‘An innuendo is, according to the Advanced Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, … often used to express disapproval’

It’s not an innuendo for a hetrosexual person to be called homosexual.

Can you take legal action against someone who simply says something that’s untrue about you? Or do you have to prove that it’s in some way damaging?

Hague’s actions regarding Section 28 (and lack of remorse – has he ever personally apologised for whipping his party to vote against the repeal?) show that he thinks homosexuality is a bad thing, but would he dare attempt to argue that in court? I must say, I’d love to see him try.

What is the point of this blogpost, other than to use the “subtlety of a brick” to put Hague’s name out there among these rumours?

’tis brave of you Sunny to have an open thread on this topic. You should be thankful that earwicga opened it so graciously.

I wish Crispin Blunt and his family the best that is liberally opportune to them all.

“We decry the salacious and homophobic interest of the tabloids in the sexuality of the unnamed Cabinet Minister, and we strongly believe that the unnamed Cabinet Minister has the right to privacy.

By the way, just so we’re clear, it’s William Hague.”

Yes, beautifully done.

Mr E – sorry, what are you quoting in your first para?

Mark M – I suggest reading it again. There are some questions posed in there, if you sort of try reading past the headline…

@2 – famously Jason Donovan sued The Face magazine for saying he was homosexual and won. His argument, when accused of homophobia was that he believed there was nothing wrong with being gay but in being accused of hiding his non-existent homosexuality he was also thereby accused of lying to the public, which would damage his reputation.

Whether you believe Donovan in that instance, I’d suggest his argument was correct – being misrepresented can be damaging even if what you are being misrepresented as is has no immediate negative connotation. Such as being accused of being a secret member of a particular religion, for example.

I didn’t know it was William Hague they were talking about until I found the link to this article on Twitter.

@CS Clark
True, I hadn’t thought of it like that. Also the fact that he has a relatively high profile marriage could further add to that.

I suppose, for example, were the homosexuality aspect of the David Laws thing to have been untrue he wouldn’t have been able to sue because his private life had no sort of reputation that could be tarnished. Whereas Hague did make a public thing of his marriage and he is known to publicly parade his wife around.

(For balance, I dislike it when any politicians, of any hue, parade their family around)

I didn’t know it was Hague till I read it here.

Everybody has a right to a private life – even if they are public figures.

‘It’s not an innuendo for a hetrosexual person to be called homosexual.’

It is innuendo to *imply* they are homosexual.

If they are named and the claim is false it’s just a lie.

Sorry, Sunny – for the avoidance of doubt, it wasn’t meant to be a straight quote. Rather, a precis of the tenor of this piece: criticising Fawkes for being so keen to “out” a minister while actually being even less subtle than that blog was and explicitly naming the politician in question. (LC is now on the first page of Google results for “William Hague homosexual”, conveniently enough).

Let me put it this way: I wonder if Sunder would have written an identical post if it had been an unnamed Labour minister threatening the press in this way?

Sorry, Sunny – for the avoidance of doubt, it wasn’t meant to be a straight quote. Rather, a precis of the tenor of this piece

I like how this blog is being criticised for pointing out that ministers should be free to live their lives without innuendo and gossip. Have you said anything about the originator of the gossip and innuendo? After all – we haven’t sent a ludicrous request for “information” designed to push this into the mainstream.

What you’re basically saying is – all the hush-hush-wink-wink stuff is ok, but as soon as someone tries to discuss issues surrounding the matter sensibly, then it’s ok to accuse them of making it worse.

What’s interesting is that nothing is said about the original claims at Guido’s, nor about the rank homophobia that is allowed to stay up.

Being a terrible cynic one wonders whether Paul Staines is acting on behalf of some one else with a specific aim in mind.

If a Minister is gay it is not really a matter for the public interest.

If however, it can be suggested that a Minister has employed his or her lover at taxpayer expense – that would be very different. Even if unproven it would hurt the Minister’s public standing and weaken the Minister’s credibility as a possible future leader.

There were already rumours that Osborne very much gave the nod to the David Laws story – so as to oust a competent man from the job of keeping him in check. Undermining Hague would see another of his rivals for influence in Cabinet removed or weakened.

