Stephen Glover’s goat

Stephen Glover has just published the latest of his paranoid attacks on the Guardian and the BBC (Indy, 27 July). According to him, these two organisations are conspiring to mislead by improperly promoting the story about massive telephone hacking at the News of the World.

There is nothing new here, he says, because we already know about what he calls “the former eavesdropping techniques” at the NOTW. – “as I pointed out in this column”. A journalist went to prison, and Andy Coulson resigned, and we should all go back to sleep. But the Guardian, “aided and abetted” by the BBC, is conspiring to keep the phone scamming story alive.

But which story? On 9 July the Guardian led with “Revealed: Murdoch’s £1m bill for hiding dirty tricks”. This wasn’t a story about hacking, it was a story about NOTW victims being paid off so as not to cause big trouble in the courts. For a few days, a few stars thought about taking legal action themselves, Max Clifford and Vanessa Feltz among them. If they do, and a lot of other victims join in, we shall see a merry time in the courts. And possibly a massive drain on News International’s finances.

Glover, then, can’t even identify the story correctly.

And this was a genuine story. We hadn’t heard before that Murdoch had made these payments. Behind it was a mass of police evidence never used for prosecutions. Behind that was the feeling that the Met was afraid to act against News International. Right in front was a reasonable suspicion that the NOTW and Andy Coulson were lying about the extent of the scamming, and the extent of what they knew. Mass NOTW-related amnesia at the Culture, Media and Sport select committee on 21 July tended to confirm this.

Now Stephen has his own story – that ten years ago the Guardian itself employed a private investigator to hack into Monsanto (you know – the GM people Tony Blair liked so much). Stephen’s story is, sadly, second hand: it belonged to David Leppard of the Sunday Times, whose own source was “a shadowy accomplice” he had worked with before. While Nick Davies’s Guardian story was properly sourced, the ST can do no better than “shadowy”. After Alan Rusbridger got the director of the private investigators involved to deny that it happened back in 1999 (yes, it’s ten years old, this story), the ST didn’t run anything to counter the Guardian story about Murdoch buying people off.

Funnily enough, Stephen Glover couldn’t get a “nervous” David Leppard to talk to him, whilst the Guardian “passed on its denials to me”.

So what’s going on here? M. Apache has hinted before that he doesn’t find S. Glover to be the sharpest knife in the columnists’ box. It seems he wants to get himself involved in this story, hassling Leppard and Rusbridger, worrying away at unsupported conspiracy theories, and all the while moralising in the dead language of the secular pulpit.

Rusbridger, he says, acts “holier-than-thou” and is on his “high horse”.

Glover insists again and again that the Guardian – sorry, the moralistic Rusbridger – did employ a hacker. He’s very sure of his source, in other words, and though he has no evidence that he can give us, and no known investigative skills, he is right. The ST didn’t run the story, so he will do it – even if “Mr Leppard” (as he calls him) won’t speak to him.

But what is Glover right about? Not about the Guardian story, which was about previously unknown payoffs, and a stack of interesting police evidence.

Let’s just glance at what’s serious about this story.

Andy Coulson is probably lying, and if he goes as Tory party communications director, then he just goes. (And goes to edit the Sun in the autumn.) If he stays, this story will keep erupting as a distraction, and he’ll go eventually.

More important than Coulson is the Met’s trepidation before Murdoch. If there’s good actionable stuff amongst the evidence collected, that’s a scandal.

If News International is discredited in a slow-burn process over the next year or so, then it will become less necessary for New Labour to suck up to Murdoch. Blair’s sweetheart deal will not be repeated, and the unhappy liaison can be wound up. Labour can find its own way.

And then there’s Parliament. (M. Apache feels slightly ashamed to be supporting that venerable and far from anarchistic institution, but needs must.) Central democracy needs to be redeemed after the expenses scandal, and vigorous action from select committees might help. Eventual legislation – such as reform of the libel laws, and a PCC with teeth – would be one way of rescuing something from the shambles.

Meanwhile, we can look forward to more self-centred look-at-me columns from Stephen Glover. What gets his goat, he says, is Rusbridger’s moral attitude, “that he somehow occupies a higher and better universe than the rest of us”, when really he is only another journalist. Stephen (not so brightly) seems to think that all journalists are the same. Trouble is, they aren’t. There is a difference between a Nick Davis with a story, and a David Leppard without one – or a NOTW hack with a Vanessa Feltz phone transcript in his hand.

