The Mail Is At It Again ... But What Is Really At Stake?

The Mail on Sunday has obviously failed to do its homework - again! It referred to me today (as before) as a friend of Jeremy Corbyn. It clearly implies that my original creation of Exaro was partisan. Apparently, Exaro is now a 'rogue' news site though, in fact, the roguery is coming from the Mail itself. Its journalists are lazy. They not only failed to contact me for fact-checking but they completely ignored an extremely clear statement by me that was drawn directly to their attention on their web site. It is, of course, for Exaro and not me to comment on Exaro's editorial position but it is reasonable for me to comment on references to me and to have opinions as an outsider on what may be going on here.

My statement was explicit about my non-relationship with Jeremy Corbyn (basically, I knew him somewhat in the 1990s but have not seen him since) while the journal failed to note that I had also stated clearly and unequivocally that I had no control or influence over editorial decision-making and that Exaro was strictly non-partisan. Maybe they thought I was lying ... if so, they should have at least had the decency to say so to my face.

The latest bit of hysteria includes an assault on the Tory MP Zac Goldsmith, another politician I rather admire, alongside Tom Watson, for his basic integrity and for reasons that have little to do with the child abuse investigation. Although I am now a Labour man again (as of a few weeks ago), I am not so shallow as suddenly to cease to admire someone if they are on the opposing side. For the record, I have never met Goldsmith.

The campaign that is going on week after week appears to have some purpose - ostensibly to restore the reputation of certain persons, in fact it increasingly looks as if it is designed to force the Metropolitan Police to close down or contain their child abuse investigation. The latest wheeze is to pressure the High Tory Command in Government not to reappoint the redoubtable Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe (current Metropolitan Police Commissioner and a committed reformer). In an accompanying article, the Mail leads: 

Scotland Yard chief Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe is under pressure to quit after the force admitted it refused to drop a baseless rape claim against former Home Secretary Leon Brittan over fears of a public backlash. 

You might like to note at this point that news has broken in the last day or so that the National Crime Agency had started an investigation into alleged corruption in the Stephen Lawrence case. This may seem wholly unconnected to the child abuse investigation but, as we shall see, allegations of police corruption are a material element in both sets of investigation. The State is becoming very active in dealing with aspects of policing that are troubling if only through active investigation without prejudice.

This may be part of a political struggle of immense importance to our country. Operation Midland is only one of many investigations across the country - if it is taken down, all the others are weakened. We might even add the suggestion of an investigation into complaints about police behaviour at Orgreave to the mix - as reported by Exaro - as a sign that reform is in the air. In this latter case, as others, the issue is community trust in the police which leads us on to the possible 'why' of all this.

Why might reformers want to be so active in their turning over of stones other than because it was the right thing to do? The 'ulterior strategic motive' is standard procedure in public life so why not here as well. I would suggest that it is because trust in the police, alleged police corruption and even links to organised crime have become a much more vital national security issue in recent years on two grounds: a) a public that does not trust the police will not come forward and provide vital intelligence on crime and, indeed, terrorism, and b) organised crime is no longer a national business contained within its limited remit and left to prey on those without a voice (like the kids in the care system).

Organised crime, for example, is now a multinational operation, accumulating capital at a ferocious rate, capable of suborning lower paid public servants at every level, involved in human and arms trafficking as well as more conventional crime, drugs and the sex trade, and even holding the potential to be an armed state within the State in extreme conditions. What happened in Northern Ireland could happen in British cities if the Police do not get a grip on things. And alliances between crime and terrorism are at the back of every security official's mind. The relatively new National Crime Agency exists to deal with this threat. Running any major investigation without infiltration by well-funded organised crime is now a key part of the reform agenda.

The point is not that there is any necessary connection between corruption allegations and organised crime and child abuse and turning a blind eye to the actions of our political police (there may or may not be) but only that all are examples of things that require thorough investigation and reform if our trust in the police is to be maintained. And, at times, these things may, indeed overlap and, if they do overlap, we need to know about it.

I retain considerable faith (perhaps stupidly in the eyes of some) in the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office to continue to do what is right - which is to investigate allegations without pressure from any party, including (though it undertakes no such pressure to my knowledge) Exaro News. If the current Commissioner is forced out (or rather his mandate is not renewed) by a politically-directed media campaign based on implicit political threats, questions must be raised about who runs Britain and whether the rest of us can feel safe in our beds if we cross those who do. This is not to say that we should not be concerned about 'excesses' by reformers (we should be) but only that the correction of any alleged excesses must not fall into the trap of damaging the reform process.

