Monday, 14 May 2007
Iain Dale is a very nice person
Well, first of all, we (finally) have a (partial) answer (of sorts) to this series of questions for Iain Dale:
Iain Dale's Dairy - Iain Dale: some questions about John Hirst
The answer is documented here, in the following post from John Hirst:
prisonlawinsideout - John Hirst 3 Iain Dale 0: This is the explanation offered by Iain Dale[;] "When you first started emailing 18DS I was genuinely interested in what you had to say on prisoners votes and went out of my way to give your views time on the channel. This resulted in me saying I would invite you onto the channel. I said that on air before I was aware of your past. I discussed the issue with colleagues and it was felt that as you hadn’t been upfront about this it would not be a good idea to invite you. I saw no point in entering into lengthy correspondence about this. At about the same time you started saying some fairly inflammatory things on your blog and on mine. This tended to confirm the view that we had made the right decision. In terms of being 'got at', I’m not sure what you mean. The only people I have discussed it with are within 18 Doughty Street. No one 'got at' me. We made a joint decision".
Today, we invite you into the mind of Iain Dale so you may better understand the truth behind this answer. The thinking appears to run as follows:
What this deeply poisonous post at Iain Dale's Dairy blew out of all proportion was that Iain received a number of private emails from his valued contributors urging him not to allow John Hirst onto 18DoughtyStreet. During the course of this innocent and heartfelt intervention, it suddenly became clear to Iain that a blogger going by the name jailhouselawyer at a blog named 'prisonersvoice' had a criminal past (but the matter was only discussed with the team at 18DS, so therefore those contributors played no part in the debate). How dare John Hirst keep this from Iain? And how dare he suggest that Iain had been 'got at'?! No doubt this conspiracy theorist is part of the Tim Ireland conspiracy.... and so on and so forth.
Strap in, folks... we go deeper into Iain's mind when we further investigate correspondence published by John Hirst here and here:
"You have had a detailed explanation. And I have no intention of continuing correspondence with you when you have publically [sic] called me a hypocrite and a liar". - Iain Dale
This may seem a bit of a stretch, but do reach for it, folks... yep, almost there... *ding*
Iain thinks he's already in the House of Commons!
This being the case, if you ever dare to call Iain Dale a liar or a hypocrite, he will feel quite within his rights to refuse to discuss the issue with you until (maybe) after you withdraw the accusation and apologise... to everybody.
But it gets so much better...
"I am not prepared to have 'diplomatic relations' with anyone who links to the Iain Dale's Dairy site, so I would ask you to remove it from your bloglinks" - Iain Dale
This bullying approach bears out a lot of what we've been saying about Iain Dale's selfish and cack-handed approach to networking and linky-love... and on the subject of bullying you will want to:
a) Note that nowhere does Iain Dale address the matter of John Hirst being bullied at his website.
b) Have a look this charming comment in response to John's flawed but earnest YouTube effort: "Get help. Or top yourself. Either or."
Nice.
PS - Be warned that if you decide to blog this item, it could result in your removal from Iain Dale's blogroll.
Labels: 18doughtystreet, iain dale and his sock-puppets, jailhouselawyer, john hirst
Posted by Tim @ | Permalink
1 Comments:
- Aaron said...
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I was kicked off Iain Dale's blogroll (for being critical of the Blogging Expert) ages ago. Way before this blog was launched.
6:59 PM, May 14, 2007
So I very much regret constantly referring to Iain as Precious Iain Dale. Apparently - and the above evidence proves it - he's not 'precious' at all.
*snigger*