If Glover is looking for problematic types, how about the crass vanity of Stuart Kuttner? He is the recently-resigned NOTW managing editor, who tried to tell the CMS select committee that certain MPs should not be there – and they laughed at him!

It’s not quite clear what Glover is getting at – his 27 July column is full of non-sequiturs and nonsense – but he does give the rest of us a chance to say something sensible by sorting him out.

Stevie G. is the little boy outside the tent, desperate to see what the big clowns are up to.

Himself, he is just a little clown.

Stephen Glover begins to get it

In his Monday Media column in the Indy, Stephen Glover is noticeably less enthusiastic about the Telegraph’s expenses campaign than he was two weeks earlier. Then, he spoke of its “courage” and historical significance. Now (1 June) he is more sceptical, and has realised that the Telegraph may actually be politically motivated.

He points out that the paper has been “softer on some than on others”, David Cameron in particular. He does a rather good analysis. “Only in paragraph three [of the Telegraph on Cameron] was his £680 claim to remove wisteria mentioned in a deadpan way”.

Stephen also points out – what not all of out here would have known – that Cameron does not have a “cottage” (Telegraph), but “a grand house” with a £350,000 mortgage.

Can Glover have been reading M. Apache? We pointed out on 20 May that his attitude to the Telegraph’s operation was naïve and star-struck. We pointed out how the right-wing paper had played verbal games trying to discredit Gordon Brown in ways that didn’t stick. Stephen now finds similar games going on, but pointing in the opposite political direction.

We don’t at all mind you lifting a critical attitude from this blog!

Well done, Stephen – come aboard!

The Telegraph and the crisis – and Stephen Glover (again)

Stephen Glover’s wide-eyed admiration for what the Telegraph newspapers have been doing gives us a chance to assess what he calls their “triumph”. The story will become part of history, Stephen says. And: “It will become part of journalistic lore”. He criticises the Times for not being hard enough on the MPs – one in the eye for you, Daniel Finkelstein. It “required some courage” to publish a few of the two million documents for which it paid an intermediary businessman either £100,000 or £300,000. That’s hard research.

Hero of the hour is Daily Telegraph editor Will Lewis, whose reputation will be “burnished” by the “hundreds of connections” his staff have made. There is even a photo of Lewis, looking up into the camera like the golden-haired visionary he is.

Yet Glover’s own paper has shown that Will Lewis is corruptible. The Independent on Sunday pointed out – at some length and on page 3 – that last Friday the Telegraph played down the sins of Yvette Cooper and Ed Balls because Lewis and Balls are friends. They both like karaoke, apparently. The story was “hidden” downpage on page 8.

The real scandal of the Friday the 15th paper was surely the front page coverage of Justice Minister Shahid Malik. Two huge photos, trimmed to the ears to maximise weirdness, showed Malik on the left and his landlord on the right. A sullen off-centre Malik contrasted with a smiling Tahir Zaman, who is conveniently wearing an “Islamic” beard. There is a racist undertone to this conjunction. The photos of both men are larger and more unsettling than the photos of white-skinned males that the Telegraph has been running.

Perhaps this is what Stephen Glover means when he says that “in some respects” the Tele looks like “a pale shadow of the Daily Mail”. A bit of apparently-justifiable reporting which just happens to have a racist component would, we think, be one of those “respects”.

Stephen also thinks that the BBC was slow to see the serious side of things. He recalls hearing on Sunday 17th “the joyous assertion on a Radio 4 news bulletin that the The Sunday Telegraph had been forced to eat humble pie”. But what did this relate to? Was it not the STel’s abject withdrawal of imputations against Gordon Brown? In its editorial the paper wrote about the cleaning bill shared with his brother Andrew (because the cleaner wanted a single bill for tax purposes) that “There has never been any suggestion of any impropriety on the part of the Prime Minister or his brother” (page 26, and again not easy to find).

This sounds like “humble pie” to us, and did to other commentators. Stephen Glover hears what he wants to hear.

The Brown story was meant to damage him. It featured as the first item on the first day of the “revelations”. On 8 May there is a photo (moderate size) of him under the heading “Brown paid his brother more than £6,000 for ‘cleaning services’”. Do you notice those quotation marks? They imply that the payment was not really for cleaning services, but for something else. (They are also accurate, but that’s not how it was meant to be read). In Saturday’s paper (9 May) there is a story headed “Cleaning cash for brother was legitimate”. Friday’s story implied that it was not legitimate. Way down in Saturday’s story we find a Downing Street spokesman saying that “The Daily Telegraph was ‘wrong to have claimed that Mr Brown “appears” to have paid for little of his own living costs since moving into No 10’.” So Downing Street was on to the paper’s little verbal tricks.