The corruption issue cross-connects to the child abuse investigation and this is shown in Duncan Campbell's piece which appeared in March 2015:

"Now [March 2015] the Independent Police Complaints Commission is investigating 14 separate referrals of alleged corruption in the Met relating to child sex offences from the 1970s to the 2000s. Offers of immunity need to be made to any police officers still with information so that, finally, the jigsaw puzzle can be completed in all its dark and depressing detail."

This gets to the heart of the matter - only half the probes into alleged child abuse cover ups (according to the Daily Mirror) result from claims by 'survivors' and non-police officers. It is not right to imply (as the BBC appears to have done) that the 'survivors' who have retracted or may be questionable are all the 'survivors' who 'matter' nor that an allegation or claim is false when it is merely unproven. The other half of probes apparently come from former serving police and security officers. This is devastating and perhaps scary to those who have a stake in keeping a lid on things. We can legitimately ask what sort of governance do we have that left an investigative journalist to uncover the disgust and rage of decent men at what they were (allegedly) asked to do. If they are not all fantasists, their lack of a voice in itself tells us something about a culture of 'cover up' and it is only fortuitous that a 'secret' forum in which concerns were expressed came to light.

The anti-investigation campaigners are certainly pinpointing some 'not proven' cases (which may be proven to be true or false at a later stage or which may always prove to 'unproven'), an exercise not entirely without merit if they were doing so in good faith and perhaps not as a means to some other end. However, what is going on here has darker effects, whether intended or not by the media or even those sincerely angered by the effects of investigation on friends or relations - vulnerable witnesses are at risk of being deterred or frightened into withdrawal of claims while those making claims from within the services are at risk of being made anxious that they could face serious problems of their own often at an advanced age.

There are issues surrounding the Official Secrets Act according to Campbell (an Act seriously misused if used to cover up an investigation into child abuse) and pension rights. Meanwhile, one sex abuse victim was hospitalised following a suicide attempt after the BBC Panorama 'expose'. Much is at stake beyond the immediate reputation of a few big wigs.

All that is required, from the point of view of those who may have something to fear from further inquiry, is for the flow of intelligence to the investigating officers to dry up. The investigation then fails to proceed to trial because of inadequate evidence (which also means that, in fact, doubt and suspicion might remain over particular persons if the investigation does not have enough evidence to exonerate them). If (and we say if) bad things have been done, justice will not be done.

We have seen already how important elements in the Establishment were mobilised to protect the former Bishop of Lewes in the early 1990s. Such attitudes do not suddenly disappear two decades later. Anyone who has done bad things can certainly put up with the conspiracy theories of the 'great unwashed' (I am subject to them as well) so long as they are not disgraced, sent to jail or dragged through the court of public opinion (which is, of course, never actually our opinion but only that of the media). Vagueness and innuendo may be preferable to clarity as the lesser evil.

Again, let us be clear - all the claims may prove to be claims that cannot stand up to scrutiny with the DPP. They may, indeed, all be false claims by fantasists and liars. But the police think the claims are credible enough to be investigated. And we have seen that there have been 14 referrals (or more) of alleged corruption in child abuse investigation cases already. And we note that the entirely separate determination to uncover corruption in the Stephen Lawrence case shows determination to look into possible miscarriages of justice. Something is up here ... something that cannot or should not be hidden from us by politically motivated and evasive attacks on Tom Watson, Zac Goldsmith and a 'rogue' Exaro.

I leave you to decide what is the right thing to do under these circumstances. Personally, I remain convinced that the interests of the People and of the State cohere in clearing out the Augean Stables and dealing with innuendo and rumour on all sides by means of a decisive investigation that can come to conclusions where there can be no suspicion of cover up and no room for conspiracy theory. Let us keep an open mind - it is quite possible that the police may uncover things quite different from our current beliefs and expectations on all sides.

It is certainly not enough simply to organise matters in secret so that, if serious state tolerance of child abuse has taken place, it could not happen again. Investigation into what has happened, how it happened and who did what to whom is absolutely necessary in order to put in the right practical reforms that are trusted by the population at large, otherwise we will make more mistakes. Bluntly, the life chances of thousands of kids is still and ultimately infinitely more important than the reputations of those of us at the top of society. I will take whatever the Mail, Times and others throw at me rather than not see this through to its end and am prepared for any outcome other than cover up. The very commitment by the ESRC to funding academic work on the 'hidden history' of official failure to deal with child abuse is just one aspect of the case that shows that our administrative structures are currently serious about reform and so should we all be. Yes, we should curb excesses and show restraint but any compromise on that reform could be disastrous for our trust in the State itself, let alone the police - that way madness lies.

