Today’s arrests in Operation Yewtree
Today, two men were arrested as part of Operation Yewtree. Both were in their 50s and therefore come from an era where public figures were able to get away with all manner of things.
A certain right-wing comedian of the same age of one of them, 59-year old Jim Davidson, was named later in the day by the Fleet Street Fox on Facebook and Guido Fawkes on his Order-Order.com blog as one of the people to have been arrested. (more…)
She’s best known for the catchphrase: “You are the Weakest Link, goodbye!” but this television great has accomplished much else. The “Queen of Mean” is renowned for her knack of coming up with great newspaper headlines and has also accumulated a fortune of some £40 million. Robinson is vehemently pro fox hunting and lives in Kensington but don’t get her started on what she thinks about the Welsh.
Matthew Steeples examines the charges against Stuart Hall
In my youth I met a man named Stuart Hall MBE. Today, this self-appointed northern joker was charged with three counts of indecent assault on girls aged between 9 and 16.
Hall is a man described by The Independent as a “Northern hero with a penchant for hyperbole and hilarity.” In reality, he is just a bit of a fool. This television presenter’s attempts at humour were always cheap and tacky and whether he is guilty or innocent, he is a man who should be consigned to history.
This broadcaster portrays himself as a “national treasure” but in reality it is time he was just silenced. May the halls not be decked with Stuart this Christmas.
Undoubtedly best known as one of the greatest actresses of the post-war period, Yorkshire born Dench briefly played Pru Forrest in the BBC’s The Archers. She’s an advocate for “more progressive drug policies” and only took the role of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride & Prejudice after director Joe Wright wrote to her and said: “I love it when you play a bitch. Please come and be a bitch for me.” There’s barely a role she hasn’t conquered.
Matthew Steeples responds to the recommendations of Leveson
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” was one of Edmund Burke’s most famous observations.
Today, David Cameron’s former spin doctor Andy Coulson and ex-News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks were in court to face charges of having conspired to pay Ministry of Defence employee Bettina Jordan-Barber around £100,000 for information. How terribly convenient for our Prime Minister that this court appearance coincided with Lord Justice Leveson issuing his report into press standards.
In the inevitable media firestorm in the run up to today’s report being issued, one question has been missed and that question is: “Did we really need a £4 million inquiry to tell us that there are elements of the press that have done wrong and did we really need a 9-month inquiry to tell us that the Press Complaints Commission was a “toothless poodle”?
Inevitably, the media and politicians have reacted against many of Leveson’s suggestions and “victims” have suggested he should have gone further. The main suggestion made was that there should be a “new independent system of self-regulation underpinned by the law.” It’s hardly a revelation and it’s hardly a solution.
“Bad men and foreigners shouldn’t be allowed to run our press,” commented Conservative MP Sir Peter Tapsell of the report. He added: “[Media] ownership should be confined to British nationals.” This utterly ludicrous suggestion shows how out of touch certain politicians in this country are. We live in a global society in which the Internet allows information to be shared across transnational boundaries and as a result our media has to operate globally.
Our own audience is illustrative: 38% of our readers are based in the UK, but 31% are American. We have an ever-growing readership in Russia and China and receive countless comments from individuals in places as far apart as New Zealand and Finland. Though many may loathe him, the person whom Tapsell’s attack was directed at, Rupert Murdoch, is not a force for evil. He’s simply a tycoon who wishes to make money and get on with running his business. He should be left to do such and the media should be left to self-regulate.
Sir Christopher Meyer and Baroness Buscombe, appointed cronies who were put in place to regulate the media in the UK were responsible for the mess created at the PCC. They failed because they were busybodies with political agendas and they failed because they did not go the whole hog when it came to dealing with the bad apples. As a result, public trust disintegrated and the PCC will deservedly be scrapped.
The bad behavior of a small number of people should not destroy the free press as a cornerstone of our free society. Today is an illustration of a case where good men actually should do nothing.
