L'Ombre de l'Olivier

The Shadow of the Olive Tree

being the maunderings of an Englishman on the Côte d'Azur

25 May 2009 Blog Home : May 2009 : Permalink

The Hypocritical Barclay Bros

It seems that the Barclay Brothers don't handle criticism very well. In fact they get really really upset when people make speculative posts about their motives. On Friday "Mad Nad" Dorries wrote a blog post where she discussed the possibility that the Daily Telegraph (owned by the Brothers B) might be running their chinese water torture of daily expenses exposures in order to ensure that minor parties benefit in the upcoming Euro elections. Subsequently her blog was removed from the Internet thanks to some quick work on behalf of the Brothers B by Messrs Sue Grabbit and Runne the legal eagles at Withers. Dizzy explains the sequence of events:

• 22 May 2009 @ 20:30: Counsel at Wither LLP contacts the support@ alias for TDMWeb with an email with attached legal letters advising they require urgent attention and action. The letters state that Nadine's Parliametary email address has been copied.
• 22 May 2009 @ 21:00: TDMWeb - an upstream provider of services to a Bedford based provider, Acidity - emailed a contact at Acidity, stating that they had attempted to contact him by landline and mobile, and that they, TDMWeb, had taken the decision to stop the IIS webserver that managed the subdomain blog.dorries.org. It was not Acidity that stopped the service as I blogged yesterday, apologies for any confusion I may have caused on that.
• Sat May 23 2009 @ 00:10: Nadine contacted me saying her blog was offline. My initial thought was that it was a server issue that I would look into first thing in morning.
• Sat May 23 2009 @ 01:30: Nadine is advised of the details of the legal letters by Acidity.

So we have just thirty minutes between receipt of notice and the total takedown of the blog, with the lawyers having chosen to contact Nadine on her Parliamentary address, on a Friday evening in Recess. The complaints against Nadine from the lawyers came in two areas, firstly complaint of false allegations against Telegraph Media Group, and secondly, false allegations against the Barclay brothers.

You can put me in the group of people who thinks Nadine Dorries MP is not always able to correctly differentiate truth from fiction and, in fact, in the (overlapping) group that thinks that she's being a bit too defensive of her fellow MPs. However I'm also in the group that thinks that the Daily Telegraph's politics team seems to have a grudge against her and more importantly in the group that thinks that she should be allowed to speculate in public. Indeed you can stick me the the group that thinks that having lawyers act like this indicates that the Brothers B may actually have something to hide because the more sane reaction to her blog post would be to laugh it off as the ravings of a paranoid.

Hence as a public service, and as part of the Spartacus defense,  I'm going to publish on a linked page everything that Nadine Dorries wrote on May 22 and to save people the bother of clicking through here are her more interesting speculations:

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.

It is worth noting that the Brothers B don't take criticism lightly. They sued the Wapping Liar for suggesting that they bought up businesses on the cheap and they also reacted negatively when voters on Sark rejected their candidates in elections last year.

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