Stephen Pollard, the Brown-hating, Kaminski-supporting editor of the Jewish Chronicle, on his blog, 9 October 2009:
On a couple of blogs today I’ve been described as a Tory, as if that somehow undemines my arguments because I am parti pris in Kaminski’s favour.
Problem is, it’s nonsense . . . James Macintyre of the New Statesman, however, has behaved rather differently. In two posts at 13.14 he called me a “Tory supporter” and a “Tory sympathiser”.
I emailed him to point out that I am not a Tory supporter.
Stephen Pollard, the Brown-hating, Kaminski-supporting editor of the Jewish Chronicle, in the Times, 27 April 2010:
Next week I will vote Conservative for the first time . . . It’s strange looking at the election campaign and hoping for a Tory victory. But since Tony Blair went, Labour offers only tax-and-spend big government. I’ve encountered far worse racism from Labour supporters than Conservatives. And only one party offers to transform opportunities for the poor and the struggling middle classes. It’s not Labour.
Surprise, surprise!
Update: Egomaniac Pollard has been quick to respond to my playful post above with a rather weird and intense post on his JC blog:
Hasan is clearly unable to comprehend the concept that someone might vote for more than one party in their lifetime. I have always voted Labour. Were Brown not leader and the party instead had a leader who did not disgrace the office of Prime Minister, I would probably have carried on doing so. But for reasons I outlined in my piece, I’ve decided now that I’ll be voting Tory.
You might not agree with my reasoning, but I’m sure most people understand the idea that you can make up your mind about which party to vote for based on the evidence available to you.
Pollard is “clearly unable to comprehend” that I’m not questioning his right to vote for a party other than Labour; I’m just questioning the idea that he wasn’t a Tory back in October when he was getting all high and mighty about James calling him a “Tory supporter” and a “Tory sympathiser”. The idea that he only converted to the Tory cause in the period between October and April is, frankly, laughable.
As for him rejecting a party leader who has “disgraced the office of Prime Minister”, why then did he vote for Tony Blair in 2005? As his own JC columnist Jonathan Freedland pointed out, back in October, he has long been a “fierce anti-Brown partisan”. And I have no doubt that he’d decided to vote Cameron in October when he was shamefully defending the indefensible Tory alliance with nutjobs and loons from Poland, Latvia and the Czech Republic.
Ideologically, as Pollard himself concedes in his Times piece, he hasn’t been on the left since the mid-1990s. He is a market-worshipper. In fact, he is a Murdoch-worshipper. From his blog, 28 August 2009:
This is to whoever wrote James Murdoch’s speech today at the Edinburgh TV Festival (maybe the man himself?):
I worship you.
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