‘New Labour sees the Church as a rival’ – As Bonfire Night approaches Ed West meets ‘Guido Fawkes’, the Catholic blogger who humiliated the Government
In 1605 a young man by the name of Guido Fawkes tried to destroy Parliament and a rotten anti-Catholic government with gunpowder. Fawkes failed, and every November 5 we’re reminded of the fact, but his spirit lives on, because four centuries later another Catholic by the same name has done much better – bringing down an entire political system armed only with a computer.
Guido Fawkes is the pseudonym of 42-year-old Paul Staines, Britain’s leading blogger, whose site, order-order.com – “Guido Fawkes’ blog of parliamentary plots, rumours & conspiracy” – attracts 1.5 million hits a month.
“Guido” became the most talked about man in the country back in April when he exposed an email sent by Government spin doctor Damien McBride to his colleague Derek Draper in which he suggested smearing Opposition politicians on a new website (which had been set up in imitation of Fawkes’s blog).
McBride had to resign, the Prime Minister was forced to apologise, and the reputation of the Government, and in particular Gordon Brown’s inner circle, was left in tatters.
Staines, like his nemesis McBride, is from London Irish stock and, fittingly, one of the reasons for their feud is that McBride purposely spilled Staines’s pint of Guinness in a Westminster pub, although this wild Gaelic touch is just spice for an underlying ideological divide.
His mother came from Cappagh in Dublin’s northside – “Dublin’s answer to Peckham” – and his father is a mixture of German and Anglo-Indian, and went to the same school as Cliff Richard before coming to England in the Fifties.
“There’s obviously some bastardy in the family,” he jokes. “My grandmother said she was of Armenian extraction, but I’m sceptical. That generation of Anglo-Indians would have liked to downplay their Indianness, if they could explain their dusky colour some other way. Some of my grandmother’s siblings were very dark, and it wasn’t uncommon for things to go wrong with a local girl and a European soldier. The middle class didn’t like to admit to that.”
Staines’ father went from a house full of servants in India to a row of houses in Colchester, where he was an exotic sight at the local grammar school. Staines senior was a Fabian socialist and is now a wet Tory – “I suppose the apple does fall far from the tree,” Paul jokes – and worked for John Lewis for ideological reasons (it is a partnership that shares its profits with staff), then for Gallagher tobacco, before retiring at 52.
“He retired at 52 on the old-fashioned corporate welfare, index-linked pension, private healthcare til you die. Now it’s only 10 years away from me I think I wouldn’t mind retiring at 52.”
The Delaire-Staines (the family’s full name) had a traditional church-going London Catholic upbringing.
“It was church on Sundays, although I think my father was a bit of a sloper and would like to stay in bed a little bit. It was also a bit of a social thing. My mother would catch up with the gossip, catch up with the other mums. Our Catholicism was not intellectual. We were beaten to go to church.
And the schoolmasters and the priests, if they didn’t see you on Sunday they would pick you up on Monday.”
It was at school, Salvatorian College in Harrow, where Paul and his younger brother attended, that Staines was politically awoken, at the same time that he lost his “personal relationship with God”. But whereas most teenagers end up with Che Guevara posters on their walls and avidly read tedious Marxist tomes, Staines admits his were more likely to be posters of Maggie Thatcher.
“I was a precocious young teenager but when I read Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, I thought: ‘Maybe I’m completely wrong.’ As you can when you’re in intellectual turmoil, finding politics and the end of my personal relationship with God happened at the same time. I don’t think I really pray to God now in the way I did until up to 13. After that my belief system changed.”
When he went to Humberside College of Higher Education he joined the Young Conservatives. “In the Eighties being a radical Thatcherite believer in free market capitalist on campus was non-conformist. I was never going to be a bow-tied kid, I was a hippie capitalist.”
Within the Young Conservatives there were three factions – the Monday Club-types, known as “the S—s”, the libertarians, known as “the Loonies”, and the Wets.
“Nick Robinson was a wet. Jon Bercow was a S—, then he became a loony lib, and now he’s whatever he is. I’m still a loony after all these years – I really, genuinely think socialism is evil, I still believe that very strongly.
“It was fun being rebellious. When you’re closed down by Norman Tebbit for being too Right-wing, you must be doing something over the top.” After university Staines worked for the Libertarian Alliance, and also as a “foreign policy analyst” for the Committee for a Free Britain, a Conservative pressure group, where he edited the group’s publication, described as a “monthly intelligence analysis of the activities of the extreme Left”.
He once described his politics as “Thatcher on drugs”, and he certainly was wild in his youth, something which he’s open about now. In his first political incarnation in the late Eighties Staines lived a double life, working simultaneously as an anti-socialist ideologue and party animal.
While working for the Society of Human Rights, which highlighted the abuses of Communist regimes, and Global Growth Org, which campaigned for free trade with the Third World, he was also PR officer for the Sunrise collective, a group that organised raves and acid house parties. Staines lobbied the Conservative party conference and organised two rallies in Trafalgar Square and criticised police crackdowns on parties as “truly a regime of which Stalin or Hitler himself would be proud, implementing socialist policies to protect the citizens from their own moral weakness”.
He then spent several years in finance, where he made and lost a fortune, but it ended in the courts, and a dispute with his business partner described by the judge as “the most acrimonious litigation, hard-fought at every turn of a number of interlocutory skirmishes.
