Grant Shapps: my part in his rise and failure to fall

The political news of the week seems to be Two Kitchens Bad, Three Names Good.

In short, Grant Shapps MP is in trouble again. As I helped with the original story, I thought I'd summarise what happened and explain why I think it's important.

Grant had a business called HowToCorp. Essentially, it was an online version of snake oil, selling 'business secrets' and the like to rubes: titles such as 'How To Make You Own Money Making Mint', How To Bounce Back From Recession' (a volume his colleagues in the Treasure evidently didn't read) and The Meaning of Dreams, a $29.97 reprint of an 'extremely rare' book which could actually be found on the internet for free, or for pennies if you wanted the dead-tree version. Shapps also promoted a classy pamphlet called 'Stinking Rich'. You can read my original piece on these magnificent economic treatises here.

Using the names Michael Green and Sebastian Fox, Grant flounced round shady business seminars and the web flogging these products simultaneously trading on his status as an MP while all three identities denied any links. The other side of the business was TrafficPaymaster, a nasty little bit of software that helped you plagiarise or 'scrape' other people's websites and promised to beat Google's algorithm, which generally took a dim view of this kind of behaviour (hilariously, one of 'Michael Green's booklets is How To STOP Digital Product Theft which suggests buying his crappy software!). He also operated sock-puppet accounts for political dirty tricks and frequently sanitises his Wikipedia page.

All this was exposed thanks to the sterling work of various bloggers and journalists, but it wasn't really going anywhere. However, I was young and angry in those days. And bored. Very, very bored. So I had a look round 'Michael's' websites (now sadly deleted) and smelled a rat when I read the testimonials from satisfied customers. So I spent a good few hours trying to track them down. Nothing. One had the same name as a minor PG Wodehouse character but the rest appeared to have no web presence (despite being enthusiastic web marketers) and some of their locations appeared not to exist. So I reported the sites to the Advertising Standards Authority and chronicled events here and here.

That got quite a lot of attention, including this classic piece of Shapps and Michael Crick charging round a conference venue like Benny Hill.



But he got away with it. He withdrew the adverts rather than go through an investigation, which allowed him to claim – without evidence – that his testimonials were all genuine. He dismissed me as 'politically motivated', a criticism that still sounds a little odd coming from a Member of Parliament and Chairman of the Conservative Party. A police report concluded that while Shapps' company's activities 'may constitute an offence of fraud', an investigation was dropped. Why? Who knows? No satisfactory explanation was given.

So that seemed to be that, until this weekend. Grant's had a glorious career as the Tory Party's bullshitter in chief, turning up to defend the indefensible whenever no more senior politicians could be bothered to turn up. But some journalists have stuck to the story, and this is why it's still alive. Shapps recorded an interview on LBC radio three weeks ago denying that he'd carried on the business while an MP (this was during the Double Jobbing Scandal), but someone unearthed a video of him saying that he did:



And all this having used legal threats to force a constituent to remove a Facebook post detailing his activities as libellous…despite it turning out to be true. I've been pretty (justifiably) rude over the years about my disgusting MP Paul Uppal, but he hasn't set his briefs on me.

So why is this story still alive? It's pretty simple. Shapps/Green/Fox's business was a spivvy, seedy little operation, but the real story is that last bit: using the law to cover up a lie. He isn't just some dodgy businessman, he holds public office and should answer to a higher standard. He's a powerful man who deliberately silenced justified criticism using the law.

The wider story is the debasement of public life. Politicians have always associated themselves with shady businessmen, but rarely so blatantly. I can't imagine Douglas-Home, Macmillan or Balfour promoting someone like Shapps, author of Stinking Rich. While the PM and Chancellor go round talking about The Rise of the Makers and fiscal prudence, their closest colleagues flog rip-off pamphlets promising that you can 'Make $20,000 in 20 Days Or Your Money Back'.

This morning the Tory spin machine is in full swing. There are two lines of attack. Alongside others, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt (who has also made millions in a pretty dubious web-marketing line which didn't treat its employees very well after several other businesses failed: funny that he's happy to slag off welfare dependency while his own business depended on contracts with the state) claims that this proves Labour and the Guardian are 'anti-business',

while Nadine Dorries (who when called out about her lies claimed that her blog was actually 70% fiction and presumably be viewed as art) reckons that Shapps is identical to JK Rowling, who used a pen-name.

Except of course that JK Rowling is an author, didn't set lawyers on a Facebook poster and didn't lie to a radio station. Nor, of course, does she hold public office.

Nadine also reckons that:

Yes, all the best business withdraw their advertising and get banned by Google for being copyright thieves, plagiarists and cheats.

What we have here is the progressive loss of a moral compass, in the political class in general and in the Conservative Party in particular. Shapps is the latest in a long line of cheats and bullies at the heart of government. Andy Coulson's in prison. Rebekah Brooks miraculously escaped it. Hunt and Shapps are spins, while Shapps is demonstrably a liar, though his defence is that he 'screwed up dates' while 'over-firmly' denying allegations. Clarkson apparently punches people while drunkenly abusing them for being Irish, while Hamilton, Archer, Asil Nadir and Aitken rattle their bones in the background. There's a pattern of shady behaviour which the classic old Tory party wouldn't have condoned: these types would have been despatched to the library with a bottle of whisky and revolver. But now politics is about the sales pitch, they come to the fore, and as long as they ride out the news cycles, they're OK – principles are so old hat.

