Glasnost, The Politburo and Anecdotes

One I had to get off my chest

I’ve been meaning to write this article for some time now. But I haven’t, for a variety of reasons. I’ll explain why later. But here goes. 

This is an article about free speech. It’s not about me, or my experience, or even politicians. It’s about the new era, where the establishment media apparatchiks decide what opinions can be expressed, what observations can be observed. But it’s also a lament.  

Gorbachev and the Apparatchiks

Many years ago I accidentally met Mikhail Gorbachev (although this article isn’t really about that meeting…but bear with me).  I was attending a conference in Washington DC. It was a very tedious conference. But to encourage people to attend the organisers had recruited several very high profile speakers. Including Mikhail Gorbachev - who was to speak about glasnost: openness and a free press.  

Given the tedious nature of the conference I decided to sneak out of the auditorium and to go seek a coffee. As I did so, a motorcade pulled-up by the pavement beside me. I stopped to watch a little distance from a black Lincoln town-car. Soon a couple of plain-clothes minders were opening the door of the car and out stepped Gorbachev. I was the only person standing near the car. I was suited. So the great man with the world’s most famous port wine stain made his way towards me and shook my hand. And in that moment the only thing I could think to say was, “I’m so pleased to meet you Mr Gorbachev, but I’m not the important person you think I am.”  He smiled and was taken away, presumably, to meet his official delegation of important people.

It was the moment I gained my most-used anecdote.

Sometimes, as Gorbachev showed, people come up with ideas, like glasnost, and share them, against the prevailing wisdom - against the wishes of the politburo. It’s the sharing of ideas, the dissent, that makes them interesting and influential people. 

Last November and December the prevailing idea popularised by this government was that getting people to stay at home (again) was a good idea. We were being told, for the umpteenth time, that a virus was doing the rounds and that we had to be vaccinated against the thing - using a vaccine that clearly wasn’t working. The latest version of the virus, Omicron, seemed to be very much like the cold. The vaccine had been formulated for another version of the virus - close to 2 years before Omicron appeared. But, despite this, the idea was that we should definitely have to get the vaccine, and prove it via an electronic pass, before being allowed into public places.  

In Northern Ireland, where I live most of the time, the local “Executive” decided to put the new idea emerging from Westminster into force via an executive decree. The decree in question had to be voted on by all Ministers, including the Justice Minister, Naomi Long.  

Justice related aspects of this Executive Order were rather incendiary. In Northern Ireland it was suggested that mask mandates would be enforced by people having to provide proof of exemptions before (say) entering supermarkets maskless. This would have required victims of rape, for example, to prove exemption to (say) supermarket bouncers before being able to enter Tesco.  So, in my view, it was worth highlighting the fact that the Justice Minister had voted in favour of the mandates and Vax Pass.  

So I decided to tweet a stock photograph of Ms Long complete with the following text. “This is Northern Ireland’s Justice Minister. Today she voted in favour of the introduction of Vaccine Passes to keep Northern Ireland healthy and safe.”  

Clearly the tweet was laden with irony. I make no apology for that. That was the point of the tweet.  The text aligned with the photograph of Ms Long made clear the irony. However, nothing in the tweet was incorrect. 

Now it’s impossible to know if a tweet will be successful or “go viral”.  Earlier this Summer I tweeted from Greece that it was 36 degrees celsius and no-one was complaining. It had three million views the last time I looked. I could never have predicted that when I tweeted it.  Similarly, I had no idea that a tweet about a politician voting for a Vaccine Pass would result in the tweet spreading faster than Omicron in a sweaty nightclub.  But, the fact was, it went totally crazy. It was shared all over the world and some of the comments were far from pleasant.  But such is social media. 

The day after I’d published the tweet I started getting calls from the media asking if I’d be interviewed about the tweet. I declined. It was a tweet. It wasn’t news. But national and local media made contact.  By this time the tweet was being shared by Lawrence Fox, Julie Hartley-Brewer and many others.  