@earwicga etc – it could be argued that the Telegraph story isn’t really focused on the issue of homosexuality as such – the same story could have been run if the attractive young man been an attractive young woman.

Mr Paul Staines has had a disappointing morning. He has tweeted: “Hearing that editors of both a broadsheet and a tabloid have both spiked {name}-related stories”

Elsewhere, news of ” one highly influential blogger” yesterday… “PinkNews.co.uk editorial staff have been told by one highly influential blogger to “get up early on Sunday”, suggesting that a Sunday newspaper will be publishing revelations relating to a cabinet minister. Further emails from the blogger link to photographs of a particular Conservative cabinet minister who has been the subject of rumours relating to his sexuality in the past”. Friends of the minister told the Daily Telegraph that the minister will take legal action if the rumours should be published in the mainstream media.”He is happily married and is not gay, it is as simple as that,” one source told the newspaper.

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2010/08/28/married-cabinet-minister-reported-to-be-considering-legal-action-over-gay-rumours/

The post was noting that the Telegraph had already identified the minister it was not naming, referring to “baseless rumours” on the internet which it itself published (in a way which hinted there was something in them). I didn’t see that there was a problem in identifying the minister on a blog like Next Left, when his name was so widely in circulation, especially online, as well as his being easily identifiable from Mail and Telegraph news reports. The post was cross-posted here, and Sunny on reflection has decided to take the name out.

* There is no reason not to believe the minister’s account.

* the readers of Next Left (where this was published) and LibCon (who cross-posted half of it; the longer post is about Crispin Blunt) would take the view that, for example, Crispin Blunt’s decision not to be public about his sexuality was largely irrelevant to his political career.

* It is a shame that Britain’s leading political blogger, in terms of traffic, appears to so enjoy providing a forum for the celebration of homophobia in 2010. It is quite appropriate to use a forum like Next Left or Liberal Conspiracy to identify that as a consistent feature of his blog. That might reasonably form part of his public reputation. It is perfectly possible it this simply motivated by schoolboy controversialism rather than anything else. I can’t pretend to be a mind-reader on that.

* The episode does highlight the evolving boundaries between mainstream media, blogging, social media, and where the line is between news and gossip, which audiences like this are perfectly capable of discussing rationally.

I don’t think we’re talking about Billy Hague. The allegations or, rather, insinuations about him don’t relate to a hack.

I’m with @ 13.

The importance of the allegations is not the type of sex which is allegedly (and clearly not in fact) happening.

It’s that it’s happening on the payroll.

Or not happening, as of course is the truth.

I must be the only one who remembers this doing the rounds years ago, well before twitter, is he gay who the hell cares, is he a Pratt yes.

Ah so it’s Hague they’re talking about. Thanks for making it clear Sunny.

Sorry but William Hague is wrong to abuse his position in trying to censor the MSM in relation to his giving his boyfriend a £30,000 “special adviser” job. There is the issue of why should the taxpayers fund his sex life. Would it be acceptable if the news broke that a minister was caught spending £30,000 of taxpayers money visiting prostitutes? Then there is the accusation of jobs for the boys.

As you well know by now, those giving Guido Fawkes the credit for breaking this story are mistaken because I led with it 24 hours before he did. I am disappointed that you have not given credit where it is due.

It is odd to write “the article was edited to remove any mention of the minister in question”, and yet allow those in the comments to name the minister as William Hague. Especially, as you removed my link with his name from the comments on Next Left.

JailhouseLawyer@20

Just to clarify, the post is an extract cross-posted from Next Left. But I am not responsible for editorial decisions (headlines, extract, whether to use the name, comments policy, legal issues, etc) here at Liberal Conspiracy when either writing for LibCon or when LibCon is cross-posting something. I do take those decisions for Next Left. (Hence a situation where the name could be in one post but not another).

I wasn’t aware of your having published the story earlier when writing the piece. But “led the online charge” remains true, I think. That was not intended to identify who had blogged the story first, but was rather identifying Guido Fawkes blog (correctly I think) as the blog which had done most actively and energetically to promote it. That partly reflects the blog’s reach. I would also be astonished if Paul Staines was not the “highly influential blogger” reported by PinkNews, and he appears to have been pushing it with the nationals too.

Not much point in removing the name from the title if you leave it in the URL.

