All done in the best possible taste

Unity at Ministry of Truth has published another long post on the Guido affair. In it he quotes from Justin McKeating's parting post:

On Saturday last week, a Guardian article from 1986 was circulated amongst a group of bloggers which related to what Paul Staines, AKA Guido Fawkes, may or may not have got up to (emphasis mine) whilst a right-wing political activist at Hull University.

Being something of a night-owl, Sunny Hundal at Pickled Politics beat the rest of us to the punch and published the article. Early Sunday morning, Tim Ireland, Labour MP Tom Watson and I followed suit. Shortly after, emails arrived from Paul Staines stating that he considered the publication of the article as defamatory. He demanded its removal from our blogs, stating he had a ‘retraction’ of the article which he would let us see.

 Unity then goes on to say, in his irritating, long-winded and pretentious way:

...Now to be clear, I have seen both the original 1986 article and the letter that Staines describes as a ‘retraction’, and knowing the content of both there are a couple of minor points I feel its worth adding as matters of clarification. First, and in regards to the original 1986 article, it appears that the strictly factual content of the article is not in question in so far as it describes a particular course of action undertaken by Staines during his student days. What is disputed, and this forms the basis of Staines contention that the article was/is libellous, is the matter of how those facts could be interpreted and how one interpretation, in particular, might reflect on his character and, crucially, his motives at the time.

Having read the available documentation I have no hesitation is stating for the record that the interpretation that Staines is so concerned about would be both untrue and libellous in as much as it relies on an unfounded presumption of ‘guilt by association’ that categorically does not stand up on the material facts revealed in the article. However, I would also add that any such presumption would rest solely with the reader and is not made explicit in the article itself and, even without access to the retraction letter, which gives Staines’s alternative account of his motives, it is neither an interpretation of the article nor a presumption that I would have made in any circumstances. (emphasis mine)

The unfortunate thing here is that in trying to ‘defend’ Staines, some people who do not have possession of the full facts of this matter, have managed to refer, in isolated comments across a number of different blogs, to the very interpretation that Staines wishes to suppress, albeit that they do so in the course of making the specious claim that the re-publication of the 1986 article constituted a deliberate smear on his character. Ironic, huh?

In trying to defend Staines, some of his supporters have succeeded only in perpetuating the very ‘libel’ he wishes to suppress and have given it all the character of the very same kind of rumours that Staines peddles via his own blog, putting him in the position of a choice of allowing those ‘rumours’ to fester without challenge, scouring the blogosphere in an effort to secure their removal or ‘coming clean’, a course of action that would release those of us who know the full story from any further constraints on publication.

There is only one question to ask, given what has been said (especially in the highlighted section above), and it is this:

Why, then, was the 20 year old article circulated and published in the first fucking place?