To read Leveson’s report, go to: http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk
Lancastrian Sky News anchor Kay Burley is the longest serving female newsreader on British television. (more…)
A marine residence with a history tied to the Rolls-Royce Spirit of Ecstasy, the Special Operations Executive and Babycham
The House on the Shore on Thorns Beach at Beaulieu in Hampshire is a home that wouldn’t look out of place in the Hamptons or Rhode Island. Dramatically situated next to the Solent waters to the north of the Isle of Wight, this suitably named building wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1980s BBC series Howards’ Way. It could. Indeed, have been an ideal home for Gerald and Polly Urquhart. (more…)
This mouthpiece was born in Rettendon, Essex in 1958 and vents bile on all manner of subjects. Articles such as: “Why don’t more women moan like me?” and “Liz Jones’ baby craving drove her to steal husband’s sperm in ultimate deception” are frankly illustrative of why she’s so unpopular. After she got banned from the majority of fashion shows and her husband left her, she quit London for Somerset in 2007 to feed organic muesli to the rats in the barns of a 47-acre farm she purchased as her “rural idyll.” That misadventure came to a sticky end in November 2012 after she’d alienated the whole county by calling them, amongst other things, “smelly” and “faintly Amish.” Goodness knows whom she’ll choose to offend next. Phillip Schofield sums her up best: “She is inconsistent, bitter, nasty and unhinged.” Our advice: Just steer well clear of this acid tongued poison pen.
An Old Etonian and graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, Redmayne has performed alongside Cate Blanchett, Dame Judi Dench and Julianne Moore. He’s noted for his manners but admits he “didn’t have a clue” when he did work experience in banking prior to embarking on a career as an actor. He’s modeled with Cara Delevingne for Burberry and has a whole cast of “Redmayniacs” as his fan club. Already honoured with a Tony and an Olivier, there’s undoubtedly many more awards to come.
Matthew Steeples examines the truth behind Liz Jones giving up on her “rural idyll”
The Mail’s Liz Jones is a waspish woman who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Those who’ve paid even a moment’s attention to her bleating, will be familiar with lines such as: “Last week, my brand new £1,300 MacBook Pro broke” and “Phil Spencer wanted his £46,000 and he wanted it now!” She never stops talking about money and the size of what she both owns and owes.
In today’s Femail, Jones bores on about about how she feels “like a cross-dresser” trying out the Kardashian Kollection of clothing in a pointed attack on Kim Kardashian, but it was for her diatribe yesterday that she truly got the goat of the nation in “[bidding] a ferocious farewell” to life in the country in an article entitled “Goodbye… and good riddance!” 2,151 people have commented so far and most of them have been far from sympathetic.
When Upcott Farm at Brushford, near Dulverton in Somerset came up for sale in 2007 at a price of £1.6 million, it featured in an article by The Telegraph’s Caroline McGhie. The 5-bedroomed farmhouse came with a 2-bedroom annexe, a courtyard of barns and stables and 47 acres of land. McGhie waxed lyrical about the merits of moving to this location: “People come here for the peace and quiet, the night skies, the dramatic coastline, and they work from home,” she stated before adding: “You can find everything here, including butchers, bakers, afternoon tea and cake, fish and chips, an art gallery and a shop selling fishing tackle.” Of Upcott Farm itself, she concluded:
“This would suit a member of the new wave of buyers dubbed Droppies (Disillusioned Relatively Ordinary Professionals Preferring Independent Employment Situations).”
McGhie got it half right: Upcott Farm sold to someone who considers herself far from “relatively ordinary” and someone who is far from “professional.” The purchaser, however, was certainly someone who’d become “disillusioned” with what she’d bought and someone whose desire to be “independent” and create a “situation” just alienated all she encountered. The buyer, you’ve guessed it, was none other than Elizabeth Ann Jones.
Jones was born in Brentwood, Essex in 1958 and studied journalism at the London College of Printing. She became editor of Marie Claire in 1999 but was sacked, she herself suggests, for “listing in the magazine the freebies she had been offered in the previous month.” Here, it seems, began Jones’s obsession with all things material and here she also met an Indian BBC radio journalist named Nirpal Dhaliwal in 2000.
Jones married Dhaliwal but the union was to prove an “utter disaster” as he had affairs with women she terms “younger, dimmer [and] slimmer.” “I’m no racist” Jones was divorced in 2007 and said goodbye to her “3,000 square foot of Islington real estate” and “easy, if super-busy, London life” in favour of the green, green grass of Somerset.
