Thursday, March 29, 2007

Representing

The Blo****ere

"Guido's" appearance on Newsnight last night was both entertaining and educational. Paxo telling him that he was talking "complete bollocks" was a personal highlight for me.

See Guido Fawkes 2.0 for analysis of the aftermath.

Nick Robinson's acceptance of "Guido's" apology contains an archived version if you missed it.

As Nick is busy (and possibly even gracious), he doesn't seem to feel the need to stick the knife in. Ah well...

Here's a transcript of the relevant section of "Guido's" interview. Sir Michael asks him to give examples of stories he's broken.
"Guido": The whole question of the second email system. The lobby was following me on that for two days...

Sir Michael: It isn't true.

"Guido": Well, it turned out it wasn't an email system. There was a second system for doing documents with Lotus Notes. We've established that.

Sir Michael: I don't think we have actually. That illustrates the difficulty. I think you got that wrong.

"Guido": Well, my source for that was Nick Robinson so maybe.
He shoots. He scores.

Shame it was the wrong net.

And "Guido's" apology:
Incidentally - want to clarify something immediately re Nick Robinson - that last line about Nick being the source, did not mean he was the source for the original much contested Guido "email" second system story. Nick has never been a source. We had a discussion re the Ruth Turner document after doing his interview. That was what the reference was to, pretty sure that came over all wrong, and genuinely apologise for any embarrassment caused to Nick.
"Guido" 0 - 2 "Guido"

Getting confused on the telly and making yourself look like a gormless twit is one thing but making two simple but entirely contradictory statements in the space of a couple of hours is something else entirely.

So, what's the truth? Is it:
a) Well, my source for that was Nick Robinson.
b) Nick has never been a source.
c) "Guido" carries a small fire extinguisher on his person at all times in order to douse the frequent pant fires which plague him so.
I guess we'll never know...

The sad part is, I do agree with some of the stuff in "Guido's" piece (you have have noticed that I've taken to calling Michael White "Sir Michael"). The lobby does have a problem with having to cosy up to politicians in order to secure access and politicians do try to manipulate that to their advantage. It is undoubtedly an issue. Shame "Guido" ended up making it look like conspiralunacy.

Anyway, Newsnight viewers who had been considering whether there was anything worth checking out in this with blogging lark will not exactly have been won round by last night's bumbling performance. Let's hope "Guido" does us all a favour and keeps his self-promoting silhouette off the telly from now on.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nah. Lets have more of that sort of stuff. After all we've all now contributed to Guido's apearance fee.

Guido is clearly a natural replacement for the dearly departed Johnny Morris on Animal Magic. I can see him now with Dotty the Ring Tailed Lemur on his shoulder, whispering in his ear "Guido...that smoke...is it your pants again?"

And you had to love his little pink ears glowing in the dark.

flyingrodent said...

Okay, so if Guido was Sid James, who was Barbara Windsor?

Paxman? I don't fucking think so.