The Friday report keeps coming back to Brown, making different points each time, and giving the impression cumulatively – but never with decisive evidence – that there was “something” wrong about Brown’s cleaning services claim.

The paper wrote that Brown’s statement “is likely to give rise to questions as to why the PM did not simply lodge receipts directly with the cleaner”. This would be an example of the “hundreds of connections” that according to Glover the Telegraph reporters have been so courageously making. But they fail to make connections when it suits them!

Other examples: why headline Sinn Fein MPs when the real story of the day was downplayed just underneath – Hazel Blears avoiding CGT on the sale of a home? That was atavistic anti-Irish Telegraph stuff coming through.

We’re not convinced Barbara Follett was in the wrong to claim for security when she had in fact been attacked near her Soho home – it was a weekend patrol costing £4882.32 a year for five years. Only well into the story do we read that her former husband – both were anti-Apartheid –was shot dead in South Africa “in front of her two daughters”. In other circumstances this could have been a sob story of personal danger arising from political conviction. But not when you want to score a point against a Labour MP.

For star-struck Stephen Glover this is no doubt more “pale” shadowing of the Daily Mail – but for us out here it looks like insensitive political malice.

Even Stephen faults the Telegraph on its refusal to say that it paid for the 2 million-item CD. This “seems a bit coy”. This is itself a coy reference to Andrew Porter, the paper’s Political editor, who has been touring the studios saying – when asked what they paid – that he isn’t going to “reveal his sources”. It’s nothing to do with sources: we know the source is a nicked CD. This makes SG look distinctly naïve, despite his air of worldly judgment and his discovery that the Telegraph is a great paper after all.

Come on, Stephen, don’t be naïve – this is political, right-wing, opportunist stuff. It’s not a “great” newspaper at work.

Stephen Glover: Dimbo

We’ve noticed before that Stephen Glover is not the brightest light in the columnists’ galaxy: his printed matter is mostly dark matter. He never gives up being dim, and it does encourage the laughter of all of us down at the Café Coup de Poing.

Latest is his defence of Paul Dacre in the Indy last Monday (17 November) – and see M. Apache below, who has to admit that he holds what Stephen calls the “liberal default” position on the Max Mosley success story. (Implication: I think, but my opponents have their opinions wired in.)

His argument is that “liberals” like to support Mr Justice Eady on privacy, but they don’t know that Eady is illiberal on other matters. He comes up with two cases in which Eady has come out for “wealthy Middle Eastern businessmen” to the detriment of investigative stories by Rachel Ehrenfeld (2005), and the Wall Street Journal (2003, judgement overturned).

Two simple points here, Steve.

1. If Eady was wrong on those two cases (and he probably was), it doesn’t follow, in logic or emotion, that he was wrong about Max Mosley. He can be right about one, and wrong about the other two, without affecting our view of the Mosley judgement. Nor does this information make Dacre right about the supposedly “arrogant and amoral judgements” that he believes Eady is making. Default liberals need not be bothered by Glover’s new info about Eady’s past activities.

2. Glover’s conclusion is pure Dacre: Eady is “developing a privacy law off his own bat” and “develop[ing] a privacy law single-handedly”. In keeping with his dimbo status, Glover hasn’t noticed that his argument about Eady’s two “bad” judgements undermines the argument that Eady has an agenda that he is pursuing single-mindedly. Dacre, who is probably a bit brighter than Dimbo Stevo, has noticed the difficulty, and is careful to say that Eady has “again and again” found against newspapers under the Human Rights Act. This means he doesn’t have to think about differently-based cases in which Eady has come out against a newspaper and a publisher. Dacre’s case that Eady is an obsessed monomaniac is undermined by Glover’s brilliant research into these cases!

Come on, Stephen – sharpen up!

Stephen Glover – still can’t think

Poor Stephen Glover. Writing about the right of proprietors to intervene in the newspapers they own, he manages to be both agitated and confused. (Indy Media, 21 April. Compare his smooth nastiness about Prescott’s bulimia in the Mail on the same day – comfortable and at home there, of course).

Evidently bothered by a solicitor’s letter from Withers, representing the Barclay Brothers – owners of the Telegraph – he makes a public apology. He didn’t mean to suggest that the Brothers had caused either the Telegraph or the Spectator to spike / alter pieces on Lord Deedes, Bill Deedes having said, apparently, that the Barclays regime was “a stinking mob”. (First question: how can two people be a mob? If it wasn’t the Brothers specifically, how can Withers make a case?)