Tom Watson and the Planet of the Apes

There is a fascinating culture clash to be seen in the demands that Tom Watson, Deputy Chairman of the Labour Party, apologise for what may or may not have been a mistaken judgment. This judgment certainly caused distress to one family just as much as it was part of a total project attempting to help many historically abused and psychologically vulnerable individuals. The political struggle that we are seeing is probably better seen as one between two sets of value that are incommensurable, based on class and education, than through the prism of short term party advantage and the growing terror of an establishment faced potentially with its biggest crisis of confidence since the Profumo affair.

The Tories (and middle class Labour MPs) are not being silly when they expect Watson to apologise to the family for 'casting a slur' on Lord Brittan. In their world, the 'facts' are only those that are evidenced. This is also the culture of a journalism that misses half of history because it so well hidden. The missing half is often the half that matters in allowing a democratic society to make rational decisions but, in fact, our democracy is as guided as that of the Chinese, just richer and with a longer history of adequate internal stabilisation But it is true that there are no facts that the upper middle classes can see that say that Brittan was 'evil' (the sort of language that is regarded as wildly intemperate in 'society' but which expresses the passions of people angry and frustrated at their treatment in that society). Because there are no 'facts' before them, they expect Watson to apologise. But matters are not as simple as they appear.

A victim (we call them 'survivors' now but we all know what we mean) who cannot prove what happened to them must, by the rules of this standard issue game, remain silent. If they make a claim that they cannot articulate well (articulacy is as important here as evidence) or for which they cannot show the evidence, then they will be humiliated or forced to submit, much like beta apes by alpha apes. Indeed, the darker side of the campaign against Operation Midland is clearly directed at terrorising vulnerable people and nervous retired state servants from giving evidence because of what may happen to them subsequently. It is assumed that they cannot easily cope with the stress of the scrutiny - hearts may give out and black depression result in the taking of lives. They will be deterred and no cases will come to court.

My ape analogy is perhaps crude and not intended to be insulting to anyone but we are still animals at heart. Our civilisation is built on the circulation of elites (the alpha apes come and go as individuals but there is always an alpha class). Individuals rise or fall but only within a much more slowly changing system of expectations and rules, punctuated (as in 1917, say, in Russia) by revolutions that change the expectations and the rules - for a new set of alpha apes to command and rule.

The laws of society, honed over thousands of years, will always give enormous advantage to the person who can assert authority, cover up their traces, argue their case more effectively, bluster and, if necessary, bully. In previous eras, this might include using their fists, having access to the hangman or damning a soul to hell but we have progressed - somewhat. However, these people also have managed to create in liberal society, over time, rules that stop those abuses that can be evidenced (the rule of law) and even, in some cases, merely articulated (the free press). So things are definitely getting better. But is it enough?

Tom Watson perhaps represents a more working class conception of power relations in which authority and the middle classes (the upper class in Britain is actually the upper middle class) set rules that may have an element of protection for all (which is good) but give no scope for the victim of anything that cannot be evidenced to speak freely and get justice or recompense without placing themselves at risk of humiliation or destruction. The fact may be that they suffered appalling bullying or abuse which if they can articulate but not prove only means that that fact may be wholly disregarded and the abuser protected. The rules of society continue to protect the powerful and authority in perhaps more subtle ways than they once did but grants protection nevertheless. If the victim is not articulate, they are twice-damned - as 'ignorant' or as 'unworthy' on the one hand and as unable to provide what the rules require on the other.

When he speaks for the abused in Parliament with passion, Watson speaks, in his mind's eye perhaps, in a language that is incomprehensible to the editors of newspapers and the professional classes but one very comprehensible to anyone who has been institutionally bullied, worked for a bad boss or been abused inside a family or church group. There is nowhere such people can go in most of these cases - institutions are governed by authority and low level fear and anxiety, bad bosses until the rise of modern human resources skills could act with impunity, families are a no-go area for the State except in exceptional circumstances and the churches often appear to be another no-go area for investigating authorities.

The bullied and abused used to be fobbed off with the Church and a loving Jesus but, however comforted privately by religion, they generally have to cower and, literally, 'suffer in silence' in this world in the hope of the next - they have to submit as betas before the alphas. I once was stuck for a couple of years with a bully of a boss, a psychological thug of the worst type. I was trapped by the need to feed my family and yet if anyone is a natural alpha in terms of almost Nietzschean drive it is me. I was temporarily trapped by the power relations of a particular type of society with no escape - in that case, he was fired and I took his job so there was something of a happy ending. But the experience marks you. People stuck in abusive families, care homes, institutions and so forth are deeply marked by their experiences.  And it is even a bit more complex than that - between the betas and the alphas lies a 'kapo' class of willing servitors whose psychological brutalities are conveniently unseen by their masters. The worst of abuse is always that it happens outside the sight of the people who are supposed to maintain the rule of customary law. It is a secret matter of gross impunity.

