Fifty Shades Of Stupidity

Sedition? Is That A Moron I See Before Me?

Ever since the recent episode of 'Q&A' aired, this government has been up on its hustings denouncing the ABC as well as the show itself. At the heart of it of course is one Zaky Mallah who was on the show and made particularly pointed comment at a Federal minister. Since then it's been a bit of a free-for-all with the commentary and it's been hard to keep track of just what it all means. At the core of it is this notion that Zaky Mallah saying what he said:

"The Liberals have just justified to many Australian Muslims in the community tonight to leave and go to Syria and join ISIL because of ministers like him,"

... was a form of sedition.

Sedition is actually relatively old term, dating back to Shakespeare's time. It's the kind of crime Kings accuse of subjects who talk defiantly of the power of the throne. In a post-modern world where we recognise Freedom of Speech as normal (and normative), it is an outdated and quaint term - just as bringing it back was sort of historically retrograde. Worse still, Kim Beazley waved it through as Opposition Leader so we're stuck with these head-scratchingly stupid laws, but hey, this too is the Australia we have wrought.

If you look at Mr. Mallah's statement, he doesn't actually incite people to go join ISIL, he says should people do so, they would have justification because of ministers like Steve Ciobo. That's a description, not an incitement. Especially in light of what Mr. Ciobo was saying about revoking people's citizenship:

Queensland Liberal and panel member Steve Ciobo was unapologetic, saying he believed the only reason Mr Mallah was acquitted of terrorism was that the terrorist offences "weren't retrospective in application", and that he would be glad to see Mr Mallah sent out of the country. 

"I'd be pleased to be part of a government that would say you're out of the country," he said.

*Ugh*. That made my head hurt.
So, not only is Mr. Ciobo's understanding of human rights somewhat faulty, he can't quite hide he's a fascist who believes in a kind of unilateral vindictive justice. It's easily argued that Mr. Mallah was provoked into saying extreme things.

Be that as it may, the Stupid expanded greatly when Alex Hawke said:

"It's almost as if the ABC is engaged in some form of sedition," he said. 

"They have utterly no regard for what they are doing on this show and the people who will suffer the most is the moderate Islamic community in Australia," he said. 

"If you're going to get someone to say the citizenship laws are questionable and invalid but why would you pick someone who has threatened to kill Commonwealth officials?"

So there we have it. The whole ABC is now seditious. Really? Or is it more sensible to understand it as these conservatives just wanting to not have to face the fringe opinions of their own society? Or as Guy Rundle put it succinctly:

As soon as right-wingers are exposed to real debate they flail, ham-fists flying all over the place. Steven Ciobo should have welcomed the opportunity to enunciate his principles in the face of real challenge to them — because a challenge is an opportunity to make your ideas clearer, better, win people over. But he would have had to be competent to do that. In reality he’s just another faceless mook who’s come up through the entrenched machine of the party, which, like Labor, is a quasi-state apparatus, embedded by compulsory preferential voting and public funding.

Of course, it would not end there; They decided to play the man as well.

Playing The Man And Not The Ball

It must be one of those moments for the Coalition to feel they're be able to say, "ha! Gotcha' when they can see that a guy wearing a gold cannabis leaf on his flat-brimmed baseball cap says things that cut against the grain of government propaganda. Not only are the racial prejudices of judging the man for being "of middle-eastern appearance" (as the cops like to say), they thought they could pigeonhole him with their own cultural prejudices about what such a man might hold as an opinion.

Thus the Liberal and National Party have basically banged the drum loudly that Zaky Mallah was a convicted terrorist. Surely anybody charged of terrorism under the Anti-Terror laws must be a jihadi right?

It turns out the man's background is much more complicated than that.

Turnbull's portrayal of Zaky Mallah and his views is profoundly misleading. "He had served a term of imprisonment for threatening to kill ASIO officers," he said. 

Well actually, he served two years in solitary in the Goulburn super-max a decade ago, awaiting trial on terrorism charges for which he was acquitted. He pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of threatening Commonwealth officers and was sentenced to time already served. Which is not, of course, to say that he was not at the time a seriously deluded and dangerous young man. He was 19. 

More recently, Turnbull continued, as though Mallah had not changed his spots in the least, "he had travelled to Syria in the pursuit of what he described as 'jihad' ". 

Mallah did travel to Syria in 2012. The "jihad" he was interested in joining was the fight against the tyrannical government of Bashar al-Assad, and the outfit he joined for a few days – without engaging in any combat, he insists – was the Free Syrian Army. This is the force which the United States is now training and which Australia supports.
As The Australian's Adam Shand reported at the time, the former would-be suicide bomber realised "how misguided his anger towards Australian society had been...'Go to Syria where your brothers are dying for freedom, democracy and the true Islamic way, rights guaranteed in this lucky country,' he says…. 'We Muslims have so much freedom here (in Australia) yet we are causing so much trouble'." 