Stephen plunges on, finding an instance of “legitimate editorial intervention” which “Oddly…concerns me”.

Me again!

Sir David Barclay wrote to then-Spectator editor Boris Johnson in 2004, complaining about something that Glover had written about the Telegraph. Boris – sorry, that should be Mr Boris Johnson – wrote back to say a) ignore the guy, and b) “I will ensure that nothing of the kind is repeated”. Stephen thinks that this is an example of “a gentle guiding hand”, exercised by “the guardians of venerable publications”.

For us out here it looks rather different. It looks like an owner protecting himself against criticism by bringing pressure to bear. Boris Johnson is entirely compliant, and another opportunity for reasonable comment is lost.

Glover doesn’t seem to realise how much these two stories show him as a weakling and a loser.

Come on Stephen – there’s a difference between a guiding hand and a hand at your throat!

Martin Amis nailed by NYT

Martin Amis’s The Second Plane has been nailed in the New York Times (8 April) in terms that should bring shame to reviewers in the UK. Their reviewer pulls no punches, and says what should have been said over here in January when this book first appeared. Michiko Kakutani starts out by calling the book of essays “chuckleheaded”. Whatever that means, she’s not giving a compliment.

Then Kakutani goes for Amis’s objections to the “9/11” shorthand we all now use, calling it a “pretentious and formalistic argument” that shows Amis trying to deal with a tragedy by means of “preening, self-consciously literary musings”. It should be 11/9, you see.

Kakutani points to Amis’s “nonsensical analogy between terrorism and boredom”. Try telling the families affected “that their relatives and friends died in the opening chapter of the ‘age of boredom’ or ‘the global confrontation with the dependent mind’” she writes.

Where boredom is concerned, notice that the publishers of the US edition changed the book’s subtitle to September 11: Terror and Boredom. The UK edition has September 11: 2001 – 2007, to suggest the enduring significance of the absurd little essays Amis began to write just after the event. The American subtitle seems designed to be insulting.

Kakutani reminds us about Amis’s remarks in the London Times about making the Muslim community “suffer” until they get their children to behave. Amis said: “There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say ‘The Muslim community must suffer until it gets its house in order’”. He later defended himself by saying this was speculative, thinking out loud. But it wasn’t – as any good fiction writer knows, the phrase “don’t you have it?” is complicit, not opening out to truth. And it doesn’t care if you don’t have it, either.

Then there is Amis falling for a Canadian right-wing nutter called Mark Steyn. Steyn is into birthrates, and Amis goes along with him. Western Europe isn’t fertile enough, but Somalia, Afghanistan and Yemen (Yemen?) are. The culture is threatened. (Weirdly, Stein began his journalism career with our old friends at the Indy, back in 1986 when it was set up – appointed by founding editor Stephen Glover, maybe?)

This criticism by Kakutani is more decisive than anything written on the European side – look at how nice and polite Christopher Tayler was in the Guardian Review. Who knows what links of friendship there are in that corrupt little world – come on Chris, you know Amis is wrong, but it’s time to be a bit more coup de poing.

The negative review of Amis in London Review of Books was by Marjorie Perloff – another American, another perceptive woman.

Kakutani also does well something Brit reviewers shy away from – intellectual indebtedness. She spots Amis’s reliance on conservative academic Bernard Lewis, “the Middle East scholar who influenced the thinking of some members of the Bush administration”. She doesn’t miss the influence of our good friend ex-Trot (but still a Trot), Christopher Hitchens, the authoritarian man of the left who supports the Iraq war. And she spots a name new to M. Apache, Sam Harris, an religious-culture author who has been interviewed for a “Jesus never existed” docu called The God Who Wasn’t There – never mind that you may agree, just keep clear of such junk.

Kingsley Amis, Martin’s novelist father, lost his political common sense over the Vietnam War. From 1968 onwards, he was barking mad about it. The idea that he had once been a Communist – which was not well-known at that time – now seems barely credible. Vietnam sent Kingsley off his political rocker (and the young Apache did have a chat with him at the time – you could feel the danger).

9/11 has done the same for his son Martin.

Come on Martin – get back in touch with the rest of us. There may still be time.

Simon Hoggart, ageing slacker at the Guardian, wrote a kind of defence of Amis against the Kakutani assault in Saturday’s paper (12 April). “I suppose the only way to handle such a review is to regard it as a badge of honour. You can’t be a real writer until you’ve been demolished by Ms Kakutani.” Yes, and ha ha, Simon.

