One of the main reasons Brooks Newmark’s sexting was so inappropriate is that he co-founded the Women2Win group helping young women get involved in politics. Newmark invited our Sophie to a Women2Win event – he was abusing his position in the group to meet young Tory women. Well, Women2Win have welcomed Brooks back into the fold, there he is in the photo above holding a Women2Win placard while campaigning for the Tory candidate in the Sleaford by-election. Alongside a bevy of young Tory women. Have to wonder if this is responsible from those now running Women2Win…
This morning Guido got a notice from Google at the behest of Carter Ruck telling us they were going to take the links to Newmark’s selfies out of the Google search index. This is counter-productive because it just gives Guido an excuse to put the images up again and back into the Google search index.
What is the point after being splashed all over the Sunday front pages week after week? If you want to see the futility of Newmark wasting his money on Carter-Ruck look at this list of sites hosting the images. Brooks, we know you read Guido, please Google “Streisand effect” and save your money.
Brooks Newmark has instructed Carter-Ruck to remove all his sext pictures from the internet. Letters have gone out from the solicitors to newspapers, who have complied with his demand because they are his copyrighted images. He used to like sharing his photos…
Now if you search the stories about him you will see that the original pictures he sent have indeed been removed. Obviously since he sent photos voluntarily to our “Sophie” this will be amusing to argue about in Court. A senior government Special Adviser has been known to share with colleagues some of the funnier – so far unpublished – pics of Brooks in his pyjamas. “‘Ere, do you want to see some dirty pictures?”
You would have thought old Brooks Newmark would have learned his lesson about mysterious blondes on social media. So it’s a little surprising to see what he has been up to on LinkedIn:
“If you can’t change your fate, change your attitude” says Brooks’ seductive model friend. Indeed…
Over a period of six months, Media Guardian campaigned to stitch up the Sunday Mirror, consistently falling short of the journalistic standards it sets for others. In an extraordinary series of factually incorrect articles, Roy Greenslade alleged that “at least seven other Tory MPs were also offered similar lures” in “a giant trawl“. It is completely untrue to suggest that we “offered similar lures” to a “giant” number of MPs. If we had only tweeted at Brooks Newmark he would have seen the sting coming a mile off. The account followed and tweeted at many MPs, male and female, as well as celebrities and news organisations. Prior to the investigation we had a specific tip-off about Newmark. We only ever had a private conversation with one MP – Newmark – and it was instigated by him.
Media Guardian claimed on multiple occasions that “Wickham approached the Mail on Sunday’s political editor, Simon Walters”, and that “the MoS was concerned about the methodology employed to obtain the story, believing that it amounted to entrapment and also involved a fishing expedition”. We can now reveal this to be 100% untrue. Alex Wickham never spoke to anyone from the MoS about the story. A very brief conversation was had between Paul Staines and the MoS, where the detail was not discussed and it was agreed that the story would not work for the mid-market paper on the grounds of taste – Lady Rothermere’s taste. Despite the innuendo and factually incorrect reporting of Media Guardian, at no point was the methodology ever considered by the MoS as the prime stumbling block to running the story. Whatever may have been subsequently briefed.
Greenslade then wrote in the Standard that “the net had been spread wide in the hope of a juicy catch”, concluding “It is impossible to disentangle the public interest from the methodology. Given that we have a code of practice, we cannot argue that the end justifies the means”. Again, we had a specific tip-off about Newmark, and IPSO has found that the methods employed did not breach the code of practice.
Much of Media Guardian’s error-strewn reporting can be explained by their reliance on unfounded innuendos made by less popular parts of the Twitterphere. Peter Jukes claimed “there are many abuses being perpetrated here“, accusing us of “fishing others”, and again suggesting that two other newspapers “knocked back the subterfuge”. Our position has now been vindicated by IPSO.
A Buzzfeed report named a number of MPs with whom our account had interacted, implying they were targeted: “If you’re a middle-aged Conservative MP and a young attractive researcher starts taking an interest in you on Twitter, then be careful”. These MPs were not targeted, Buzzfeed’s irresponsible report was factually incorrect and responsible for much of the bad reporting that followed.
Finally those doyens of press accuracy at Hacked Off also made a series of untrue allegations about the story. They suggested there was no “prima facie evidence that any of the six MPs approached were engaging in inappropriate conduct on the internet”. This is clearly incorrect and the IPSO ruling has found that to be the case. They concluded: “There appears to have been nothing to justify the use of subterfuge by the freelance reporter”. This was always disputed by us and the Sunday Mirror, because we were in possession of the facts and we have now been vindicated by IPSO.
See also: Not So Pronto IPSO