And, of course, the poor prey on the poor. The Rotherhan abuse case is a case study in thuggery perpetrated on the vulnerable where the rules and processes of a system designed by the alphas for their own protection as much as that of their charges proved wholly incapable of protecting young people. There are suspicions in this case that blind eyes were turned because local electoral considerations handed power to a 'kapo' class of vote providers who were then allowed to protect their community in return. The vulnerable margin was just handed over to the abusers as a type of the sacrifice of the outsider to preserve the cohesion of a closed community - a human approach to social cohesion that can be traced back to the Iron Age and perhaps to the bog bodies.

The Labour Party, of which Tom Watson is Deputy Chairman, may crudely be characterised as having been created to give the betas, the ordinary person without power, a chance in life. Indeed, the early trades unionists in particular grew their own alphas who would represent them through the Party. In the last few decades, this 'Movement' has become nothing more than another bunch of competing alphas at the top of the gibbon troop: the Rotherham child abuse case is proof enough of that. The leaderships of the Left have not spoken for the vulnerable and changed their conditions directly through struggle in which the vulnerable can participate so much as empowered a rather nice liberal 'kapo' class of social managers that feathers its nest at the highest levels. Things, of course, are more complex than I imply but something has gone wrong with the Left Project. In speaking for the abusers and refusing to obey the rules of the alphas (represented earlier today by the expostulations of an outraged Nicholas Soames), Watson speaks against the norms of the system he had entered on behalf of the betas. He has returned to the spirit if not the practice of the lost radical beginnings of his Party which, in many ways, is out of character for him.

This is (roughly) perhaps at the core of his reasoning for not apologising beyond the 'distress to family' apology that he has already made. It is at the core of the essentially political (that is, related to power relations in the community) aspects of the case, the driving insistence of editors and politicians that he say more, that he kow-tow to their aspirations and their rules. Above all, he perhaps (I cannot speak for him) knows that the alpha class, of which he is one through hard work and diligence, which is in command of the rules of society, are combining here to bully an upstart ape within the troop. He is 'letting the side down'. He must be brought into line - it is about much more than an apology to a family, it is a struggle for the commanding heights of national morality.

I prefer to see Watson as someone who chose not to abandon his roots but to keep fighting for those he was sent to Parliament to represent. But I do not want to be misunderstood here. I have no opinion on the late Lord Brittan. I have no emotional position on him. I genuinely feel sorry for a family who, even if he did do something bad (which we do not know), might have no inkling of it. All I recognise is the fact that the jury that has never met and will probably never meet may have to remain open until two things have happened - the exhaustive enquiries into what appear to be credible complaints of abuse and credible corroborating statements from state servants about cover ups of elite child abuse has been gone through and a system of abuse within the elite proven or not proven. Even if it is not proven, this is not the same thing as proven to be not true. We are stuck with ambiguity unless there is a killer punch that demonstrates that the claims come from liars or fantasists and it is as wrong to dismiss claimants as liars and fantasists as it would be wrong to assert that the accused are guilty rather than the subject of investigation.This alone makes it imperative that Operation Midland is permitted to proceed and to be resourced without attempts to interfere with the witnesses.

This is all deeply tragic (in Hegel's sense of tragedy being the conflict of right with right) because the ambiguities and difficulties of such cases mean that somebody is going to get hurt under any scenario. Full acceptance of the rules of the alpha system simply means that the 'hidden history' (as it is being termed by the ESRC-funded academic study of official attitudes to child abuse) will continue and that the survivors will continue to be treated as second class human beings. Full support for the claims of all 'betas' without adequate investigation could mean possible injustices to perfectly respectable and decent members of the elite - in other words another form of injustice entirely.

The answer, of course, is partly in-depth investigation ass Operation Midland is undertaking. Unfortunately, we have good historical reasons for believing that such investigations have been mishandled or subject to influence in the past. Personally, Operation Midland strikes me as determinedly independent but Watson scores a point here. Conveniently for the advocates of the survivors' case, the Bishop of Lewes has got sent down this past week for sexual exploitation. The court heard that, in the early 1990s, a surprising number of elite figures wrote to give character references that helped to ensure that justice would not be done at that time - the alpha apes look to the rest of us as if they look after their own. And if this case is proven as it is, why should not there be many others? And how was it that Savile was not investigated for so long? - and so on and so forth. The BBC as recent cultural lord and master of alpha morality in this areas may be predictable but also faintly repulsive in this latter context.

