We’ve been keeping coverage of our ongoing court battle with former Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale to a minimum on the site, partly because little of any material impact has actually happened yet.
However, there was a mildly interesting development last night, which was scooped and accurately reported by the Scottish Sun.
Reactions to the party’s statement have already seen serious amounts of what we’re generously going to call “misinformation” generated and circulating around social media, so we’re going to have to clear some of them up. Apologies.
Most serious is an extraordinary falsehood printed in today’s Times. In a story which makes no reference whatsoever – direct or indirect – to either Oliver or David Mundell, the paper asserts that:
Any person reading the article without detailed prior knowledge of events could only reasonably conclude from it that rather than making a joke about the public-speaking ability of a straight white male Tory MSP, I was accused of a campaign of direct and personal homophobic harassment of a gay woman, a much more serious matter.
At the time of writing this paragraph it’s been over two hours since I contacted both the Times and its Scottish editor Magnus Llewellin pointing out this error and asking for an immediate correction. No response has been forthcoming, the unamended article is still in place on the paper’s website, and we are now in discussions with our lawyers.
Meanwhile, the Daily Record’s political editor Davie Clegg, who appears (along with Paul Hutcheon of the Herald) to be on a personal crusade on Kezia Dugdale’s behalf in respect of Labour’s funding of the case, announced to the world that Scottish Labour’s MSPs had united behind her.
This evidently came as news to at least one of them:
Neil Findlay is a member of the “Campaign for Socialism” group within Scottish Labour, which had in fact issued a statement backing the Labour NEC’s decision to withdraw funding from Dugdale.
(Findlay, quite interestingly, shares an office with Dugdale.)
Whenever there’s an outpouring of malicious inaccuracy to be found on social media, Wings readers will of course be asking “where’s Duncan Hothersall?”, and true to form the staunch party activist didn’t disappoint.
Despite Hothersall’s apparent sudden acquisition of legal expertise, there is in fact no evidence that the Record made any such offer. Its editor at the time of the Dugdale column’s publication, Murray Foote, has said only that the paper “took up the fight and sent the initial legal response”, which is a markedly different statement from “we were prepared to write her a blank cheque for whatever eye-wateringly high costs she chose to run up for months and years on end”.
(The initial response we received last year in Dugdale’s name, incidentally – whoever was responsible for it – was a document of such astonishingly incoherent rambling gibberish that we assumed it had been penned by Dugdale herself, or perhaps a small child or some sort of experimental algorithm.)
Readers might reasonably wonder what was preventing the Record from picking up the reins and footing the bill now, were it the case that the paper was willing to fight to the death for her right to defame members of the public whenever she chose. But instead this week the Record dispensed with Dugdale’s journalistic services entirely, making her none of their problem.
Foote’s ex-colleague, Record hack Mark McGivern, also waded into the discussion with the assertion that Dugdale had been speaking out against “nasty bullying”.
When we politely asked him to clarify exactly what he meant by that remark, McGivern hastily deleted the tweet without replying or retracting it.
Almost all of today’s Scottish papers carry reports of the Record podcast, a very cosy one-sided affair in which Dugdale, Davie Clegg and Lib Dem MSP Alex Cole-Hamilton all wailed at great sympathetic length about the dreadful injustices supposedly being perpetrated on the former Labour leader entirely as a result of her own actions.
(There’s also been some actual journalism on the subject, such as this blog post by former Labour MP Eric Joyce pointing out that Dugdale’s claim of being given an open-ended guarantee by the party could not possibly be credible. What looks most likely to have happened is that the party’s Scottish former general secretary Iain McNicol promised Dugdale HIS support, but on his vacating the position in February the new incumbent took a more dispassionate view not coloured by a personal friendship.)
Dugdale herself suggested on the podcast that despite not being able to afford to pay for the costs of the case herself, she intends to stall until around next Easter, when her expensive appeal against losing the first stage is likely to be scheduled.
So it seems that we can expect many more months of this absurd and unnecessary circus, and all the attendant lies, misrepresentations and “mistakes” that will bring. We promise to only talk about them here when we really have to.
