn, indeed - the hateful illusions and prejudices of the hard left.

Back to the BBC, I strongly recommend that people take in the whole of the interview with McAlpine on the World at One yesterday. Later in the same programme there's the devastating interview with his solicitor. Thinking about the Speaker and his wife listening to that is a rare joy. And of course Lord McAlpine is arguing that the Lord Patten should resign. I say only if they can guarantee the next person is going to be better. Patten and Entwistle know where a lot of the bodies are buried by now. Those who want them hidden forever may prefer both out of the picture. But I'm completely open on that last point. Whatever works.

Why bother Dung? This thread is already way past its tipping point, a private conversation between two City types to the exclusion of others. If I were a UK resident I would be, like Delingpole, attempting to steer the Tories towards policies reflecting traditional middle class conservatism, not the clubby exclusivity of Mayfair. And Mr Ackroyd, this is entirely on topic; if you want to criticize the BBC you need to show that your fundamental mindset is different from theirs, something you have thus far failed to do.

I'd take encouragement, Martin, both from the amazing things that have have been happening in the BBC since the thread began and from those seemingly unable to cope with this fact. I have more thoughts arising from events and your latest response than I can write down now. But I'd like to pay tribute to Ben Pile five days ago, who I think explains better than I've seen why topics like this, where we might be expected to agree, are more challenging than one might expect:

Mike: ‘scepticism is fast becoming the new orthodoxy!’

I would make a distinction between orthodoxy and forms of agreement. Debate is anathema to orthodoxies. Meanwhile, the complaint of most sceptics is not that there’s no climate change, but that a political consensus excludes dissent from the scientific and political discussions. So while there is a sense of the word ‘orthodoxy’ which means ‘consensus’, what worries us more is the sense which implies ‘dogma’, or the policing of opinion.

Exactly.

Sorry Dung, I must have been obscure without knowing it. I find your presence on this blog very positive, and wholeheartedly agree with most of your posts. No, my criticism was directed towards Martin and Richard, who seem to want to exclude others from the conversation. Even though this is a discussion thread, we are all guests on BH and a little politeness wouldn't go astray. To say as Martin did "May I politely suggest" while being anything but polite leaves a lot to be desired imho. Not that they will care what I think. Richard has made a slighting "jokey" remark about Aussies in the past, so maybe there's a cultural element of Pom (of a certain type) vs. Aussie in this. I prefer to confront such behaviour rather than let them get away with it, in the forthright Australian tradition.

Chris, you didn't create another discussion thread, as Martin politely suggested, "on the nature of power, the psychology of mobs and so on". Why not? This thread is about the BBC. I don't get the reference to Australia either. Love the place and a lot of the people, with whom I've had the pleasure of working pretty closely in years past. You seem to have a very thin skin compared to most Aussies I've dealt with though. Be that as it may, this thread is notable for its longevity, solely caused by the extent of the questions being asked about one of Britain's most famous institutions. If that doesn't interest you, no problem.

Q: HOW do you describe a well-balanced Australian?
A: One with a chip on both shoulders.

Dung, we disagree about some things. That's all it is. I can cope with that. It's now the third anniversary of the Climategate leak, and my birthday, so I'm feeling good about the world. I'll add some stuff about the BBC in the morning and hope we can refocus in that way.

Dung, thanks for your solicitude, much appreciated. I have started a new thread (not the one I was told to make) which I hope will spark some interest.

Anon:

We are being asked to believe that in the 15-20 years between Steve Messham allegedly being shown the picture of 'Lord McAlpine' by police and accusing him of sexually abusing him in an un-broadcast part of the interview with Newsnight that Messham has never once Googled 'Lord Alistair McAlpine' and seen the pictures of him widely available ever since he said he was abused??

Who is asking you to believe that? Steve Messham. There are people of his age and background who have never googled anything. But I'm not asking you to believe him. It's a free country. Perhaps you want to go further and libel Lord McAlpine directly, using Bishop Hill as your medium and 'Anon' as your user name. How courageous that would be and how thoughtful to the host of this blog.

