Divining the Truth has been made more, not less, difficult by the onset of the internet. The Slog chooses three glaring examples from last weekend

Tackle senior administrators and legislators these days on the subject of how their job has changed over the years, and after a lot of woffle, they tend to remark upon two things above all others: truth-benders/spin doctors, and the security services dimension….which itself involves a great deal of dis/misinformation.

I don’t think I can remember a day quite like yesterday – in both the old media and on the internet – when so many webs of deceit were tangled up in false flags, when so little focus could be achieved because of blatant distraction, or when so much dissembling was around about who was behind what.

Whether it is the conscious plan of one or more of the myriad participants to create utter confusion – while uttering creative invention – I do not know, and I very much doubt if anyone else does. But that is, without doubt, the total effect of this range of Smileyisms being in play. If I may, I’m going to lay out some of the examples I perceived over the weekend…..and as far as possible, they will be even-handed.

Yesterday, Cameron must Go began trending in the early hours, and was at No 1 by midday. It stayed there until late evening, and this morning it was still at No 3. As a professional who’s made several attempts to do this using unpaid help, I can tell you that the near 180,000 retweets we’re now looking at have been organised and crowded by pros. In the late morning, I asked a few tweeters who was behind the drive. “Just two ordinary people sick of right-wing bias” they replied, like so many Stepford Wives.

It’s bollocks of course. Pressed on the point, the Left came out red in tooth and claw with a stream of insults followed by blocking. No change there then. But anyway, as always the nutters gave themselves away, so we can be sure that this ‘spontaneous’ eruption has been orchestrated from the start. It’s a pointless ploy, because it won’t change anyone’s mind and it doesn’t add anything to the debate: it’s merely the hitech 2014 version of “Maggie-Maggie-Maggie….out-out-out”.

I don’t mind idiots wasting their time on this nonsense, but I do detest the subterfuge and deceit. Pointing this out, I received the classic Brechtian response “At least we’re honest about our bias”. Under the circumstances, one would be hard-put to produce something quite as oxymoronic as that.

Next came Sir Cliff Richard, and a piece in the Telegraph alleging that ‘Documents reveal the full extent of co-operation between police force and the BBC, which broadcast live from the search of the veteran entertainer’s home’. To even begin to understand what’s going on here, we have to rewind the tape back to the Barclay Twins’ rabid hatred of the BBC, and the delight with which their columnists laid it on with a trowel about the place being a nest of paedophiles. Most of that having turned out to be complete tosh, some of us then said right, who tipped off the BBC and why was police time wasted on this ridiculous circus?

My feeling thus far is that there are controllers within BBCNews who are wooden of top, and leaking sawdust all over the place. I suspect (based on sources and common sense) that a person of some infamous renown in the field of paedophile drivel entrapped the BBC with what he claimed was a massive scoop and it’s highly likely he was paid to do so by another news organisation which, um, would like to take over from the BBC.

Behaving exactly as you’d expect an innocent man to do, Sir Cliff came back to Britain and took a near-immediate decision to sue the backside off the Beeb. He is also, I understand, approaching this in concert with others who feel similarly aggrieved. I think someone needs to grab Richard (for all his holiness,a decent man) and give him the broader picture here.

This extract from the Torygraph spin might explain why I make that suggestion: (my emphases)

‘The dossier shows how [the BBC and S Yorks police] worked hand-in-hand ahead of the search of Sir Cliff’s Berkshire home on August 14 – which took place with BBC reporters outside the multi-million pound development and a BBC helicopter filming overhead…..But the extensive broadcast coverage triggered a backlash over its intrusive nature. Relations also soured between South Yorkshire and the BBC when a reporter from the Corporation suggested – incorrectly – the force had tipped off the BBC about the raid.The dossier, disclosed in full for the first time, reveals that David Crompton, the South Yorkshire chief constable, even told a senior BBC executive the force was keen to continue working with the Corporation once the “dust settles”.

The Sarkograph is being coy here; I suspect they know full well who tipped the Beeb off…or rather, set the sting in motion. Notable also however are the ‘worked hand in hand’ and ‘keen to continue working together’ – an obvious attempt to suggest that the BBC is no different to Newscorp in the way it corrupts police officers. This simply is not true. But it’s also what the Murdochian Coalition Cabinet would love us all to think as well.

Sir Cliff is suing useful idiots when he should be piling into South Yorks Police – a force with, dare I suggest, less than glittering credentials when it comes to being straight. He should also, in my view, out the Sting-puller. I know for a fact that some of the singer’s fellow victims are keen that this last should be the priority, but there you go. Eerily – some would say ironically – the SYP (having finally realised that they were set up) are, I understand, out for the double-agent’s blood.

