Now then, me thinks the lady doth protest too much…

Yesterday afternoon, The Guardian asked for women in the UK to come forward and share their experiences of being “subjected to online misogyny”. Let’s take a look at how some of the 1,553 replies shaped up:

• “Does a pile on started by Owen Jones which ended with a man local to me developing a fixation on me & leaving me scared to leave the house count?” – Victoria Freeman
• “Owen Jones” – Julie Bindel
• “What, even when it involves your columnists?” – Emma Burnell
• “Well I cancelled my Guardian subscription because I was sick and tired of your biased reporting on gender ideology, which endangers women. Does that count?” – FletchFletchington
• “You removed JK Rowling from your list of celebrity birthdays because her support for women’s rights upset the incels in your IT department” – Simon Edge
• “Ask the female journalists you drove out of their jobs. If you can remember what ‘female’ means.” – Sarah Phillimore
• “There was the time a clownish far-Left publication insisted birthing bodies & chestfeeding were ‘inclusive’ terms. Gross.” – Rita Panagi
• “Is this an all staff email?” – Goody TwoShoes
• “You mean Owen Jones? Glad you finally got there.” – Frances Barber
• “Well, there’s this newspaper I used to read every issue of and then they decided to join a misogynist, science denialist cult and now every day I have to see articles from their journalists pretending women aren’t real anymore…” – Shambolic Neutral KPSS
• “How about the time a newspaper referred to women as menstrators? Which paper would insult women so horribly!? Think real hard. Give up? IT WAS YOU!!!” – Laura Marcus
• “Remember those articles you published about the Wi Spa incident, making out women and girls being exposed to a naked sex offender in the changing rooms were bigots?” – Andrea Paterson
• “I’ve had an awful amount of abuse, and a pile on orchestrated by your Owen Jones, who is really quite a horrific nasty bully.” – Red Tory
• “Just look to Owen Jones’s timeline & replies & write an article about that.” – Sall Grover
• “Seeing you get rid of Suzanne Moore and other female writers so you could keep misogynist opinion and misogynists like Owen Jones. You are truly the nastiest most anti-women paper in the UK.” – Lottie Lewis

You get the idea…

Stationery giant Paperchase has fallen into administration today, having failed to find a buyer for its 106 shops across the country. Tesco is only buying the brand and intellectual property, leaving 800 or so jobs at risk.

Guido’s old enough to remember when Paperchase faced a vicious backlash from angry customers in 2017, after bowing to pressure from anti-press freedom cranks not to advertise in the Daily Mail. At the time, one Owen Jones declared it “another victory against hatred”, and claimed the reaction was evidence of “a rightwing press lashing out from its death spiral”…

Today MailOnline reports on the death spiral of Paperchase, and the Daily Mail continues to sell millions of copies per year. As always: go woke, go broke…

Guido has previously reported on Owen Jones raking in the big bucks from his cash-for-access online entrepreneurship.  How times change, now it seems that even Owen isn’t immune to the cost of living crisis, as his Patreon subscriber numbers have since plummeted. He’s currently sat on 1,000 patrons, down from a peak of 1,942 – a decrease of around 49%. Based on the cost of his lower tier subscriptions of £3-10 per month (they range up to £100), Owen’s losing out between £2,800 and £9,420 per month. Cheerleadling for Jez doesn’t go down so well when Sir Keir is riding high in the polls…

Owen’s pockets aren’t the only thing taking a hit from his haemorrhaging donations. His ego also seems to have sustained some bruising as he’s since switched his Patreon stats to private.

Although the champagne socialist may soon have to switch to Prosecco, he can still count on his 1,000 patrons to bring in at least £36,000 per year. This is in addition to the book royalties, Guardian column and YouTube revenue. Poor Owen…

This morning Rachel Reeves has finally admitted something Guido relentlessly called out during the last general election: for all their claims, the Labour manifesto was not fully costed.

At the end of November 2019, John McDonnell published a manifesto costings document, claiming “Every spending commitment is fully costed. Every source of funding is explained.” In response Guido went through the manifesto, pointing out that it was missing over £600 billion in spending commitments, including their ‘national transformation fund’, a 4-day working week, and all their nationalisation programmes. Thankfully the public didn’t buy it as many of them had two years prior…

Ahead of today’s big Starmer speech – in which he says Labour is no longer the party of big spending – the shadow chancellor was asked whether she accepts that in the past the party was such a party:

“Well you look at the last few manifestos Nick, and you know that we had unfunded, uncosted proposals and there won’t be any of that with Keir as leader”

Naturally Corbynite luvvie Owen Jones claimed this “is a straightforward lie”. Guido’s inclined to agree, albeit we’ve already seen examples of uncosted proposals from Sir Keir’s Labour…

It’s the final Twitter bitch fight of the year, and who better to lace up their gloves one last time than two veterans of the ring: Steve Bray and Owen Jones. They’re back for round 2. 

Co-conspirators would be forgiven for thinking their inaugural bout back in September would be their first and last encounter. After all, the final bell rang when Bray decided to block Jones entirely. Today, however, in the spirit of Christmas, the prizefighters have given the people what they really want, and picked up where they left off:

Owen Jones is just an insignificant twat to be honest! I wouldn't worry about that waste of space! https://t.co/gSkwnmPRk2

— Steve Bray on Mastodon @SNB19692@Mastodon.Social (@snb19692) December 20, 2022

Far be it for the likes of Steve Bray to hurl an insult like that at anyone. Jones inevitably swung back:

For example, I wish Steve Bray had rightly treated me as the insignificant twat I am at Conservative Conference, rather than bizarrely screaming about me over his loudspeaker and deliberately trying to stop us interviewing Tories by following us around with his music blaring! pic.twitter.com/1LdbOJ2Way

— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) December 21, 2022

As always, Guido leaves it to co-conspirators to determine the victor…