It might be some 80 years since the Daily Mail ran a leader entitled ”Hurrah for the Blackshirts“, but that hasn’t stopped RightMinds‘ Dominique Jackson from scoring a particularly awkward Nazi-inspired own goal. Dominique wrote:

“The German slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei” is somewhat tainted by its connection with Nazi concentration camps, but its essential message, “work sets you free” still has something serious to commend it. There is dignity to be gained from any job, no matter how menial, and for young people at the start of their careers, there are valuable lessons to be learned from any form of employment, whether that is on the factory floor, on a supermarket till or in the contemporary hard labour camp of a merchant bank or law office.”

The offending paragraph has now been removed without explanation…

The Mail’s Kirsty Walker is leaving the Lobby to become associate director at the spinshop best known for Boris’ 2008 mayoral election campaign. Fleet Street’s first ever drugs correspondent is quitting the Mail after 12 years to take up the post at InHouse Communications. She tweets that she’s ”ready for a new challenge”. Apparently her new job will require her to be well-versed in crisis management. No one mention injunctions…

Regular readers will know that Andrew Pierce has form for plagiarising Guido’s work, so it’s little surprise that the Mail columnist has been at it again. Last week Guido explained the real reason why old adversary Tim Yeo is so upset about cuts to renewable energy funding: he earns over £100,000 a year from green investments. Low and a behold Pierce has penned a piece for today’s paper revealing how – you guessed it – Tim Yeo makes over £100,000 a year from green investments:

He also syndicated our story about Lord Hanningfield hiring a penal reform researcher. The invoice is in the post…

See also: Andrew Pierce is a Thief – An Occasional Series, Andrew Pierce Goes all Hari, Did You See Guido’s Column in the Mail Today?, An Open Letter to Paul Dacre

The High Court have banned Associated News papers from naming a “philandering” politician again and more specifically, his love child. Associated have also been ordered to pay £15,000 in damages for publishing photographs of the child – named only as AAA – and any further reference or photos are prohibited.

The court heard that the politician was married at the time of the affair and has had a string of extra-marital liaisons in the past, including getting a previous mistress pregnant. The elected politician, still serving in office, was described as “reckless, philandering, adulterous and has betrayed his wife. He has achieved a level of notoriety as a result of extramarital adulterous liaisons”. Apparently photographing the child pointed to who their distinctive looking father is. Who could it possibly be?

Having recovered from his weekend exploits Brian decided that Wednesday evening would be a good time for a document dump, releasing submissions on the future regulatory regime for the press. Guido was amused by some of the more wacky suggestions, including:

• Paul Dacre proposing meaningless “ethical” press cards that would seek to create a Soviet-style club of authorised journalists. Guido might issue his own cards…
• The Mail editor suggests banning hacks from the Press Association newswire if they misbehave. Apparently “it would be very difficult to produce any newspaper without PA“. Speak for yourself…
• Max Mosley implying that stories about “sexual conduct between consenting adults” should be banned for not being in the public interest. Don’t mention the spanking tarts!
• Advertisers should boycott non-compliant publishers. Facebook, Google and Guido are not exactly trembling.
• PCC Chairman Lord Hunt claiming the PCC never had the power to do anything about previous dodgy press practices. That will be it’s epitaph… 

Well they would say that, wouldn’t they…

What a remarkable similarity between Bill Swanson’s letter published in the Telegraph on the 16th and Andrew Pierce’s column four days later.

UPDATE: This is not the first time Andrew Pierce has done this.

See also: Andrew Pierce Goes All Hari On Us and An Open Letter to Paul Dacre.

The Daily Mail’s Right Minds, also known as the “Heffington Post“, has been going for a month now. It is getting sharper. Nevertheless some old inky habits die hard, newspapers like to pretend they are the font of all knowledge and will rarely acknowledge other sources. Guido is used to being referred to by newspapers as a mysterious unnamed gossip website whenever we are leading on some scandal the papers are too timid to touch. Only this week the NewStatesman’s niche-website ran a disingenuous rebuttal to our scoop about Dan Hodges exiting their magazine without either linking to or naming this blog. We put that bizarreness down to bitterness, it must be soul destroying working for a discredited low circulation, loss making left-wing vanity publication.

In the case of our friendly commercial rivals at the Mail and the Telegraph we can only presume they don’t get it. In the last month for every reader referred to this blog by the Mail, Guido sent them 14 readers, for every reader sent by the Telegraph website, Guido sent them 12 readers. This asymmetry is counter-productive, Guido suspects they still have the print mindset, where a paper is held by the reader and holds onto the reader from cover to cover. Online the readers know the next story is really just a click away, anywhere and everywhere.

All the research suggests that linking-out doesn’t just give readers a better service, in increasing the utility to the reader websites get more traffic when they press the back-key to return, you don’t lose many. The Spectator is the biggest referrer to Guido followed by ConservativeHome, we in turn send them a fair chunk of traffic in return. Linking works in our mutual interests.

Guido always welcomes competition, but he barely noticed the Heffington Post slip onto the radar this morning. Clearly not willing to share Guido’s nominative pearls of wisdom, the Heff has gone with Right Minds as the name of the latest multi-author comment-fest. See what they’ve done there?

The other name put about was “Running Commentary” which could, pre-Olympics, have been mistaken for an athletics blog. Mail Political Editor James Chapman has been given a blog on the platform. Guido would like to congratulate him on being awarded the title of “Britain’s Best Political Blog” after just two posts, which reminds him of what Simon Heffer said about the internet in 2009: “while being possibly the greatest invention of my lifetime, is also a means of purveying rubbish.” Heffer’s wisdom once again standing the test of time.

Cruelly nicknamed by one hack as ”the Fired From the Telegraph Club”, the Mail have certainly rounded up some big hitters for the project. It does however just seem a bit like all the comment from the Daily Mail has just been put in one place…

Guido hears that an order from the top brass over at High Street Ken has gone out demanding that Mail hacks wrap things up an hour early so they can all get back to the comforts of suburbia before nightfall. Canary Wharf is emptying too.

There is also a rumour doing that the rounds that Television Centre over at White City is shutting up shop early…

It is next to Westfield shopping centre to be fair…

It was only a fortnight ago that Guido wrote to the Daily Mail’s editor, Paul Dacre, asking him for a columnist’s job at the Mail. Some of you will have noticed that he has decided that Guido’s distinctive style and subject choices are worthy of a column. However due to an unfortunate mix-up at the printers the paper has run Guido’s stories with Andrew Pierce’s byline. What other explanation can there be?

The lead story in the Mail column was a piece on Tristram Hunt, which admittedly appeared here on the blog a full 7 days ago, but it was such a good take on the story – pointing out that Tristram’s alma mater was a member of the Eton group of schools – it was worth repeating. Quote of the Day this morning was Guido’s Quote of the Day on Friday and even the story about DfID hosting a “gender and climate change seminar” was recycled from Thursday’s blog.

Guido’s invoice is on the way…