Since then, Mallah has been outspoken in his condemnation of Islamic State. On Channel Ten's The Project last October he said: "I'm on this program this evening to distance myself from the actions of these individuals, these idiots, these wankers, who are giving Islam and the Muslim world and the Islamic community in Australia a bad name and for those who are considering to join ISIS I hope ASIO is onto you, I hope your passport is refused and I hope you are arrested and locked up." 

In one of numerous video blogs on YouTube, Mallah calls on Australia's Salafist imams to join the fight against extremism: "You need to condemn terrorism. You need to condemn fundamentalism. You need to condemn those who are brainwashing our youth into believing that a group like ISIS is fighting for jihad. They are not fighting for jihad. They are fighting for bulls---."

This claim that the ABC put a jihadist on TV to exhort muslims to go fight for ISIL is therefore inaccurate as it is utterly lacking in substance, let alone having any nuance. Which all goes to show how deeply stupid and unreceptive this bunch of old school closet-racist, proto-fascist dickheads are, in this Abbott Government. The most damning bit from the article is the bit here:

His final, notorious comment was not a call to arms – although it's easy to see how many viewers took it that way. It was, if you watch it again, the comment of an angry young man, a born and bred Australian with no other nationality, who has been trying for some years to counter the lure of Islamic State in his own community, and who had just been told by a member of the government that ideally he should be expelled from the country by ministerial decree.

What they didn't see was a guy who was their ally in the fight against ISIL. They saw a guy who was an enemy to them precisely because of their racial and cultural prejudices - and they then ran around screaming the man shouldn't have received the forum to say what he said. Frankly, it's really rather pathetic, and unbecoming of a government.

But did it end there? No.

Because Somebody Has To Lose A Job For The PM To Be Happy

Tony Abbott decided this was the moment to go all outing attack the ABC and its Leftist sympathies. of course, anything and everything except Hitler and Mussolini would look to the left side Tony Abbott and his anachronistic view the universe, so it's not saying much of anything to be characterised as 'The Left' by Tony Abbott.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has launched a blistering attack on the ABC's Q&A program, asking "whose side are you on?" after an Australian man convicted of threatening Commonwealth officials appeared on the program. 

In comments that reignited the debate within the Coalition government about the role and responsibilities of the national broadcaster, Mr Abbott accused the ABC of effectively giving "a platform to a convicted criminal and terrorist sympathiser - they have given this individual, this disgraceful individual, a platform and in so doing, I believe the national broadcaster has badly let us down".

"I think many, many millions of Australians would feel betrayed by our national broadcaster right now, and I think that the ABC does have to have a long, hard look at itself, and to answer a question which I have posed before - whose side are you on? Whose side are you on here?" Mr Abbott said on Tuesday. 

"We all believe in free speech, but in the end we have to make judgments and I think that the ABC made a very, very serious misjudgment last night."

Well, it might look like Tony Abbott was arguing something of substance about the 'Q&A' programme if he had his facts straight about Zaky Mallah. The fact that he doesn't makes it even worse, but here it goes any way.

Even if Zaky Mallah were convicted of terrorism, he would still have the right to free speech. As it is, he was charged and the charges didn't stick - And all this is immaterial to the fact that he still has the freedom to express his opinion.  It is an opinion that stands in sharp contrast to that of Tony Abbott, but there's no law against expressing such an opinion anywhere, on air or off, on the streets, or on radio iron internet, or for that matter a discussion show like 'Q&A'. His freedom to express his opinion in this nation is Mr. Mallah's inalienable right, especially as a citizen who was born here.

That being the case, this notion that "many Australians would feel betrayed by the national broadcaster" because Mr. Mallah was there to express his opinion as is his right, does not speak for me at all. On the contrary, many Australians should and would feel betrayed that the Prime Minister of this land would seek to close down freedom of expression - while espousing it as value (perhaps as applying only to him and his wealthy, White, Anglo, peers) - and try to punish the ABC for this perceived injustice, all on the back of his own unmitigated, undiluted racial and cultural prejudice. I feel betrayed he's our Prime Minister and nobody is calling him on this shit.

All the same, totally unreflective of how misguided his position is, Tony Abbott says "heads should roll." The only metaphorical head that should be rolling is Tony Abbott's own head. And clearly Peter Dutton's seeing that he endorses this idiocy (and nice to know these guys want to add to the unemployment queue). This is a ridiculous turn of events based on one remark on one programme. how stupid does this country look right now?