In the more general context of cases like this, Tom Watson looks eminently reasonable in doubting whether justice can be done for the abused without he exertion of political pressure. A calculation that is culturally political may be being made here that justice for the abused trumps justice for alpha families let alone individuals. It comes down to a fairly brutal decision on where you think your moral responsibility lies. For one cultural system perhaps, the ultimate crime is armed resistance by their underlings (now labelled as terrorism and turned into the darkest of all dark crimes) but to the other the ultimate crime is cover up of the misuse of power and especially of misuse of power that turns a blind eye to, and perhaps condones or even organises for its own purposes, the rape of children and harms to the weak. The war on terror led to ambiguities of justice and so, it would appear, does the 'intifada' that is the war on elite child abuse.

In many ways the Left has submitted to the Right under the recent hegemony of rights liberalism - it has abandoned all struggle except within the law - but the Right has not responded in kind in its arrogance of power. It continues to resist transparency and lacks a basic integrity that places certain human values above protection of their own kind, indeed core values above the law itself as it stands. Liberal-minded Left and Tory MPs alike are not changing the law actively to protect the vulnerable - if anything, thanks to 'austerity', they are rapidly eliminating those protective infrastructures that do exist. Watson asked MPs today to search their own consciences but he was faced with rows of blank faces and dead eyes because most of them have no conception of the radical action required to protect the vulnerable in our society. The truth is that most of them don't really give a damn enough to initiate action and those few that do come from all parties. Giving a damn about the your own vulnerable is not a Left thing in the real world any more - it used to be but not any more. Mrs Jellyby is alive and well and living in Parliament. The vulnerable of the world can cause lengthy impassioned posturing on the benches but the state of the vulnerable at home regarded as an embarrassment. For those of us on the Left, Watson has offered us, rather clumsily, a way back to the recovery of our souls. 

If Watson apologises any further than he has done, he will have betrayed the vulnerable. He will have adopted all the rules of the elite and then be forced to slink to the back of this troop of unpleasant gibbons and hope to remain accepted. He must, in short, stand and fight or lose his place forever. The distress of one family is certainly regrettable, especially as relatives may not be alphas at all but fellow betas. But if he believes (which I think he may do but is problematic as a matter of faith and judgment in the prevailing system) that the survivors who came to him as their representative, that is, to their own dedicated alpha ape, did not lie and that there is reasonable cause to believe that, despite the lack of direct evidence (according to the rules of the game), the Noble Lord was, shall we say, 'problematic' (since it may be a matter of faith that he is not problematic) then he also knows that not only would he not be true to himself but that he would do irreparable harm to the tens of thousands, maybe many more, people who look to him and his increasingly rare type in Parliament if he compromised beyond a certain line. They have hopes and now expectations that they never had before that they can be represented against a system of mostly unintentional but sometimes cynical bullies. Again, it is true, the late Lord Brittan himself may be the victim of an injustice but ... something is up and it needs investigation.

These two world views are thus incommensurable - perhaps you are of the genuine Right or Left, as opposed to the ersatz Left, to the extent that you understand this and take the appropriate side, that of order through rules with the risk of occasional cruel injustice at the margins (Right) or that of struggle against tyranny at the risk of creating worse and unstable conditions in response to the resistance of your opponents (Left). Personally, I would like a balanceof some sort - but not at the xpense of the weakest and most damaged in society. We have ended up in a world where, thanks to social media liberating the masses by cultural means, one culture bays for Watson's blood and the other begs him to stand firm no matter what.

This is what he clearly will do, backed implicitly by his own Leader - any other recent Labour Leader would probably have caved in rather than hurt the system that sustained them but things have changed. You can almost smell the panic in the elite air about this new form of passionate demotic resistance which extends far beyond this case. Even Watson himself is a possible victim of it within his own Party as Momentum gains momentum. His Party may be a victim of it as 'Red UKIP' challenges the Labour middle classes over Europe. Revolutions perhaps must always eat their young. Eventually an internal Party struggle, a Referendum and then a General Election will pit the two cultures against one another for the first time since perhaps the 1960s. Then we will see what happens, how the thesis of one culture and the antithesis of the other culture will synthesise.

In the meantime, although I do like a society of rules and I do not like armed struggle, criminal behaviour and cover up by the elite (I am persuaded that this is what the police are investigating in good faith and that it is credible that bad things have been done) offends me. I shall back Tom without assuming that any claim is proven yet. But proven or not proven has, regrettably, no necessary link to the reality of things. The law constructs an alternate probabilistic reality within the framework of its rules. It is closer to the truth than blind assertion or faith but it is never necessarily the truth as many proven cases of miscarriages of justice have shown. Sometimes even the system corrects itself with sufficient facts but the purpose of law is only incidentally justice. The purpose of law is order tempered by justice.