Drawing his blood is an outcome that would please everyone in Britain with a functioning brain. But here too, it is a fragile web being tangled by muddy waters: The Telegraph agenda, the money motive, the Newscorp agenda, the Tory Big Beasts’ agenda, the police BBC DJ fitups, and the Beeb’s hopelessly floundering attempts to regain some credibility. Nobody really knows the full extent or relative emphasis of those dimensions – and anyone who claims to is either a Yoblogger (as I’ve taken to calling them) or a scheming liar.

Onward then to historical Westminster child abuse – or as several ignorant hacks termed it yesterday, ‘Historic’. Judging by what they’d have us believe, this new ‘development’ certainly does suggest that Conservative MPs were buggering children pretty much 24/7 during the 1975-1990 period, and possibly even later. But this new Exaro-generated ‘story’ seems to have emerged from a fog, within which lies another scandal of greater credibility wrapped in an enigma, the whole becoming a riddle so four-dimensional, you’d need a huge software program on a mainframe MI6 computer just to sort it into order, let alone work out who’s firing what at who.

Why, we ask ourselves, has attention suddenly switched from Elm House to Dolphin Square? That’s a toughie – although I’ll have a go at it. But a more likely starting point might be this question: where do Exaro’s sympathies lie?

They’re a rum set of coves at Exaro. When they set up and immediately ran two police raid scoops about celebrity paedophile suspect ‘lists’, I saw them as entirely good eggs. I sent them some info and said did they think a in any way led to b or even c. As since that time the Law’s noose has gradually gripped the flabby neck of c more tightly, I was surprised when Exaro gave neither acknowledgement nor response.

Exaro sets out its credo and ethos very clearly: It wants to “Hold Power to Account” – and with that end in mind, it sets out to produce “evidence-based, open-access journalism – not spin, not churnalism, not hacking – just journalism about what should be transparent but isn’t.”

On the whole, I’d say they’ve made an excellent start. It’s run by Mark Watts, a distinguished investigative terrier with past credits like World in Action, The Big Story, New Statesman, and Sunday Business. Thus his sympathies could be fairly summarised as more Guardian than Telegraph. Another luminary there is David Hencke – the man who passed Exaro’s Elm Houe evidence to Tom Watson MP. He worked for the Guardian for 33 years. Also senior at Exaro is David Pallister. He too worked on The Guardian for many years, specialising in miscarriages of justice, the arms trade, and corruption in international business.

Tom Watson is a brave man, but he remains rigidly tribalist….as do most men of the Left. He went all out to get Murdoch (fantastic idea) but was quite obviously not open to further investigation of Trinity Mirror in general, and Piers Morgan in particular. Equally, none of Exaro’s stuff looks at Labour’s appalling local government record on turning a blind eye to Islamic child molestation.

So as a set, here we have four people who are highly unlikely ever to join in at the local Tory fete. That doesn’t alter the fact that, in relation to Elm House, I think they have discovered a genuine cover-up….and one which continues under Boris Johnson. And while remaining hugely sceptical about most of the celebrity/MP accusations being bandied about, whereas Sir Cliff Richard behaves like an innocent man, Leon Brittan doesn’t: he had to be forced into a public denial, and he has been secretive and evasive about the Dickens Dossier on Elm House – at one point almost blaming his senior civil servants for its disappearance.

From my own perspective, I take the Brittan charges very seriously because in the 1990s I worked extensively with Whitehall & Westminster on a number of COI projects. Two Ministers and a senior mandarin – without collusion – related appalling stories about Lord Brittan’s allegedly somewhat peculiar tendencies. As he’d been banished to Brussels by this time, I doubt if they had an agenda to peddle: but it all still remained hearsay.

Until, that is, pressure grew to reopen the Elm House case and at least three Met detectives allegedly made some very quick progress. Since when the Mayor’s generous backside has been sitting on it.

And then, suddenly, the Boys from Exaro switch the arc lamp over to Dolphin Square. Why? Again, your guess is as good as mine; but here are a few things upon which you might want to chomp:

1. From last Thursday for three days, a media placement campaign to rubbish the reputation of original Elm House whistle-blower Geoffrey Dickens MP (dec) began in earnest. He was a philanderer, he was a fantasist, a drunk, a flake, and an altogether unreliable human being. Allegedly. Here too was the usual evidence of obvious orchestration, and hack idleness in simply soaking it all up like so much blotting paper. It is something of a Tory trademark to chuck dead people to the wolves in the hope of baiting false trails.