What does this mean for the world of social media? Having played some small part in this saga, I think it demonstrates the symbiotic nature of social media and journalism. I heard the original story via the newspapers. I followed it by doing some digging of my own, which was picked up by TV and newspapers. Then the story went dead until a radio station asked Shapps the question and The Guardian unearthed the video that proves he was double-jobbing. I think we need each other. Bloggers don't have editors demanding instant results. We have the freedom to get obsessed with small details that may turn out to be important, and we have the ability to harp on about things to semi-interested audiences. Professional journalists though have time, training and resources, plus the credibility that comes with a cover price and masthead.

Will Shapps go? I doubt it. There's an election coming and resignations tend to overshadow photo-ops. People tell us that we should be more engaged in politics. Then they select and promote specimens like this and wonder why we aren't.

Politics: ugly business for show people

Politics, it used to be said, is showbusiness for ugly people. You get to hold forth at length in Parliament, on TV and in the local and national press about whatever it is buzzes around your bonnet. With Lembit Opik, famously, it was asteroid strikes. Until he ended up dating a Cheeky Girl (ask your parents, kids) and losing his seat and whatever shreds of dignity remained to him. He tried stand-up, music and most recently, professional wrestling. It didn't go well.

What didn't often happen was a transfer between politics and showbusiness. There was a sense that politics was largely a serious business undertaken out of duty to improve the lot of your fellows. It was often the culmination of a lifetime's work: as a union activist, as an entrepreneur, diplomat or teacher. it wasn't a stepping stone to greater things.

Until the advent of Tony Blair. Entering politics as a young man and unencumbered with any serious ideology, he parlayed the ability to persuade people of his sincerity into a long stretch as PM and now a life of plutocratic luxury doing something mysterious which persuades merchant banks and foreign governments into giving him millions of pounds. His example spread stardust around the houses of parliament like dandruff from a celebrity's collar. Ann Widdecombe, previously famous for insisting that prisoners giving birth should be chained to the bed, turned up on an amateur dancing programme. Still an MP, she combines being dragged round a dancefloor with announcing that gay people can just think themselves straight, amongst other nonsensical opinions. The Speaker's wife appeared on Celebrity Big Brother. Louise Mensch dabbled in politics just long enough to snag a column in the Murdoch press and leave for New York, away from all those constituents whinging about their terrible lives. Worst of all, Lord Drayton resigned from his job as Minister for Defence Acquisitions to pursue a career as… a racing driver. Meanwhile, the MoD spent £30bn it didn't have on 'defence acquisitions' that don't work. This is politics as a hobby - no sense of public service at all.

And now we've reached a new low. Serial self-publicist and reactionary Nadine Dorries has announced that she's joining I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here - not after her political career is over, but during it. Despite being paid £65,000 to represent her constituents, she's off to Australia for a game show. Presumably the Tory whips' office have agreed to this because she's such an embarrassment, but that just deepens the sense that politics is a springboard to a media career or fame and fortune. These people are cynics and dilettantes… which goes some way to explaining why our public sphere is rotten to the core. The only people who'll stick around are the lunatic fringe and the lobbyists.

Earth to Nadine Dorries

If you're not familiar with Nadine Dorries, she's an abrasive Tory MP with an unhealthy interest in teenage girls' uteruses (uteri?) and a fine line in abusing colleagues and constituents, inventing statistics and generally making things up.

But now isn't the time to get into all that. Instead, this is just a quick corrective. In the course of her many hectoring and untrue statements on the BBC's Question Time this week, she announced that the government's intention is to get NHS safety up to the level of the private sector.

Now, I'm from a family which has both worked for and benefited hugely from the NHS. I've seen the best and the very worst of it. But I'm not having this kind of nonsense from a reactionary blow in. Two facts:

1. The NHS was founded because the private sector failed completely. The poor were treated only by charities, in extremes. There was simply no health care: ongoing treatment, vaccinations and so on. Hospitals were often filthy, unsafe and underfunded. Dorries' so-admirable private sector specialised in the kinds of back-street abortions which killed mothers and ruined lives.

2. If something goes wrong in a private hospital, you don't get some kind of 4-star care. They call an ambulance like everybody else, and you join the queue at your NHS A+E ward. That's the secret of profitable private health: they only do easy, quick things that make a lot of money. Anything complicated, like emergency medicine or chronic conditions - off to the state with you.

Now the NHS is being privatised, it's Forward To The Past. I look forward to my children contracting retro diseases like rickets and consumption.

Meanwhile, watch David Cameron talking about the NHS as 'a business'.

