Dick Fedorcio is taking a little trip to Westminster to be quizzed. By Keith Vaz’s committee. How times change – Keith Vaz as the standard bearer of public integrity. It’s got to be more convincing to get your second chance after 10 years in the wilderness though. Meanwhile, has anyone else noticed that the “#AskEdM”…
Read More Vaz discovers the networkLet’s talk sheep dip. No, not drinking the stuff. Spooks have another couple of uses for the word. One means to fix the admin when you borrow people or equipment from the real world. Another, and the one we’re interested in, is to arrange things so it’s not obvious to other people how you got…
Read More how to clean out a sheep dipAm I right in thinking that Andy Hayman’s testimony yesterday fingered Met press chief Dick Fedorcio? Hayman admitted he’d regularly had dinner with News International executives while he was meant to be investigating them. He mentioned that he had done this in the company of the head of communications of the Met, presumably with his…
Read More a city wired for soundFMCNL. We loves you. Rupert Murdoch arrived this morning at London Luton with Gulfstream G550 tail nr N89NC at 09:25 UTC. It would be improper, I think, if N89NC was to depart again if there was any doubt at all as to who was on board. We don’t know how many other people involved, other…
Read More watch the skies, or rather, the airportsAs a relief from all the Murdoch/Met filth, what about a slight return to last week’s coup plot? One of the oddest things about Technique of the Coup d’état is Malaparte’s judgment of individuals. The most famous example is the chapter on Hitler, who he thinks was too soft. Seriously – he argued that he…
Read More slight return: coup plotSomething else, (via BorisWatch’s Twitter feed): I didn’t know Coulson lived so close to the infamous pub at the centre of the Southern Investigations case. Come to think of it, News International people always liked to project a gangsterish image, ever since they moved to the East End, even though the choice of Wapping was…
Read More plastic gangstersThere’s been a little progress on some of the lines of inquiry in this post. First up, the question of whether or not Coulson was subjected to security vetting before joining No.10 Downing Street, and if so, what the Defence Vetting Agency said about him. This one took a relatively long time to spin up,…
Read More this is a security announcementMore progress from here. In comments, we have an explanation of the PoCA 1906 vs. BA 2010 issue. It’s actually much simpler than I imagined. Basically, the old Act was in force at the time of the crime, and it’s not clear whether the new one is operational yet in the absence of the Ministry…
Read More simpleI thought I’d reorganise the information in this Peter Oborne post. I plotted the number of times each newspaper group reported on the phone-screwing case against the number of times they were caught paying for information. Even I was surprised when the R^2 correlation came out as 0.94 – a near perfect inverse relationship. The…
Read More fun with charts!I still can’t get over this morning’s Cameron press conference. The incredible thing, as I said, was the transition in what was respectable to discuss. The Guardian went the whole hog and brought up the whole ball of police corruption, and Michael Crick of the BBC pressed very hard on the question of the money.…
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