I shall personally also feel sorry for Lord Brittan's family under all probable scenarios while considering the investigation that caused pain during his last days to be the 'lesser evil' in terms of human suffering. This is one for Dostoevsky on a dark and stormy night. But crushing the spirit of the weak by forcing their Leader to bend his knee on one possible error (not yet actually proven to be an error) is too great a price to pay for good order in a broken system.

Poor Journalism & The Art of Innuendo - A Second Personal Statement

A few days back, I made a Personal Statement about my involvement in Exaro that I had hoped would be decisive in telling the truth of the matter for those interested in the current child abuse scandal - remember that I cannot and do not speak for Exaro or for the other shareholders but only for myself. As before, this has to be a Personal Statement.

In essence, I stated that I had founded Exaro but that I had no influence whatsoever over the editorial content and that, in particular, I certainly had no say in the editorial decision to get involved in the allegations about child abuse and its alleged cover-up in the British Establishment. I expressed my continued support, however, for the investigation of allegations. One of the grounds for this was that the campaign of vilification against me, the Editor and the main shareholder in Exaro (who also has no say over editorial decision-making as a result of a decision when the Company was founded, enshrined in a shareholders' agreement) which started some months ago in the back waters of the internet appeared to demonstrate that 'Exaro was on to something'. Based on long experience (see below), this indicated that there seemed to be murky forces interested in discrediting Exaro and perhaps 'killing it off' and, in killing it off, killing off the investigations by the Metropolitan Police. I have been struck since then by the extremely robust responses of the Met to the wide campaign of denigration of the investigations that has been mounted in recent weeks. I am also keen to emphasise that not all critics of Exaro can be tarred with the same brush. There are sincere and questioning people who are right to be concerned that the investigations remain on the right side of decency and do not descend into a witch hunt - so far, I do not believe that Exaro has done this.

I came to the view that there was no point in responding to the bottom feeders in the further reaches of the internet. The opinions of people who post on forums connected to David Icke might reasonably be ignored. I referred to the fact, however, that private investigators had been used to compile a 'dossier' on me and on Exaro. Having seen that part which related to me, it was in the grand tradition of third rate research without analysis and with content riddled with opportunities for innuendo, the art of which I shall return to later. This sump of rumour and half-truths did not avoid dragging in my family but my decision stood - there was no merit in giving the oxygen of publicity to what appeared to be an extreme right wing campaign of vilification or a psychological warfare operation masquerading as such. I have no idea who initiated or was interested in undertaking this campaign. Long experience in the defence of individuals against such online campaigns of vilification have taught me that these operations are best regarded as one of the unfortunate costs of a free society - like trolls in social media. One should be bigger than this.

So far so good but the denigration has recently moved up the line on the internet in a way I should have come to expect until it has reached the point where comment has to be made or lies and half-truths will become part of the mythology of my reputation. There is no necessary connection between the innuendo of the bottom-feeders and the higher level innuendo of the more 'respectable' blogger or mainstream media - none whatsoever - but the fact of reporting or campaigning through innuendo ironically demonstrates why Exaro existed in the first place. It was created in direct reaction to experience of the worst of British journalism - the automatic publication of material provided in dossiers whether by the 'secret state' or others, the failure to give adequate background, analysis or detail on stories and the failure to check stories at source. I am not going to defend Exaro in this context - it has to defend its own conduct. If mistakes have been made (by me as by others), there should be apology but any apology should not be the cause of the destruction of a major project which may offer to uncover something of what the ESRC-funded academics in History Today this month have called the 'hidden history' of official handling of child abuse in our country.

So, do I have anything to apologise for? Absolutely not. I have made it clear that I founded Exaro - for which I have absolutely no reason to apologise - and have no, repeat no, influence over editorial decision-making. Even if the Editor was proven to be politically motivated, had lied or had engaged in fearful misconduct (none of which is the case to date), my role would be limited to agreeing with Board Members to his removal on the evidence and only on the evidence. There would be no justification for such an act if the matter was one of the editorial material being inconvenient for us personally or our business interests.

But what is the response of the media to this in my case? It is not acceptance of the facts as outlined in my clear and unequivocal blog posting but, instead, an exercise in the sort of innuendo abhorrence of which had led to the creation of Exaro in the first place. Innuendo is the natural tool of the British Press in full hunting mode because it is an art learned within the confines of English defamation law and it usefully means that not too much resource need be spent on the expensive business of fact-checking and contextualisation. There is certainly no need to defame if you can select facts and use them to suggest something that is not actually true.

There are two key items of innuendo in my case and I am not afraid to confront them directly: that because I am left-wing and radical therefore Exaro must be part of some political conspiracy; and, second, that because my company, TPPR, undertook media relations and speech writing support for Asma Al-Assad, that I am in some way a 'bad person' whose implicit evil casts a shadow over Exaro. So I am going to deal with these two items of innuendo head on.