Can you not recognise that the NYT review raised serious questions about Amis and the British literary culture that he is part of? This shrugging-off is not the right response. Nor is the “I made that bit up” suggestion that Ms Kakutani might, in some imaginary past, “have made an idiot of herself by loathing, say, Great Expectations”.

Your father, Richard Hoggart, believed in something. What do you believe in, beyond feeble jokes about nothing much?

Stephen Glover v. Nick Davies (again)

The Indy’s obsession with Nick Davies continues, and Stephen Glover is back with a sermon, advising Nick and nice Sunday Times investigative journalist David Leppard to settle their differences over a drink rather than in the courts. (Leppard is threatening action through libel solicitors Carter Ruck.)

Stephen is careful to say that he has never met Davies (or Leppard): so we know he’s been reading M. Apache, who thought – see 12 February below – that his criticism of Nick was based on personal animus. It’s just that when Glover writes, it sounds like that….

Then Oliver Duff turns up doing the Media Diary (not for too long, we hope), with a story explaining the animus behind Peter Preston’s Guardian review of Davies’s book. This goes back to an unpleasantness in 1984, involving Davies sending a solicitor’s letter – followed by a twenty-three year mutual freeze-out. (Young Apache, learning his trade within sight of Preston all those years ago, rather admired him; not any more.)

And finally Nick Davies himself turns up on the Indy’s letters page, rubbishing Kamal Ahmed’s complaints that Davies hadn’t done proper research into Kamal’s ‘Campbell Ahmad’ years at the Observer. Those complaints were made in an interview with Michael Savage whose effect was to undermine Glover’s earlier attack on Davies. (See Indy, 11 February, and M. Apache, 12 February.)

Nick Davies now reveals it was Kamal himself who spoke into Davies’s tape-recorder, and admitted that Ali Campbell let him have a private view of the “dodgy dossier”. The rest of his case against Kamal was equally carefully researched.

Glover “suspects” that Davies is “mostly wrong” in his criticisms of Leppard. Just as he “suspected” that Davies was wrong about Kamal Ahmed? At the same time he praises Davies and Leppard as among the “depleted guild of investigative reporters”. So which is it, Stephen? Guesswork and suspicion, a tone of animus – or a little bit of investigative work on your own account?

In this tangle, not meeting Nick Davies is not so bright.

What do we have so far?

Stephen Glover is a demented moralist and lefty-baiter incapable of picking up the phone.

Nick Davies supported the Iraq war: ‘for better or worse, I was pro-war’. Worse, Nick, worse.

Peter Preston writes a review skewed by a 23-year feud.

Kamal Ahmed gives a feeble-minded interview that was bound to be found out.

Oliver Duff has a story, but is a grinning prat who can’t quite write a payoff line.

Does all this matter? Yes, because it is these journalists who brought us the Iraq war, cash for honours – and Leppard’s story that Michael Foot was a KGB agent.
And where now is Matthew Norman?

Come back, Matt – we need your plumpness and wit!

Nick Davies bitten – but not very hard…

Down at the Café Coup de Poing there is agreement along the zinc that M. Apache was right to move in on Stephen Glover’s attack on Nick Davies a week ago. In this Monday’s Independent Media there’s more, so someone is obsessing.

Davies’s prime target was Observer political editor Kamal Ahmed.

Under the headline “‘Nick is a Coward’. Ahmed bites back”, Michael Savage allows Ahmad to reply, but it’s a soft bite.

Nick was “a coward” because he didn’t ask Observer editor Roger Alton about the allegations against Ahmed before publishing. Unprofessional. Roger would have put him right.

Reminder: Glover attacked Davies last week for suggesting in Flat Earth News that Kamal Ahmed, recently retired (unh, sorry, moved on to duller things) political editor of The Observer was too close to Ali Campbell, and did his bidding in moving the Obs to a pro-war position on the Iraq war, thereby softening up potentially discontented Labour MPs.

M. Apache wrote last time that Davies made it clear on a Today interview – about as conspicuous as you can get – that his sources were informed but unhappy lower-order journalists who (Apache pointed out) couldn’t be named because they’d lose their jobs. The peasants, Davies called them. He didn’t expect the lords and ladies to answer his questions.

Again close reading is required. Ahmed is quoted as saying that over the pro-Iraq war issue it was editor Roger Alton who made the decision, and it wasn’t he who did the pushing. Then he says: “Of course, there were tensions. And some people, a tiny minority, may have misconstrued that as being because I was too close to Number Ten”. That was indeed the allegation.

