25/11/2014
I went to bed last night dizzy with tiredness. The physical and emotional investment that goes into the preparation of material for
a speech of the complexity offered by Owen Paterson yesterday is hard to imagine, and almost impossible to convey.
Hundreds of hours by "the team" went into that, all to come together on the day for a brief hour to feed the unknowing and ignorant media - not a single one amongst them with the capacity to understand what they were being told.
Sitting in my home office in Bradford, though, I'm not supposed to admit my part in this, except that I've effectively been outed by
Dellers this morning, who makes the link so clear that only the blind - and the London hacks - could fail to make the connection.
Oddly enough though - as many have guessed - the main flow of information down to Westminster is via the blog - briefing in plain sight, so to speak. This is material which is freely available to anyone who wishes to avail themselves of it, kept available by the generosity of readers and sponsors. But such is the arrogance and ignorance of the media
claque that they don't stoop to read such this material and hence have not recognised the source of much of the input.
The best way, therefore, to keep a secret from the media is to publish it on this blog. Then, even if they accidentally stumble on it, the idle hacks will never admit to having seen it, for fear of betraying a darker, shameful secret, that they have looked at EU Referendum, work - as Dellers kindly says - from "our greatest living expert on the subject".
Had they done so, of course, they would have known that much of the material that went into the speech came directly from
blog posts such as this, picked up by the
Paterson team in London. But then, even if the hacks didn't care to sully their precious little brains with such seditious material, they could have picked it up from
Booker (who gets much of his material from the same source) - except in that sneery way of theirs, they don't read him either. They are far too grand to accept anything from his column - except when it suits them.
Thus, yesterday was an affirmation of the way the Westminster politico-media bubble works. It is not
what is said to this ghastly, mocking crew. It is
who says it that matters. And yesterday, they were being addressed by one of their own so, for a brief moment, they listened.
To their horror, though, they found they were being addressed by a grown-up, telling them things they had not heard of before, in such depth and quantity that they immediately went into crisis overload, recoiling in shock and horror at the sheer weight of facts that battered their poor little brains.
Each of them dealt with the crisis in their own ways, some by mockery - the action of children tittering at the back of the class because they didn't understand what teacher was telling them. Others struggled manfully with unfamiliar concepts and thus made their usual botch of reporting. Not one managed accurately to convey the depth and subtlety of the speech.
And then we have the naysayers. Not least, we had the dreadful Roland Rudd sounding off from his position of the most profound ignorance. He thus delivered to the BBC, where he has his own personal camp bed, exactly what they wanted to hear, smarming his way though Newsnight, followed by a Evan Davis interviewing Owen without the slightest interest in what he had to say.
That, then, is the next job - to tackle these malign naysayers - who have largely focused their attack on the "Norway option" - again without even beginning to understand what was being put to the audience and without having read the speech.
They, however, do recognise the threat. The moment it becomes clear to the British public that it is possible to be part of the Single Market, without having to be in the EU, it is game over for the Europhiles. And, for all the weakness of the media, that realisation came a little closer yesterday, which made it, on balance, a good day.
That day, for once, we set the agenda.