The funniest indirect part of this story is Iain Dale describing Paul Staines blog as libertarian.

famously Jason Donovan sued The Face magazine for saying he was homosexual and won.

Not strictly true. The Face never claimed he was gay, they simply carried a piece on the Outrage movement’s poster campaign ‘outing’ alleged homosexuals. To illustrate the piece, they used a pic of Outrage’s Donovan poster.

Ah so it’s Hague they’re talking about. Thanks for making it clear Sunny.

boy, you must be really thick.

Either that or a whole bunch of right-wing trolls are playing games. Both are plausible I guess.

I took the name out because I didn’t want people googling his name and ‘gay’ and getting here.

Mr E and others – care to address my point at #12? All those now showing faux outrage at LC – did you bother criticising P Staines for his rank homophobia?

I’m glad he didn’t get his story. Scumbag.

A more interesting legal precedent is surely when John Major sued the New Statesman back in 1993. The Staggers article was about an alleged affair between Major and someone who worked for no 10. Now the article accepted there was no truth in this (as there wasn’t) and was mainly concerned with speculating on the reasons that the rumours were circulating. Despite that Major sued. Details and original article here:

http://www.steveplatt.net/archive/newstatesman/johnmajor/index.htm

In the end the case was settled out of court, very much to the Staggers disadvantage – indeed they were nearly put out of business by it. This was partly due to the way Major sued distributors etc as well as the mag itself – he received a lot of bad press about it; but since Black Wednesday had already but the Government into zombie mode I suppose it didn’t make much difference.

The point is that it is accepted that, even if you publish something as being untrue and the article appears to make that assertion genuine, you are still vulnerable to action for spreading the libel. Not trying to scare you or anything Sunny.

Of course, if we’d all known that John Major had been bonking Edwina Currie on the side; the “How dare you accuse me of adultery?” approach might have been less successful.

@ 12 “I like how this blog is being criticised for pointing out that ministers should be free to live their lives without innuendo and gossip.”

Yes, of course, that’s EXACTLY, what’s been happening, isn’t it? Maybe you could state which of the 11 posts which preceded yours criticise the article for suggesting that ministers should be allowed privacy.

“What’s interesting is that nothing is said about the original claims at Guido’s, nor about the rank homophobia that is allowed to stay up.”

Nope, sorry, have to disagree with you there, it isn’t very interesting. Or surprising. That would be because you’d normally expect comments on this site to be about articles published on this site. So, for example, if someone publishes an article on this site naming someone about whom there is a great deal of scurrilous (but largely anonymous) gossip and if said article is critical of the orignators of that gossip then it doesn’t seem entirely surprising that the article comes in for some criticism on the grounds that naming the person was totally unnecessary. Especially when the article in question is the top ten google hits for that subject.

“Mr E and others – care to address my point at #12? All those now showing faux outrage at LC – did you bother criticising P Staines for his rank homophobia?”

How is that in any way relevant to criticism of the article above? Is it necessary to earn the right to comment on the LC article by, first, criticising the Staines article? Does Staines’ conduct have any bearing on yours?

Aren’t we permitted to comment on discrepancies between the family values espoused by the government and Conservative MPs and what happens in practice, especially when so much has been made of the claimed downsides of single-parent families and the merits of re-introducing tax breaks for married couples?

We seem to be getting back to that old adage: Don’t do as I do, do as I say.

Plus ca change . . .

I thought an innuendo was an Italian suppository, until I read this thread.

TuringMachine: Is it necessary to earn the right to comment on the LC article by, first, criticising the Staines article? Does Staines’ conduct have any bearing on yours?

What “conduct” specifically are you having kittens about.

PS – if you don’t find the issue interesting then don’t bother commenting on it.

‘Note: the article was edited to remove any mention of the minister in question.’

Mr Stable-Door, allow me to introduce Mr Bolt.

@ 31. Shatterface LOL!

“What “conduct” specifically are you having kittens about.”

I’m not but you certainly seem to be. Maybe that’s why you haven’t been able to support your claim that ” this blog is being criticised for pointing out that ministers should be free to live their lives without innuendo and gossip.” On the other hand, maybe it’s because there weren’t any and you were making shit up in order to divert attention from the actual criticism. Feel free to prove me wrong by pointing to the posts in which LC was criticised for advocating minsters’ right to privacy.