Then Savage sinks Ahmed’s boat, writing:

In fact, senior staff at The Observer did approach Ahmed with their concerns. One says he did believe Ahmed had become too close to Campbell, and told him so. “Kamal would go around calling himself ‘Campbell Ahmad’,” he recalls. “A joke’s a joke, but at the same time, never a truer word was said.” And according to one political reporter, Ahmed’s one-to-one with Campbell on that flight [to Washington DC, when Ahmed was talked to and shown a copy of the “dodgy dossier” ahead of anyone else] and his two trips to Chequers to interview the Prime Minister were more unusual than he would like to admit. (Indy Media, 11 February 2008)


Notice anything here? Savage names no sources! “Senior staff…one says…one political reporter.” Nobody thinks this is invalid because there are no names. But the essence of Kamal’s case against Davies is – that he doesn’t name his sources! (“There’s…not one person on the record.”) Savage’s reporting both confirms the truth of what Davies was saying, and repeats the methods he used to say it.

If the Indy can do it, why not Davies?

Ahmed complains that Davies did not ask editor Roger Alton about his allegations. (Alton and Ahmed are close friends, Savage says.) But Davies did “run them all past” Alton’s deputy Paul Webster in a two-hour meeting. What, Apache wonders, is the difference? Did Webster not know how the paper’s Iraq decision was made?

Davies is consistent here – in his probably justified belief that talking to Alton would have got him nowhere. Particularly as Ahmad was Alton’s protégé.

Deliberately or not, Savage’s interview with Ahmad undermines Glover’s view, expressed a week before, that Nick Davies is a journalistic villain. Perhaps there is some tension at Indy Media these days? Just the person to enlighten us would be Good Guy media diarist Matthew Norman, surely? Never mind Gaunty, let’s hear about Glover.

Come on, Matthew – tell us what you know!

12 February

Stephen Glover: can’t think, can’t argue

What’s the matter with Stephen Glover of the Independent? Nasty attack on Nick Davies (one of the Good Guys), whose Flat Earth News about the laziness and corruption of the British press is just out. “Damning allegations that, if true, bring disgrace upon ‘The Observer’” is the headline over a piece (Independent Media, 4 February) so badly argued it must have personal animus behind it.

Glover tells us Davies’s criticism of The Observer, and then writes as though what he’s just written isn’t the case.

His summary of Davies says that Number 10 and Alistair Campbell wanted the Observer on side over support for the Iraq war, because skeptical Labour MPs might be persuaded by this liberal newspaper. So political editor Kamal Ahmed was given a “sneak preview” of the lying “dodgy dossier” of February 2002. Glover then goes berserk, and says Davies is claiming that “the editor and political editor of a great liberal newspaper were suborned by Number 10, and so manipulated that The Observer became a government mouthpiece”. This is “amazing stuff”, apparently.

Then, writes Glover, “One also notices that when two newspapers wrote about Mr Davies’s book last October [Apache missed this], he responded in terms that were virtually misleading: ‘The hacks who have said that the book accuses Kamal Ahmed of helping to write or edit the dodgy dossier are simply wrong’, he [Davies] remarked.” Glover goes on: “Well, no, he does not precisely say that, but what he does say is almost as combustible”.

I get it: Davies was “virtually misleading” about something that Glover admits he didn’t say.

And what was so combustible? That Kamal Ahmed was softened up by being given a “sneak preview” of the dossier. Which is Glover’s own account of the allegation.

Unable to set up a straight argument, Glover turns to innuendo. More than once he remarks that Davies “provides no evidence” for (eg) the suggestion that chunks of Alistair Campbell’s emails were lifted and inserted into The Observer’s “pro-war editorials”. (So Number 10’s policy worked.)

But Glover must know – and he would certainly have known after Davies’s spirited interview on R4’s Today on 5 February – that Davies’s sources were not the lords of journalism, but “the peasants” – working journalists who knew what was really going on, and told him.

Does Glover seriously think that these journalists would allow themselves to be identified, and lose their jobs? And why is Glover pretending he doesn’t know this?

That is why Apache thinks there’s personal animus here.

And just look at what Alistair Campbell in his Diary has to say about Stephen Glover: “a deeply unpleasant man”. Suppose Ali was right for once, and this is true? It would explain a lot.

First question: is The Observer still a “great liberal newspaper”?

Come on Stephen, think straight and be nicer!