Whoever’s side you see it from, five years of hell followed. Jones baited the locals and they grew to loathe her. She wrote columns and a book, The Exmoor Files, where she attacked them as “faintly Amish… feral, old and smelly” and another hack and neighbour, Jane Alexander of The Telegraph, responded: “Dulverton [was] positively fizzing with fury” after each and every publication.
Of the local restaurants, Jones stated:
“I have given up trying to eat out in restaurants here on Exmoor… It is still stuck in the Seventies, with only things in baskets and rum babas on the menu… If you tell the waiter you are vegetarian, you are stared at, incredulously, as if you are black.”
She whinged about her inability to find love:
”I will never, ever meet a man here in the middle of a moor, where even to be in possession of your own teeth is a bonus.”
And whined about fieldsports:
“I didn’t increase my popularity by being unable to pass a party of men and often children with guns, shooting rabbits and deer, without getting out of my BMW and saying: ‘Do you really have nothing better to do with your Saturday morning?’ The look of shock on their faces that I had the cheek to challenge them was priceless. I would stop, too, and shout at huntsmen on horses, galloping on tarmaced roads, one hand on the reins, the other clamping a mobile phone to their heads. ‘You will ruin your horses’ tendons!’ I would wail.”
Whilst Jones found little to like in her new community, they found nothing positive in her arrival either. Her dog was blamed for worrying lambs, and Jones’s inability to control it, locals say, was an indicator of the chasm between her life and theirs. In 2009, one neighbour went as far as to tell Danny Brierley of The Independent:
“We have got nothing in common with her, really. I think she may find it difficult to make any kind of life here now. She is not a very friendly person and we are all sick to death of talking about Liz Jones. A hatred has been building up for months. She is actually having a go at people and they are not going to tolerate that. She has feelings like all people, of course she has. But everyone wants her to leave and leave now. No one can make her, but we think she will go. I don’t see how you can live in such a small community with people who think that way about you.”
Matters came to a head when Jones’s precious black BMW convertible, “bought in 2005 for £26,000,” was pelted with eggs and teenagers fired shots at her letterbox with an air rifle. A local councilor even dressed up as her in the local carnival and yesterday Jones took revenge on those she blames for her “five-year prison sentence” and deprivation from Space NK, Cath Kidston and Illy coffee.
Instead, the article just shows the true reality of this bombastic harpy. The lines Jones penned speak for themselves. Country people don’t welcome someone who planned to “hack for miles across the open moorland in my Prada jodhpurs” anymore than the folk of Knightsbridge welcome Arabs treating their roads like racetracks. The gardener who had to endure Jones yelling “walk faster!” at him didn’t deserve such anymore than a bus driver in SW11 deserves abuse from his passengers. Jones concludes:
“I’m now a different person. I became so lonely. I would often get in my car, not just for the warmth, but for the kind voice of the satnav lady. I’ve learned that an amazing view and a pair of nesting grey herons are not enough to make me happy.”
Miss Jones bleats that she’s taken a £500,000 loss on Upcott Farm, which languished on the market at first at £1,900,000 and then £1,750,000 for three years. The “unexpected” sale of the property has given her the ability to “flee back to the city” but the locals and even the “Droopies” should be warned: there’s still 27 acres of the farm unsold and on the market at a price of £200,000. Halloween may have passed but the battleaxe in the Beemer could still call again.
Read yesterday’s “Goodbye… and good riddance!” article by Liz Jones for the Mail on Sunday at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2231033/Goodbye–good-riddance-During-catastrophic-years-country-Liz-Jones-greeted-gun-attack-relentless-abuse-Now-flees-city-bids-ferocious-farewell.html
To purchase Liz Jones’s book, The Exmoor Diaries, go to: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Exmoor-Files-Husband-Found-Rural/dp/0297854437
For more information about the remaining 27 acres at Upcott Farm, contact Strutt & Parker on +44 (0) 1392 976005 or go to: http://www.primelocation.com/for-sale/details/18314693?search_identifier=71cbb8a2fb43a12182bfa7b79b5de0a3