“PS – if you don’t find the issue interesting then don’t bother commenting on it.”

This problem you have with reading comprehension, it’s pretty severe, isn’t it? Maybe you should get some professional help. I do find the issue interesting, that’s why I’m posting. What I don’t find interesting, or surprising, is “that nothing is said about the original claims at Guido’s, nor about the rank homophobia that is allowed to stay up.” by people who posted on here. As I explain in the post to which you are alluding.

@6 Sunny

Sorry, my bad. You basically outed the minister in question (whose name has conveniently been edited out of the article now) and, in a vague attempt to disguise said outage, questioned Guido’s editorial policy.

And that’s it. It’s absolutely pathetic. You know, sometimes this blog pops up interesting questions that even make a right-winger like me think about a good solution (Don Paskini’s posts, and some others). But when yourself or Sunder write an article it is either a) rank hypocrisy, b) an attempted smear or c) utter tripe, or indeed any combination of the above. It’s actually a shame to some of the talented writers you have here to be associated with the likes of you.

And you know what, take the mick out of me all you like. We have free speech in this country and I’m still going to be here enjoying the good blogposts, the ones that make me think. But utter smears like this article, I’m going to criticise all day, because that’s exactly what you would do if Hannan, Carswell or any other Tory blogger posted bilge like this type of this rubbish.

You do realise the name of the minister in question is still visible in the URL?

Useful thing to check for online newspapers changing their lurid headlines, but seems you’ve been caught out on the same trick…

Mark M and, in a vague attempt to disguise said outage

Sorry, outrage over what? If you were outraged that someone is trying to ‘out’ William Hague – then I suggest that we are the wrong target. But I’m not surprised a bunch of right-wingers come here and express their mock outrage that LC ‘outed’ someone given that one of their own was making lurid hints about this all week. Spare me the sanctimony, thanks.

Mark M But utter smears like this article, I’m going to criticise all day

Hah! sorry, who is being ‘smeared’ exactly? That poor defenseless blogger, P Staines? I hear your cries of anguish.

TuringMachine: On the other hand, maybe it’s because there weren’t any

No criticisms at all? Funny, on the one hand some right-wingers are saying here that no one is criticising LC and I’m getting all het up over nothing, while others like Mark M refer to outrage and criticise me for smears. Try reading other comments.

TuringMachine and you were making shit up in order to divert attention from the actual criticism

What shit is being made up?

Josh You do realise the name of the minister in question is still visible in the URL?

As pointed out in comment #25 – I’ve done this primarily to avoid ppl googling his name and ‘gay’ and getting here. The URL counts for little in that regard.

Today it is apparently acceptable to speculate about the sexuality of any minister who is not Crispin Blunt. People jabber, jabber, nonsense.

On a previous occasion (Spectator and Pollard versus Islam Expo), we are untrusted to talk about it:
“Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.”

’twas brave of you, Sunny, on this thread. Nice try. But why do you trust the loons to have a go on minister’s sexuality here rather than about Speccie versus “Islamists” elsewhere?

we are untrusted to talk about it:

Not untrusted – it’s just that the potential for libellous comments was high…. given how much rage is usually directed at the parties involved. So I had to cover my back while being away for most of the weekend.

I don’t see anyone being outraged about your naming of Hague; I’m certainly not. I’m merely pointing out that it is pretty hypocritical to sniff down your nose at the Guido Fawkes blog for its “unsubtle” innuendo about that minister, while actually going further in disseminating such rumours than Paul Staines did.

Anyone who went on Google to try and find out who the papers were talking about would have got to LC before Guido Fawkes. Your readership is not exactly identical, so many people will have had no idea who was being referred to until they pitched up here.

You were “furious” last year when Andrew Marr asked Gordon Brown if he used anti-depressants; he had, you said, “legitimised a smear that unscrupulous right-wing bloggers have been pushing for years”. Fast forward twelve months and LC is running such “smears” itself, albeit at arms’ length.

Again, I have no real problem with any of this, but it’s rather like the broadsheets that piggyback on tabloid exposes of celebrities. By all means show us Angelina in her knickers; just do us a favour and don’t pretend it’s all too distasteful for words.