In both cases, these items have been variously used by campaigning bloggers and, latterly, by the so-called mainstream Press. Let me be crystal clear - in no case other than one has any journalist tried to contact me personally and directly in order to verify facts or discuss the implications. I note that the common trick with colleagues is to pose apparently devastating questions (less so with close analysis) only hours before a claimed deadline in that typical game of being able to say that the target had been contacted for a comment. In my case, I hold to a simple rule. Any respectable journalist may ask me any question on my own affairs in writing and I will undertake to try - as a busy person - to give a full written response if I think it appropriate within 36 hours. The one journalist who did try to contact me did so by leaving a message on Twitter which I did not see for several days - unlike the frenetic denizens of the Westminster Bubble, I only look at Twitter once a week at most!

The first innuendo about a left-wing political conspiracy is easily handled. I simply have to point to the previous blog posting and ask a journalist to read it. It clearly states the simple truth that Exaro was created with clear rules about editorial interference. I can add that the Editor was chosen in good part because of his lack of political affiliation and none of the other Directors to my knowledge have any particular affiliation themselves. In my case, I was actually estranged from the Labour Party from around 2004/2005 until only a few weeks ago. I am more radical and more left-wing in politics than those who controlled the Party until very recently and, like many, was uncomfortable with the forward foreign policy and the lack of democracy inside the Party. It is important to note that when Exaro was founded my regard for New Labour was probably at its lowest ebb.

This brings me to two specific claims - that I am a friend of Jeremy Corbyn and that I am in any way close to Tom Watson. Maybe I will be one day but I am not now. How about some basic facts. Let us start with Mr. Corbyn. I knew Jeremy in Islington in the 1990s for the simple reason that he was my Constituency MP.  I believe my wife (I had forgotten this but can thank the private investigators for reminding us) was on a local charitable board with him. I recall, unconnected to Islington party affairs, that I brought the attention of a Tory MP to some brutalised conservative-minded South East Asian dissidents who I had been asked to assist pro bono. That Conservative picked up the house phone at the Commons saying that Jeremy was the man to deal with this and, sure enough, with his usual moral integrity, Jeremy did what he could. In 1996, I attended meetings of the Campaign Group of MPs as Co-ordinator of the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance which was trying to democratise the Labour Party but I am not sure I even recall him in the room. I recall Jeremy turned up at one of our street parties. In other words, I knew him only a little more than the equally personally likeable Tory MP, Greg Clarke, in my current home of Tunbridge Wells. After I left London in 2000 - fifteen years ago - although we are 'Facebook Friends', I recall no communication between us other than one brief note of recognition when we connected. I certainly have not seen him since the late-1990s. So to claim some conspiratorial friendship is absurd. In fact, I respect and personally like him and he is part of the reason I rejoined the Labour Party but the 'conspiracy' is no more than that and I know a lot of prominent Conservatives better than I know the Leader of my own Party.

There is even less of a connection with Tom Watson. He was (I recall) my 'opposition' during the attempt to democratise the Party in 1995/1996 before he was an MP. I am not sure I even met him at that time. I may have done in passing but my dealings tended to be with Jon Cruddas amongst the Political Officers of the Trades Unions and with the Leader's Office. I am connected on Twitter and that is that. I have come to admire him for his stand on private rights over institutional force but then I equally admire the Tories Zac Goldsmith and David Davies in that respect. His election as Deputy Leader of the Party was undoubtedly a factor in my rejoining the Party as a private citizen, a decision I do not in the least regret. So, let us be clear, there is no left-wing conspiracy behind Exaro. I am the only left-winger involved, there was no Labour Party connection to my initiation of the Project (quite the opposite) and even if I had that conspiratorial intent, there is no mechanism by which I could influence policy. In short, any claim that Exaro is a left-wing plot should be regarded as the manufactured innuendo of fevered and desperate minds and this would have been made clear to any journalist who had bothered to contact me directly.

Now let us move on to the Asma al-Assad issue. The implication is that I should be ashamed in some way of my Company acting as adviser in the early 2000s to Mrs Al-Assad. Not only am I not ashamed but I am proud of the work done by my colleague - since, in fact, I cannot take credit for her sterling work. So, in the interests of dealing with innuendo and half-truths, let me tell you what one of my companies (TPPR) does in general and why our extensive work in the Syrian context was valuable and worthwhile.

