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Red Rag
The Red Rag blogsite was at the centre of a UK political scandal that became known as Smeargate. The scandal broke on 11 April 2009 when it was reported that Gordon Brown's special adviser, Damian McBride, had sent a series of emails to New Labour political blogger Derek Draper discussing plans to set up the blog which would be used to post false rumours about the private lives of senior members of the Conservative Party and their spouses. The website was never launched according to ''The Register''. The emails from January 2009, which had been sent from the Downing Street Press Office, were initially leaked to blogger Paul Staines. Draper and McBride initially tried to play down the plans. McBride stated "To call it an orchestrated smear campaign is ridiculous. It was just some ill-judged gossip between friends which was never meant to see the light of day. They appear to be some ideas – laid out in embarrassing detail – for stories which could appear on a Left-wing version of ...
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Gordon Brown
James Gordon Brown (born 20 February 1951) is a British former politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Labour Party (UK), Leader of the Labour Party from 2007 to 2010. He previously served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Tony Blair's Premiership of Tony Blair, government from 1997 to 2007, and was a Member of Parliament (United Kingdom), Member of Parliament (MP) from 1983 to 2015, first for Dunfermline East (UK Parliament constituency), Dunfermline East and later for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (UK Parliament constituency), Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. He is the most recent Labour politician as well as the most recent Scottish politician to hold the office of prime minister. A Doctor of Philosophy, doctoral graduate, Brown studied history at the University of Edinburgh, where he was elected Rector of the University of Edinburgh, Rector in 1972. He spent his early career working as both a lecturer at a further education college and a t ...
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Damian McBride
Damian McBride (born 1974) is a British political advisor. He is a former Whitehall civil servant and former special adviser to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. McBride began his civil service career at HM Customs and Excise. He worked with Customs and Excise and later became Head of Communications at the UK Treasury, before becoming a special adviser. On 11 April 2009, he resigned his position after it emerged on a political blog that he and another Labour Party advisor, Derek Draper, had exchanged emails discussing the possibility of disseminating rumours McBride had fabricated about the private lives of some Conservative Party politicians and their spouses. The emails from McBride had been sent from his 10 Downing Street email account. Early life McBride was born and raised in North London to Irish parents. He was educated at Finchley Catholic High School, a boys' state school in London. He attended Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he studied history. He wrote his fina ...
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New Labour
New Labour was a period in the history of the British Labour Party from the mid to late 1990s until 2010 under the leadership of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The name dates from a conference slogan first used by the party in 1994, later seen in a draft manifesto which was published in 1996 and titled ''New Labour, New Life for Britain''. It was presented as the brand of a newly reformed party that had altered Clause IV and endorsed market economics. The branding was extensively used while the party was in government between 1997 and 2010. New Labour was influenced by the political thinking of Anthony Crosland and the leadership of Blair and Brown as well as Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell's media campaigning. The political philosophy of New Labour was influenced by the party's development of Anthony Giddens' Third Way which attempted to provide a synthesis between capitalism and socialism. Mark Bevir argues that another motivation for the creation of New Labour was as a ...
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Derek Draper
Derek William Draper (born 15 August 1967) is an English former lobbyist. As a political advisor he was involved in two political scandals, "Lobbygate" in 1998, and again in 2009 while Draper was editor of the LabourList website. He has worked as a psychotherapist. He is the author of two books, ''Blair's 100 Days'' and ''Life Support''. Draper has had an unusually serious case of long COVID; he was hospitalised in March 2020, suffering from COVID-19, and remained in hospital for a year. Six months after returning to his home, he remains seriously incapacitated as of April 2022. Career Born in Chorley, Lancashire, Draper was educated at Southlands High School until 1984. He later attended Runshaw College in Leyland and the University of Manchester. While at the university, Draper provided hospitality for Ken Livingstone, who had missed his train after a Labour Club meeting. Livingstone was reportedly astonished to find displayed in Draper's student room a large poster of Labo ...
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The Australian
''The Australian'', with its Saturday edition, ''The Weekend Australian'', is a broadsheet newspaper published by News Corp Australia since 14 July 1964.Bruns, Axel. "3.1. The active audience: Transforming journalism from gatekeeping to gatewatching." (2008). "''The Australian'' has long positioned itself as a loyal supporter of the incumbent government of Prime Minister John Howard, and is widely regarded as generally favouring the conservative side of politics." As the only Australian daily newspaper distributed nationally, its readership of both print and online editions was 2,394,000. Its editorial line has been self-described over time as centre-right. Parent companies ''The Australian'' is published by News Corp Australia, an asset of News Corp, which also owns the sole daily newspapers in Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart, and Darwin, and the most circulated metropolitan daily newspapers in Sydney and Melbourne. News Corp's Chairman and Founder is Rupert Murdoch. ''Th ...