The Channel 4 programme about Messham's stealing of the photographs in the late 70s was completely different in that it was not trailed by Iain Overton that morning, tweeting that a prominent Tory was going to be named in that night's Newsnight. It was that combination - the tweet and the programme itself - that caused Alistair McAlpine's name to trend on Twitter for the first time ever, in the worst of possible contexts. Clearly he and his legal team have successfully argued that this did constitute defamation by the BBC, to the 'satisfaction' of the BBC's lawyers, and I for one am glad they did. But once it had happened - the combination of the terrible accusations by Messham and the mistaken identity trumpeted by Overton - then Messham was free to say more about what he had suffered. McAlpine's lawyers may or not be talking to Channel 4, I don't know, but the two seem to me to be completely different cases. The McAlpine legal team was right to start with the BBC, who had worked closely with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the organisation Overton headed until five days ago, when he was rightly shown the door.

I say quite rightly not because I claim to know who did what to whom, from the late 70s onwards, but because this was a disgraceful and counterproductive way to deal with it, via Twitter, as it was bound to prejudice any possible trial. This was something very important George Monbiot did not say clearly enough in his apology:

I felt a powerful compulsion to do what I have done throughout my career: to help the voiceless be heard.

But this is screwy. Easily the most important thing was that these voiceless ones should be heard in court in a way that led to successful prosecution of the people who caused them such great harm. Monbiot's stupidity - and that of others, many, like you, speaking anonymously, yet with great apparent self-righteousness - made that far less likely to happen.

Of course there is 'something fishy going on'. There are two pieces of misdirection that I am particularly aware of. The policeman who showed Messham a picture of the man who had abused him, in the 90s, and told him it was Alistair McAlpine when it wasn't. I fully believe Messham that this is what happened. And it cannot have been an innocent mistake by the person showing him the photograph. It was a terrible thing to do, for reasons unknown but deadly.

The second misdirection may seem smaller and is more recent. It may be an innocent mistake. This was Christopher Bland, former chairman of the board of governors of the BBC, in the Guardian a week ago:

Bland also accused others, including writer George Monbiot, Sally Bercow, the wife of the speaker of the House of Commons, and Tom Watson, the Labour MP, of irresponsible behaviour for circulating McAlpine's name on Twitter.

But I have seen no other indication that Tom Watson did this. He has maintained throughout that the intelligence he has received and passed onto police about a paedophile in the upper reaches of a past Tory administration is quite separate from the North Wales care home scandal. I have no reason to doubt Watson on that and have wondered if the Twitter debacle hasn't been deliberately used, including by pseudonymous actors, to try to discredit important, real evidence.

But we'll have to wait and see. Trial by blog has its limits and that's exactly as it should be.

RKS: What do you say are my political pretensions and what have they got to do with this? And can you be clearer please about what you think about Tom Watson and his intervention at PMQs on 24th October. I believe him that he received the intelligence he described from a very concerned person in child care. You are free not to. He didn't name the alleged culprit so I can't see why you even mention parliamentary privilege. Please be much clearer.

RKS: I'll have to backtrack and say that Watson didn't specify which party was in power when the senior aide to a Prime Minister in question was said to have been involved in criminal acts. That's very important to be precise about. I owe Watson and readers here an apology about that.

He was clearly concerned that police had had the information as a result of the Peter Righton investigation in the past and seemed not to have followed it up. That was his reason he gave for raising it in parliament. If that turns out to be true I think it's a very good reason.

Do you agree with me that Christopher Bland was wrong to include Watson with Monbiot and Bercow as those that named McAlpine on Twitter? Or can you or anyone else point to tweets where he did so?

You are perfectly entitled to deduce anything you like from my posts but if you're not prepared to be say what it is how on earth can I or anyone else know if you're on the right track?