I never speak of the details of the work I do for clients because of a commitment to client confidentiality but it is reasonable to write of the types of work we have done and why we do it. TPPR was founded in the late-1990s after I removed myself from domestic politics with a specific brief to defend individuals and others from the effects of unwarranted political warfare operations and also to advise on behaviour change and best practice to ensure that there was no room for future attacks in the future. It is rather interesting and amusing in some ways to be the one under attack now but at least I am well prepared with a correct and cool response to strategies of innuendo and to dossier-based psychological warfare operations.

I certainly have no need to justify our work to the British media - a lot of it was trying to educate lazy journalists on how to fact-check and ask the right questions. Sometimes we undertook pro bono or low paid work for the 'voiceless'. We were non-partisan and we might work indirectly alongside the State Department (in one case) or alongside Arab individuals wrongly accused of terrorism. With one exception, I do not recall we ever acted directly for Governments and that exception is outlined below. The details of our work, if we were permitted to reveal them, would be an advertisement for a fine and honourable little company that was at the heart of events during the so-called 'war on terror' and became expert in countering online psychological warfare operations during a dark period where collateral reputational damage was regarded as acceptable, using a supine media and even some NGOs as 'useful idiots' in campaigns to pervert and manipulate public opinion for political purposes.

Perhaps I am particularly proud of our first project which was the defence of the personal reputation of the owner of the Al-Shifa pharmaceuticals works in Sudan whose plant was bombed out of existence (its last shift of women workers almost slaughtered in consequence) because of a classic dodgy dossier, of our work to raise awareness in the Arab World of the appalling condition of the Marsh Arabs in Iraq in the run-up to the US invasion of 2003 and the forensic uncovering of the forged evidence used to try to remove George Galloway from the political scene. We never took sides or acted as agents of influence outside the limited parameters of specific initiatives which were ethically scrutinised with considerable care and usually related to our assessment of natural justice.

Now to Syria. Our involvement in Syria extended from approximately 2001 to approximately 2005. It certainly ended as soon as the Civil War broke out. Our Syrian friends, deeply distressed, split into their respective camps and it was ethically axiomatic that TPPR could not act for any Client in a war situation. Our relationship with Syria was complex and expressed as a series of projects in which senior and significant politicians of both main Parties might be involved and which were very much associated with the attempt to assist in the internal reform of the Government through dialogue. This was the only case where, at one point, we acted directly for an overseas Government when we agreed to assist the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in acting as liaison with the Foreign Office and in managing media relations during the Presidential Visit of 2002. We broke our rule on working with Governments in part because it was clear that it was in the British national interest to have a competent cultural liaison working with the Embassy answerable to the Embassy. During that period we had an excellent relationship with our FCO counterparts who proved, as you would expect, administratively competent under conditions where Syrian administrators were definitely not used to Western media and cultural habits.

Our other involvements were less direct. We agreed to help set up the British Syrian Society [''BSS'] with a number of highly respected British-Syrian businessmen and UK politicians as a friendship society designed to assist in the reform process that was widely assumed to be under way at the time. Incidentally, we introduced democracy to the BSS with a general vote of members to elect its Chairman. We managed the media relations for Syrian Culture Week and, through the BSS, we got to know the President's father-in-law who asked us to assist his daughter with some rather anodyne speech writing and a Press Visit by the Sunday Times. We were more than happy to do this and have no regrets. The intention was to build bridges in order to assist in modernisation. In that context, we undertook some confidential work with the London Embassy attempting (unsuccessfully) to change attitudes through educating Ministry officials on the cultural expectations of Syria in the West. Our work may reasonably be regarded as an honourable failure but it gave us a deep understanding of at least one aspect of Middle Eastern affairs. We had no connection with the Syrian Media Centre which was the State-directed communications unit in London. The specialist and educated journalists in the West covering the region were a pleasure to work with and never once were they pressurised by us to write (as if we could) anything but what they saw ... the spin and manipulation by the usual suspects was another matter. I have personal views on the responsibility for the slaughter and mayhem that subsequently appeared and I remain horrified by the ambiguities of Western association with faith-based obscurantists but that is a matter of personal politics and not the official view of TPPR.

In this second lengthy piece, I hope I have managed to make clear that not only do I have no editorial influence over Exaro which is wholly managed in that respect by the Editor but that Exaro never was, is not and never will be a political conspiracy, that the innuendo about me, about my family (if that is ever used as a tactic beyond the sump of bottom-feeders) and about my work needs cross-checking rather than accepting. My historic work in a Syrian context was mainstream, honourable and something of which I am actually rather proud.

The deeper public policy issues remain. They represent precisely the reasons I founded Exaro in 2011. Exaro may prove inadequate to the task or fail but the original impetus has been proved to be more correct than ever. When it comes to a national journalism based on dossiers, innuendo, half-truths, lack of analysis, sensationalism, partisan misinformation and disinformation, then if not Exaro ... who?