You can't trust the Tories - in blogs or with the economy

Over at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the very serious men in grey suits are ripping the government's claims about the spending review to shreds. Faisal Islam, the Guardian's economics correspondent, describes it thus:

already the most devastating critique of flaky claims, policy inconsistencies, dodgy maths, i've ever seen by IFS

Laughter at the IFS briefing as it shows the most regressive looking graph in history vs the puny looking treasury version 

in response to Cameron and Clegg saying things like this.

People do not only think of themselves as recipients of benefits. There is also: "How much does it cost to get childcare? What kind of education is my child getting at school? What am I getting back if I am doing some low-paid, part-time work?" That is how people live in the real world, and in the real world it is the richest that are paying the most – about that there is not doubt at all.

Meanwhile, it's time to look to Nadine Dorries, one of the most appallingly unpleasant of the Tory Scum back benches. She fiddled her expenses but fell ever so slightly short of being charged, but the Parliamentary Commissioner's report takes her to task over her non-co-operative approach and generally relaxed attitude towards the truth. She responds with this astonishing confession about her blog, which the authorities used as evidence:

My blog is 70% fiction and 30% fact. It is written as a tool to enable my constituents to know me better and to reassure them of my commitment to Mid Bedfordshire. I rely heavily on poetic licence and frequently replace one place name/event/fact with another.

Right. I see. Or rather, I don't see. But here are a couple of extracts which might help us understand this menace to society:

Did you know that if every GP referred one less patient per year and requested one less diagnostic test, the NHS would save half a billion pounds in that one year?

Would you like to be that one patient? How does the doctor decide who shouldn't be treated because it's too expensive? Why doesn't Dorries know the difference between 'less' and 'fewer'? (And where's the source for this statistic?).

Try this:

The BBC will only receive the equivalent of a 16% cut over five years. That just isn’t good enough.

The BBC has done a very good job over the last thirteen years to support the Labour Government. They have facilitated the very process which has resulted in the cuts every family in the nation has to bear. The blood which will flow from the cuts is all over BBC hands too.

That's right. You heard it here first. The BBC caused the banking crash and made Labour rescue the banks and needs to be punished. 

It's like reading Ewar's Shropshire Star letters over and over again, before remembering that this woman is a Member of Parliament on the government side. 

The stupid, how it burns.

So, how's the book diet coming along?

Not bad, comrades, not bad at all. I've bought 3 books in the last ten days, all for work: Motion's biography of Philip Larkin, a book on masculinity in contemporary literature, and Almanac 14, the annual of the Association for Welsh Writing in English, which came with my yearly membership. It's very good. You should all join.

Meanwhile, in Utterly Insane and A Disgrace To The Public Sphere News, the Tory Scum government has displayed its contempt for science and rationality once more. Who've they appointed to the important and influential Health Select Committee? Only David Tredinnick and Nadine Dorries.

This pair are among the more gruesome and dumber Tories. Highlights include claiming that 'unborn children can punch their way out of the womb' (Dorries - they can't - apart from anything else, there's no room to get a good swing); corrupt Tredinnick tried to charge the taxpayer for astrology kit, and thinks that blood doesn't clot when there's a full moon (it does).

" Surgeons will not operate because blood clotting is not effective."

Er… they do. Ever had an appointment cancelled because of the moon? Me neither. Though perhaps this explains why I've never had one scheduled for midnight either.

He also demands that homeopathy be funded by the NHS despite it being an evil and charlatan way to separate the rich and stupid from their money and despite a complete lack of understanding about the scientific method.

Dorries is also pretty lazy (and here) - at least she won't turn up to the committee meetings to spread the insanity. She relies on pseudo-science to support her views and appears not to believe in democracy. She also, as the article points out, has a history of distorting facts to make her sound better. Additionally, she's got a well-deserved reputation as an expenses leech and leading weirdo (famously claiming that the House of Commons was packed with potential suicides following the Telegraph's revelation that she and plenty of other hogs had their snouts deep in the trough - Dorries behaved dubiously over her housing and gave her daughters cushy jobs at the taxpayer's expense because they might struggle to find employment elsewhere. She also channels taxpayers' money to her friends.

Despite this, perhaps these two fully deserve their places on the committee. After all, they've been elected by the great British people. Tens of thousands of voters decided that they didn't want honest, hardworking, sane and rational representatives making law on their behalf. So perhaps they should be allowed to carry on - we'll get the kind of country we voted for. Idiots like me should stand aside or even welcome the kind of legislature and health service we'd get - after all, democracy should rule.

MPs expenses: a Eurosceptic conspiracy?

Nadine Dorries is one of the louder and only semi-corrupted Tory MPs, but she's not taking it lying down - she told Radio 4 that she fears MPs are on the edge of suicides, and that it's a 'McCarthyite' witch-hunt (for which Cameron told her publicly to shut up).

So far, so boring. But now she's gone after the Telegraph - and her blog has been removed at the request of that paper's lawyers. What could she have said? Well, nothing ever truly disappears on the web, so here we are, and here's an extract.

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.

She seems to think that newspaper owners try to manipulate public concern, and rule without every facing the troublesome matter of getting elected - a charge that's been true since the 18th century. It was certainly interesting that the DT didn't give Labour members any warning of what they were going to publish, but gave Cameron et al. a full day for preparation - very objective.