On my daily run I was joined by a wheezing tabloid journalist, trying to keep up.  He was from the Belfast Telegraph (BT). He was writing a story about the infamous tweet for the Belfast Telegraph’s Sunday rag. I declined to be interviewed but later realised that, of course, I had been interviewed. On returning from my run I discovered an article - by another journalist - had already been run in the BT. The piece was all about misogyny and implied that I was a misogynist because it was my tweet that started the pile-on. The Secretary of State and other other (on-Covid-narrative) politicians had been interviewed and condemned such misogyny. The article named and shamed celebrities, who had liked or shared my tweet. 

I deleted the tweet.  I sensed that a major media organisation was on a witch hunt. I, it appeared, was the witch.  

A second BT opinion piece had another go the following day, naming me a ‘failed politician’ (I’m not).  Again the piece was focused on misogyny. 

Oh, and the “journalist” who had intercepted me on the street on my run had recorded the conversation using his smart watch. And this, then, resulted in a full-page printed story and web article where the banner headline named me simply “twitter troll”.  

So the paper had run three articles designed to impugn my character and to associate me with misogyny.  The articles appeared in print and online and were written by three different staff writers. It even ran an editorial piece where misogyny aimed at politicians was condemned.  

As I mentioned earlier, I hadn’t intended to write this article. I saw little point in drawing attention to the dreadful excuse for a newspaper that the Belfast Telegraph has become. In common with other regional newspapers its circulation has been declining and its online content is syndicated candy floss.  It has also become a government propagandised mouthpiece - fearful of losing government advertorial about the urgent need on the part of ever-dwindling readership to get the nineteenth Covid booster.  

So why did I change my mind?   

I decided to look up just who owned the Belfast Telegraph these days. Turns out it’s owned by an outfit in Belgium called Mediahuis - which owns many regional titles across the UK and Ireland.  The biggest shareholder in Mediahuis is a guy called Thomas Leysen.  Leysen’s business, before buying into media, was in batteries. He was also in precious metals recycling, and automotive catalysts.  More interestingly, he’s on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group - the secretive, off-the-record, by-invitation-only globalist talking shop of corporatists and their pet politicians.  Oh, and in case anyone doubted his globalist establishment credentials, he also sits on the Trilateral Commission, the self-appointed “non-governmental” group of manipulators created initially by Rockefeller - that helped spawn the World Economic Forum.  

The Belfast Telegraph, in common with other regional newspapers and broadcasters, is now dominated by a globalist media politburo that defines the parameters in which it operates. When individuals, like me, irritate it, or get more publicity than it gets, the editorial teams can decide that they are just too irritating to be tolerated. 

The Belfast Telegraph used to be one of the largest circulation daily newspapers, by adult population, in the United Kingdom. It created - like other regional papers - some of the UK’s best known political commentators, including former BBC Political Editor, John Cole. During Northern Ireland’s near civil war, it managed to represent a moderating influence, reporting the pain across the entire community.  

But between then, and now, the Belfast Telegraph has morphed into another gotcha-styled, stenographer that parrots the same media releases, in the same way, with the same lack of nuance, as the BBC, Sky News, The Times and the rest of the globally-controlled mainstream media. Mediahuis may as well be Murdoch or MSNBC. The same bland. The same narrative. I’m merely a twitter troll. I’m a misogynist for having an opinion. In fact everything needs to be framed in the same identitarian-woke-newspeak.  

Three articles, three character assassinations, three so-called journalists, sheer bloody vindictiveness, for a single, factual tweet.  

I did complain. I complained to IPSO - the Press complaints body - about all three articles that contained so many breaches of their editorial guidelines: failure to disclose clandestine recording equipment or cameras, false information, disclosing personal information (like my address), and the association (by repetition) of misogyny. Most of my complaints were not upheld and the adjudication committee failed to consider the extent of the pile-on by the Belfast Telegraph or the extent of vilification.  IPSO is inside the tent.

But that isn’t even why I wrote this piece. As I said earlier, this is a lament. We need community. We need cash. We need to nurture great journalists who ask questions and focus on what’s happening around us and why it’s happening. We need to share values. We need to share pain. We need to be able to take the piss out of politicians’ hypocrisy without the globalists telling us how to think, how not to offend - while at the same time offending, more grossly, and more unfairly, than we could ever contemplate.  Because if that’s the new era, it feels very much like an era without humanity, without glasnost.  

I’m Jeffrey Peel, I’m pretty unimportant in the scheme of things, but I once met Mikhail Gorbachev.