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BBC News
BBC News is an operational business division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs in the UK and around the world. The department is the world's largest broadcast news organisation and generates about 120 hours of radio and television output each day, as well as online news coverage. The service maintains 50 foreign news bureaus with more than 250 correspondents around the world. Deborah Turness has been the CEO of news and current affairs since September 2022. In 2019, it was reported in an Ofcom report that the BBC spent £136m on news during the period April 2018 to March 2019. BBC News' domestic, global and online news divisions are housed within the largest live newsroom in Europe, in Broadcasting House in central London. Parliamentary coverage is produced and broadcast from studios in London. Through BBC English Regions, the BBC also has regional centres across England and national news c ...
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The Daily Telegraph
''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally. It was founded by Arthur B. Sleigh in 1855 as ''The Daily Telegraph & Courier''. Considered a newspaper of record over ''The Times'' in the UK in the years up to 1997, ''The Telegraph'' generally has a reputation for high-quality journalism, and has been described as being "one of the world's great titles". The paper's motto, "Was, is, and will be", appears in the editorial pages and has featured in every edition of the newspaper since 19 April 1858. The paper had a circulation of 363,183 in December 2018, descending further until it withdrew from newspaper circulation audits in 2019, having declined almost 80%, from 1.4 million in 1980.United Newspapers PLC and Fleet Holdings PLC', Monopolies and Mergers Commission (1985), pp. 5–16. Its si ...
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The Register
''The Register'' is a British technology news website co-founded in 1994 by Mike Magee, John Lettice and Ross Alderson. The online newspaper's masthead sublogo is "''Biting the hand that feeds IT''." Their primary focus is information technology news and opinions. Situation Publishing Ltd is listed as the site's publisher. Drew Cullen is an owner and Linus Birtles is the managing director. Andrew Orlowski was the executive editor before leaving the website in May 2019. History ''The Register'' was founded in London as an email newsletter called ''Chip Connection''. In 1998 ''The Register'' became a daily online news source. Magee left in 2001 to start competing publications ''The Inquirer'', and later the ''IT Examiner'' and ''TechEye''.Walsh, Bob (2007). ''Clear Blogging: How People Blogging Are Changing the World and How You Can Join Them.'' Apress, In 2002, ''The Register'' expanded to have a presence in London and San Francisco, creating ''The Register USA'' at ther ...
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Paul Staines
Paul De Laire Staines (born 11 February 1967) is a British-Irish right-wing political blogger who publishes the Guido Fawkes website, which was described by ''The Daily Telegraph'' as "one of Britain's leading political blogsites" in 2007.Graeme Wilson and Brendan CarlinFocus on Labour website in peerage row. ''The Daily Telegraph''; retrieved 31 January 2007. The '' Sun on Sunday'' newspaper published a weekly Guido Fawkes column from 2013 to 2016. Born and raised in England, Staines holds British and Irish citizenship. Staines acquired an interest in politics as a libertarian in the 1980s and did public relations for acid house parties in the early 1990s. He then spent several years in finance, first as a broker then as a trader. In 2001, he sued his fund's financial backer in a commercial dispute. Consequently, Staines declared himself bankrupt in October 2003 after two years of litigation, and legal costs on both sides running into hundreds of thousands of pounds. In Septe ...
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LabourList
LabourList is a British news website supportive of, but independent of, the Labour Party, launched in 2009. Describing itself as Labour's "biggest independent grassroots e-network", the site's content includes news, commentary, interviews, campaign information, analysis and opinion from various contributors and sources across the Labour and trade union movement. It is funded by trade unions, adverts, and individual donors. LabourList started as a weblog with reader comments, but in February 2019 the ability for readers to write comments was removed. Contributors and content The site features breaking news, analysis, opinion, policy and ideas from a broad cross-section of the Labour movement from activists to cabinet ministers, in addition to regular editorials and posts by the sitting editor and a core group of columnists, which include Luke Akehurst and Maya Goodfellow. Ministers from the last Labour government who have blogged on the site include Peter Mandelson, Ed Balls, Da ...
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Brand Republic
Haymarket Media Group is a privately held media company headquartered in London. It has publications in the consumer, business and customer sectors, both print and online. It operates exhibitions allied to its own publications, and previously on behalf of organisations such as the BBC. The company expanded outside the UK in 1999. History Haymarket began in the 1950s, under the name Cornmarket Press. Clive Labovitch and Michael Heseltine – later a Cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher and Deputy Prime Minister under John Major – who had met at university, started out with the 1957 ''Directory of Opportunities for Graduates'', and in 1959 relaunched ''Man About Town'', which was to become an influential (if unprofitable) men's consumer magazine. The company failed in its relaunch of the British news weekly ''Topic'', the title closing at the end of 1962, within three months of the takeover. The partners split in 1965, with Heseltine renaming his half of the business Haymarke ...
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