It reminds me a bit of the time Charlie Sheen was totally out of control doing stupid things every day, landing himself on the news page. When asked what he thought he was doing, he replied "Winning!"
I think this government is winning in exactly the same way - deep in delusion, mired in misunderstanding, unable escape its own racial and cultural prejudices.  "Winning!"

Oh, and then there's Christopher Pyne.

Education Minister Christopher Pyne accused Mr Scott of trying to "change the debate to something it isn't", rather than "fessing up" to the ABC's mistake.
"This is typical of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation," he told Channel Nine's Today program. 

"The ABC is trying to pretend this is something to do with free speech. It isn't. It's about what's appropriate and not appropriate at the public broadcaster. 

"They did the wrong thing, they should simply fess up to it and do the right thing next time."

How about this, Mr. Pyne, the ABC did not do the wrong thing, they did the right thing; Zaky Mallah is not who your prejudices say he is; and yes, it is a freedom of speech issue. Freedom of Speech is not an issue only when it suits you. But be my guest, keep dancing in that conga-line of Stupidity.

Pathetic In Parliament

Pyne Begs Abbott

It turns out Christopher Pyne wasn't running some deep Machiavellian plot when he ran a petition to save the ABC production facility in Adelaide. Now we learn he's begging the Prime Minister for a rethink. All because he is not polling well in his own electorate and if he had to explain how he lost the production facility from Adelaide, it's hard to see how he doesn't get humiliated at every doorstep in his electorate. That's the funny thing about democracy - your constituent's opinions count for something some of the time.

To save the bit on his turf, Christopher Pyne is arguing that the ABC should be made to spend some of the money in regional production, which would save Adelaide's production facility. In other words, he's arguing for jobs protections for his constituency as being an exception. You'd think he was - god forbid - in favour of regulation as opposed to the rampant deregulation for things in his own portfolio.

Quite apart from the total departure from the regular Liberal Party economic rationalist patter, he wants to save his turf at the expense of somebody else's turf. As you can see it's unprincipled on at least three levels but I guess you try anything when it comes to trying to save your own skin.

Malcolm Fraser Thinks They Suck

Live long enough, you see lots of strange things. Perhaps principle amongst my list of strange things is the sight of Malcolm Fraser attacking the Liberal Party from the outside over the asylum seeker issue.

Mr Fraser says migration legislation passed last week has given Immigration Minister Scott Morrison "dictatorial, tyrannical powers" over the lives of asylum seekers and "destroyed the rule of law as we know it". 

He has accused the crossbench senators who supported the legislation, on the basis of concessions they negotiated with Mr Morrison, of committing "a political error of fundamental proportions".

Well Mr Fraser, we are talking about Scott Morrison here. You can't expect much better from that man on the best of days.

All the same, it's a very vexed topic where there is much electoral support to punish the asylum seekers. It's a weird thing, this impulse to punish the asylum seekers, but there are some clues as to the thinking out there.

A long while back, Sam told me about his qualms about asylum seekers arriving in boats. "It's a bit like if I tried to drown myself in a swimming pool in the Eastern Suburbs and they rescue me. And I tell them that people are trying to kill me in the Western Suburbs so I had to come to Vaucluse; and the only way I could think of making you take me in was if I tried to drown myself in your swimming pool. Now you have to let me live in your house."

Now, just to be clear, Sam was joking.
Sam went on to say that of course Australia is much nicer than wherever the hell the people come from, much as Vaucluse is much nicer than say, St. Marys. So if you're picking and choosing, you would pick Vaucluse as the place to pull your stunt rather than anywhere in between. Once you decide you don't want to live where you live, then it's time to shop and people are shopping for Australia as a destination. If we all had the choice, maybe we'd all choose to live in Vaucluse, in which case who would be left to live in the poor suburbs to work as garbage collectors and plumbers?

But if you're a resident of Vaucluse, should you take this choice seriously? Isn't it obvious that the people in Vaucluse would ring the police and have the intruder removed or arrested for trespassing? And that is essentially what Manus and Nauru and Christmas Island detention Islands are - prisons for trespassing. Naturally the people who believe in Manus and Naura (or Cambodia!) as a 'solution' believe that the prison system is a fine deterrent to crime. If you bought that, Sam also had a boat ticket for you to buy.
And so the analogy went. It was all a bit 'Down And Out In Beverly Hills'.

I can see one aspect to the fear is that Australia is in the middle of a housing bubble that is pricing lots of people out of the property market. There is a lot of mortgage stress even if you can get a piece of it. It's not an environment conducive to being generous to the needy when people are seriously worried about keeping their own roofs and backyards. Scott Morrison is obviously playing to this pathetic anxiety, which in turn is at the very core of this pathetic kind of politics we're witnessing in Canberra. However, on a deeper level, people are wanting to reject the asylum seekers because they see the boat-and-drown asylum seekers as gaming the system - and nobody wants to be a schmuck.

