Don't Believe Everything You Read On The Web

I've always thought one of the key measures you can judge a politician by is whose interests they really represent. Some politicians represent the interests of their constituents and some represent the interests of those who will eventually employ them on massive salaries when they retire from political life. The former group is known as "Labour" and the latter group is known as "Tories". LibDems are too stupid to work out how to arrange such deals.

Obviously Tony is a true servant of the people with no thought for his personal advancement or that of his family and friends. So I was pleased that he stood by Ruth Turner yesterday on what must have been a ghastly day, saying: "Ruth is a person of the highest integrity for whom I have great regard and I continue to have complete confidence in her".

This fits with my memory of her from the little fling I had with her over a decade ago when we were both involved in NOLS - someone that stood out for decency in the snakepit of student politics. Which brings me to the title of this post.

The right-wing libertarian, Old Harrovian and former acid-house party impresario Paul Staines (aka. Guido Fawkes) has written some very nasty things about Ruth here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here... Oh, I can't go on as it's hurting my fingers.

His main accusation is that Ruth has been the key "woman in grey" behind the "cash-for-honours" affair. Another major accusation (amongst several) is that she has for some time been the spokesperson for Capita, Liberata, Vertex and other practititoners of "business process re-engineering in Government", otherwise known as "Government outsourcing" or more crudely as "selling off the national silver".

Clearly this is a bitter and twisted blogger with a deep hatred of this fine and decent young woman. Maybe she rejected his advances. Sexual advances, I mean of course! Ruth would never reject a good cash advance.