On many contemporary issues, the Slog’s record of prescience remains as good as anyone’s.

Top to Bottom…Assange, Coulson, Erdogun, and Hunt.

“The whole world hates a wiseass” as my Californian buddy Hugo Davies is wont to remark. He’s right of course, but a sage’s lot is rarely a happy one. You spot stuff early and get months of slings and arrows about what a w***er you are. But if and when the feared outcomes happen, you get “I don’t remember you saying that”. You also never get an apology from all those people suggesting an addiction to onanism.

So, there being far more bricks than bouquets in this business, I’m allowed just one bit of trumpet-blowing now and again. Also (he rationalised) as and when your friends ask “Why on earth do you read all that pessimistic tosh at The Slog?” you can give them a link to this piece. And finally, it never did The Sun any harm.

A good example is Julian Assange, a man like James Delingpole who can do no wrong for his devotees. Ever since I first suggested (and then reiterated) that Jules is a cable short of a leak, the comment threads have been fizzing with righteous indignation about my inability to know a Messiah when I see one. (The post last week raised the shrill tones of ire to new heights).

Now Ian Hislop at Private Eye has added his own evidence of Julian’s oddly arranged mind by dishing the dirt on an anti-Semitic rant he got over the phone from the Wikileaks founder. And as for this business of trademarking his name, well….what can I say? The only other case I know of somebody doing this is Sarah Palin.

Assange claims that he needs to protect his name for use on speaking tours and so forth. But if he cares as little about money and fame as he says, why on earth would he bother?

It is the act of a megalomaniac. Trust me, he’s bonkers: the proof will keep coming as events unfold, and he unravels.

One of The Slog’s more obsessively prosecuted beliefs is that Recep Erdogun, the Prime Minister of Turkey, is an Islamist liar. I said David Cameron’s FCO-advised speech whitewashing him was a stupid act, and I said the Turkish constitutional changes would immediately be used to Ergodun’s fascist intent. So it has proved: a week after Cameron’s speech, Erdogun declared Turkey to be Iran’s “greatest ally on earth” – an odd thing for a wannabe EU contender to say about a pariah State with genocide on its mind.

Now the FT reveals (in yesterday’s edition) how swiftly Erdogun has moved to strangle liberty via his constitutional changes. I can’t give you a link to the Pink’un because it too is hiding behind paywalls these days. But an extract will serve to convey the sense of this piece:

‘Signs of repression are increasingly abundant. On Thursday police launched a wave of raids, detaining 10 journalists and authors – including an award-winning reporter who had investigated official negligence in the 2007 assassination of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink…..

At the root of this lies the government’s drive to consolidate support and demonise the opposition, in particular using a series of political-military trials revolving around the so-called “Ergenekon terror organisation”. Prosecutors appear to have concocted a series of bizarre plots to entangle an unlikely cast of characters, from military officers and journalists, to lawyers, academics and even a former mayor of Istanbul – all of whom are alleged to be involved in a conspiracy to topple the government. The journalists detained last month and on Thursday were charged with being the media arm of this plot. Many of these cases require total suspension of common sense.’

But that’s alright, because the FCO is a field cleared entirely of common sense many decades ago.

Had you said to me twenty years ago that one day I’d celebrate support from Lord Tebbit, it would’ve sent me into a paroxysm of fear about what he (or I) might be going to turn into. But over the years I have come to understand that the man once dubbed “a barely housetrained polecat” by Dennis Healey has enormous decency behind his front of still being a jackbooted bovver-boy for Thatcherism. I too have shifted far from my original support for the SDP to becoming a radical mutualist in favour of State and economic reform.

Anyway, my having penned a piece about the Mutual rather than the Big, this is what Lord T had to say in his piece yesterday:

‘It is perhaps worthwhile saying that the great error made in 1949 was to nationalise the hospitals. As The Slog asked, why not more mutuals like Waitrose or the old Nationwide….just about all the great hospitals before the NHS nationalisation were charitable foundations, so perhaps we should return to that system.’

So thanks, Norm. His comment encourages me to believe that there is a real (rather than concocted) Coalition out there of decent people spanning much of the political rainbow. Aneurin Bevan himself, for example, wanted to model the NHS on the mutually-supported health clinic in his childhood Welsh town. Towards the end of his life, Nye realised to his horror what a bureaucratic monster had emerged. “The purpose of power,” he often said, “is to give it back”. That is the best definition of the Mutual Community (rather than the Big Society) I have ever heard.

One could almost say that those of a Mutual bent like me would focus on the sectors of education and health for the good of society, and those like Lord T and John Redwood would get in among the red-taped Sir Humphreys with a chainsaw as a means of improving our economic/export output.  Nothing is ever as simple as that, but it would represent a formidable electoral platform – and hopefully, a broad spectrum of people as suspicious of obscene greed as they are of the Big State.

And finally, of course, there is the issue of Hackgate: a story with a long way to run as yet, but in which The Slog hopes to silence those cynics who think fighting the Murdochs, Coulsons and Brooks of this world is a waste of time. I wrote consistently throughout December that – Newscorp BSkyB takeover or not – sooner or later Hackgate would shower the police, the judiciary, the political class, Newscorp, the rest of Fleet Street and Number Ten with brown solids. Thankfully, there are enough fed-up celebs and journos with clean hands to ensure that the pressure remains as high on the criminals as ever.

Long may it continue.

PS As The Slog now has a new anti-hero of prolific abilities in his chosen field, you may have spotted that Hunt Balls (a silly but smile-worthy pun, I think) has joined Hackgate as having a page all to itself.