No holds were barred; no punches were pulled.” He declared himself bankrupt in October 2003 and started the blog a year later, taking as a pseudonym England’s most famous critic of parliamentary wrongdoing.
“If I did it anonymously I thought I could get away with it more, and also I could protect my wife. She’s a great foil to me and morally superior.” The format has been spectacularly successful, perhaps because, as he says, he modelled it on the Sun newspaper under Kelvin MacKenzie.
“Whether they like to admit it or not, people like the horoscope, the gossip, the weather, people like polls. People don’t say they like those things, but they do. I base it on the Eighties Sun. “It worked in the end, but it took about four years. At first there were 300 hits a month and mostly that was me clicking on it – during ‘Smeargate’ it was three million. Even now I’m neck and neck with the Spectator, and double the New Statesman.”
Originally no one knew that Paul Staines was Guido Fawkes, but there was always a danger that popularity would lead to exposure.
The blog started to pull in readers and get noticed. In 2005 it was voted best in the Political Commentary section of the Guardian’s Political Weblog awards. The Independent named it among the 50 most influential political blogs. And in February 2006 he was officially exposed as the blog’s author on a Radio 4 documentary.
Along the way Staines has had his legal problems, although he is a famed opponent of libel lawyers and difficult to sue, so complicated has he made his dealings. His opponents have included News International, who in 2006 took out an injunction after he published a photograph of their undercover journalist Mazher Mahmood, and he’s also risked lawsuits with revelations about John Prescott’s sex life and Peter Hain’s strategy for the Labour party leadership.
All this culminated in “Smeargate”, which destroyed what little reputation the Government had left, and made Staines a celebrity, with profiles recalling with relish his history of financial disputes, drug-taking and drink-driving convictions (the second one after a talk at the impeccably Thatcherite Adam Smith Institute).
He jokes: “After the coverage in the Irish press my father-in-law found out I wasn’t quite what I claimed to be. But he was good about it.”
His wife Orla’s family live in Co Laois, just 50 miles from Staines’ parents in Wexford, and, he admits, are more devout than his family. “They are very bourgeois, and have their own part of the Church, and then they see our children come in and say: ‘Where’s Santa Claus?’ ”
But they are very much “tribal Catholics”, he says, and keep up the traditions. “We go for all the ritual. We had a Catholic wedding, Catholic baptisms.” They’ve put their two daughters down for Catholic school.
New Labour, he says, is anti-Catholic fundamentally because it dislikes any moral opposition (this is classic Popper).
“New Labour see the Catholic Church as a rival institution. Ideologically they sees themselves as the political arm of the British people. The Catholic Church is a rival hierarchical structure with a different social philosophy. Bertrand Russel compared the Communist Party and Catholic Church’s structure. Modern management consultants talk about flat management structures, and the Church is a good example. How many levels are there from Pope to laity? Seven? Six? From customer to CEO in six levels. That’s fantastic.
“Obviously you have the abortion issue, and their secular religion about homosexuality. The Church’s position is ‘we’re not anti but we’re not pro’. The Labour party’s position is they’re pro.” _
Staines is often described as an “anarchist” or sometimes “political arsonist” but (like his namesake) he is motivated by moral outrage, describing himself as the tabloid version of Peter Oborne, author of The Triumph of the Political Class, the devastating account of how politicians no longer represent anyone but themselves.
“You come out of Oxbridge, you go and work at a think tank, then a party machine, then become a spin merchant. They don’t have proper jobs.They even have their own language. Cameron, Osborne, Milliband, Clegg – they’re all the same. How many working-class trade union MPs are there?”
He especially resents the greed. “They don’t have any independent means. The whole structure is taken from Europe, where you can get rich from politics. John Prescott is a multi-millionaire. How did that happen?
“We should expect lawmakers to be something above the ordinary hoi polloi,” he adds.
He’s currently taking former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to court over £100,000 she incorrectly claimed in expenses, and is raising money through the Sunlight Centre for Open Politics, but he admits it’s a “huge challenge”. He says : “She’s been ruled to have incorrectly claimed over £100,000 and the punishment is ‘say sorry’. In some countries this would cause a revolution.
“The third of the population who pay for everything have had it. You can’t afford to send your kid to private school, the school down the road is crap, your car’s being robbed, you’re a higher-rate taxpayer, how can you be a higher-rate taxpayer? Half your income’s going to the government!” Does he ever feel sorry for his victims, like Gordon Brown, who Staines often portrays as mad, wearing an orange clown wig under the slogan “Brown is bonkers”?
“No. Once they’re above a certain level it’s ok. There is a limit, but common abuse is okay. Calling someone mad is fine. A senior Blair aide told me recently about all the personality flaws Brown has, including narcissism and paranoia. I do genuinely think he’s a weirdo.”
Well, Brown won’t be in power much longer. Many political analysts say that if and when the Tories are elected in the spring they will owe their victory most of all to one man, Guido Fawkes, who has helped reduce the public’s confidence in politicians to nil.
Isn’t there the danger, then, I ask him, that Cameron will clean up politics, end the money-grabbing and public sector waste. Won’t he be finished then?
“How likely is that?” he smiles.
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