It looked and felt to me like pure Johnsonian Camerlot crap. So I think it only fair to balance the crap with some irrefutable facts:

In 1981, Dickens named the former British High Commissioner to Canada, Sir Peter Hayman, as a paedophile in the House of Commons. He posthumously proved to be entirely correct. He was a former foster child who came up the hard way via boxing, draughtsmanship, local government and then the Commons. He won Huddersfield West in 1979 but this seat was abolished after boundary reviews. Undeterred,he was selected as the Conservative candidate for Littleborough and Saddleworth, which he won in 1983. There he stayed until his death. Soon after Dickens gave Brittan the disappearing dossier in 1985 (says his son), the MP’s London flat and constituency home were both broken into but nothing was taken. It looked, said Dickens Jr, like a well-organised search for documents.

After saving the lives of two boys and a man from drowning in the sea off Majorca during the 1970s, Dickens was awarded the Royal Humane Society’s Testimonial on Vellum.

Doesn’t sound like a loose-cannon idiot to me, but what do I know?

2. On four separate occasions to my certain knowledge, Met officers working on the Elm House investigation have leaked to the press – notably Exaro and the Independent Group – that they were “about to make arrests”. No arrest of any consequence has ever been made. It’s possible that, having become frustrated with what are alleged to be BoJo’s blocking tactics, Exaro have decided – in the light of their new star ‘witness’ – to switch their attention to Dolphin Square. Reading the articles so far published, it’s bountifully clear that – once again – the spotlight is entirely on the Tory Party.

We can’t of course research or interrogate the witness, because he’s remaining anonymous. But I’m left wondering why he’s surfaced now.…and I also have the same query in relation to the four ex Plods in the mix.

3. I began to get strong odours of dead rats when suddenly the ubiquitous man-with-supersonic-bike-who-groomed-a-nation Sir Jimmy Savile (dec) was brought into the picture. For the record, Savile’s ‘solid’ link to Welsh Care Homes vapourised the minute I started investigations from Chester to Llandudno two years ago. I have yet to meet a single former care home resident there who ever saw the slightest trace of the DJ. Nor is there a scrap of evidence that he ever went to Elm House: no credible witness claims to have seen him there. A former care home resident herself, Anna Raccoon has in turn questioned (with legally clinical journalism) whether Savile ever misbehaved Duncroft. He was universally confirmed as having done so during her term there, but she has proved beyond reasonable doubt that he didn’t.

Now it seems the Father Christmas of paedophilia was at Dolphin Square. But is Exaro saying he was?

4. Within hours of the story breaking onto Twitter, I spotted a retweet of Exaro saying ‘Savile link to paedophile ring’. When I went to the Exaro post displayed, there was no mention of Savile at all in it. So I tweeted to that effect and only then – at last – Exaro responded to say “this isn’t the correct link”. In the article at the new link, there is still no Savile link to Dolphin Square…this is the extract concerned:

‘[The police officers] provided new information on Sir Cyril Smith the former Liberal MP, and Sir Jimmy Savile the BBC star, who were exposed as paedophiles after their deaths’.

That isn’t a link to the paedofile ring: it merely mentions ‘new information’.

But then in 2014, if you want to big something up, 1st choice is Maddy McCann, 2nd choice is Jimmy Savile.

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I said this analysis would be even-handed, and I hope that has been demonstrated. There is compelling evidence here of the Left orchestrating ‘populist’ spontaneity, of the police forces of Britain playing politics, of unscrupulous media owners on the Right publishing disinformation, of liberal-leaning internet journos looking to condemn the Conservative Party as depraved child-murderers, of leftist politicians protecting the guilty in their own camp, of a Right Wing government smearing a brave man, of a neoliberal London Mayor determined to stop any Elm House wildcat getting out of the bag, and – irony of ironies – both Left and Right hijacking the super-infectious leprosy attaching to Jimmy Savile (dec) in order to sensationalise their agenda-driven allegations.

I continue to think that this tedious process of meticulously tracing news provenance has a direct parallel with the commercial side of the internet – particularly in relation to the vicious battle between search engines, the relative appeal of various software alternatives, and the blatant use of lies whereby ‘FREE’ becomes, under examination, ‘FREE TRIAL’.

Hidden in every software update in 5pt flyshit at the bottom of the laptop screen is the option not to upload the Big Boyz Bing instead of Google, the Microshit NoWayOut labyrinth of lies, or the Faceboot direct GCHQ feedback to faceless spooks.

For just as with the risible cacophony of bum notes masquerading as news today, so too the traducing tinkers of online tat do their damnedest to confuse…..whereas their job should be to confirm reality.

Reality, empiricism, objective analysis, balance, and the never-ending search for consensus of opposition in the face of palpable evil: these are the things we are losing. There is an old adage that suggests ‘the first casualty of War is Truth’. We need a new adage that asserts, “A looming General Election buries the Truth under the bodies of those prepared to die for it”.

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