It's started - by Richard... Monday, November 30, 2009

It's started - by Richard... Monday, November 30, 2009

Three days - that's all it's taken for The Daily Scarygraph to put the Lord Pearson on the front page.

"UKIP leader Lord Pearson claimed £100,000 allowances for £3.7m London home" the headline screams, telling us that this was "on the basis that his £3.7 million house in London was his second home while also owning a 12,000-acre estate with servants in Scotland."

It turns out that these allowances were paid between April 2001 and June 2007, at a standard rate of £174 a night "for the purpose of attending sittings of the House". That works out at about £16,000 a year. Add the rest of the period and, in just over eight years, he has claimed £115,683 plus £56,685 subsistence – working out at about £20,000 a year.

Add another £5,000 a year for travel expenses and the Lord Pearson over eight years has cost us about £200,000 – compared with a typical MP who, over the same period, will have cost us about £1.8 million in salaries and expenses.

Pearson, unlike many, is a working peer, and puts many hours in the House, for which he is paid no salary. Nor does he get a secretarial allowance, funding his secretary from his own pocket.

That he is also a very rich man is beyond dispute. That is not yet a crime in this country. But the paper is making a big deal of the fact that he has a country estate which is indeed his main home, while citing his London home as his "usual" address on company documentation, "for convenience" in dealing with business correspondence.

That is basically all the Scarygraph has – a non-story. But hey! Better than doing Climategate properly.

CLIMATEGATE THREAD

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Googlegate? - by Richard... Sunday, November 29, 2009

Searching the Google news site for Booker's latest column yields an interesting result – like it isn't there (above – click the pic to enlarge).

That is using the search string: "Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation" – which is the full headline of the piece. I shows up where it has been quoted in full by other sites, but of the Booker column there is no sign. It has been "disappeared".

Repeating the exercise with other headlines from The Sunday Telegraph presents no problems. They come up straight away. Only the Booker column remains invisible.


Repeating the exercise with a new string "Christopher Booker" (above – click to enlarge) yields similarly interesting results on the news site. The column for last week shows up, and the week before. But of this week's column, there is no sign.

This cannot be accidental – there is a quite deliberate attempt to prevent this piece being listed. Repeating the exercise on Bing.com and Yahoo.co.uk news pages gets similar nil results. Yet other headlines from comment pieces from The Sunday Telegraph show up immediately.

James Dellingpole has picked up the problem (great minds) but my guess is that this isn't aGoogle issue. The problem probably lies closer to home – there looks to be an enemy in the camp, who has probably been using this, or something like it.