The sad thing is that people out there in voter land genuinely don't want to see people on boats drowning on our doorsteps. Their preference is that the charade stops altogether, and the problem simply went away;  but that would entail the dispossessed stop picking the metaphorical Vaucluse as the destination. Vaucluse is kind of nice if it weren't for the people. But it's those people who are saying piss off, don't care what your story is, just go back to St Marys.

I'm pretty sure Malcolm Fraser would be unhappy with this characterisation. It really is pathetic that Tony Abbott counts stopping the boats as an achievement. It would be an achievement if they went home because their homeland improved with our help. The deeper truth is that as a nation, we really don't give a shit about that part of the equation, and that makes us all just as pathetic as the politicians in Parliament.

Cuts To The ABC

When Are These Things Not Political?

If there's one institution in the media landscape that deserves a bit of respect, it has to be the ABC. Even more than the Fairfax newspapers, the ABC has been editorially neutral. The fact that conservatives have a bad time when they end up on the ABC is not the ABC's liberal bias as much as the Coalition believe, but rather the ABC's bias towards facts and science. In other words, it shouldn't be made into the ABC's problem when clearly so many in the Coalition don't believe in facts and would like to invent their own realities. Like Tony Abbott, who wants us to believe he didn't promise to not cut the ABC's funding, when he said he would. (Of course today he is arguing that he's not breaking his promise not to cut when he makes these cuts,which is an even weirder spin on facts as they stand). It's all very laughable because they can't both be true.

Should the ABC be made responsible for idiots who can't get facts straight, can't understand science or how it is delivering sound prognostication? It's actually hard to say. I kind of think the teachers at the exclusive private schools these Coalition members attended that did a really bad job in teaching epistemology to these clunk-heads deserve more blame than the ABC. What kind of evil (or incompetent, you pick) educators gave us Chris Pyne? What school deprived Malcolm Turnbull of learning judgment? What idiot Jesuits gave us Tony Abbott, Oxford Blue Rhodes Scholar who can't understand logic or climate science?
It's like that song where they sing "there's no telling where the money went."

The ABC for its part is going to town with its cuts. One imagines there are a lot of tenured people of whom it wants to rid itself so this will be management's big opportunity to push some people out the door. It's hard to be sympathetic because, well, I was once an ABC employee too and I can tell you that there are some amazing bits of deadwood clogged in the ABC system. It's a bit obnoxious when somebody says the ABC has flab to cut, but if you know the inner workings of the ABC somewhat, you'll be forced to admit that there might be a point to it - maybe even a sharp edge too. You'd think that the same person would be mightily offended if one went up to her and said she has some flab that can be cut out so God only knows why the ABC and its fans won't get up in arms about some comment like that going to the press at Fairfax.

The cuts being made by the ABC themselves are political payback because it hits the electorates of the Coalition pretty solidly. They're closing production facilities in Adelaide, probably because Christopher Pyne made an appeal for it. One imagines this as a diabolical plea made by Pyne so that the ABC would close the Adelaide ABC production unit and thus offer up less scrutiny of Pyne in his own country. The ABC are also closing their production unit in Perth and axing the 7:30 report in the regions - which can be read as payback to the Nationals for supporting their rather nasty Liberal Party brethren. It's hard to imagine the latte-sipping inner-city types in Sydney and Melbourne would shed tears over those cuts. The bush, as it were, is about to get even less connection to the urban centres of this country. It's a funny kind of boomerang that hits the thrower in the head. So, here's laughing to the cutters getting cut. Hardy-har-har.

Gruen Censor

ABC Censorship Hoopla

God, you know it's a good week when the ABC censors something and there's a circus on the internet. The Gruen Transfer put up a brief for "selling the unsellable" - except this time it was for selling being fat. Please note, that's got to be a joke about being fat, right?

So the ad agency The Foundry put together a pretty sharp, serious piece of advertising likening discrimination against fat people as being equivalent to discriminating against Blacks, Jews and gays. The ad was deemed so confrontational, the ABC censored it from broadcast.

IT was banned from TV last night, but hundreds online have watched an "insensitive" segment of The Gruen Transfer that jokes about Jews, black people and homosexuals.

And public and expert opinion is divided on whether the controversial ad produced for the ABC show was racist and discriminatory, as deemed by the ABC.

The powerful ad, part of a segment in which two ad agencies tried to sell "fat pride", has also forced the show's host, and comedian, Wil Anderson to reconsider his habit of telling "fat jokes".

Shot in black and white, the ad - produced by Sydney agency The Foundry - features three people each telling extremely offensive jokes.

If you want to know what the offensive jokes were, you'll have to click the link. I'm not reproducing them because it's not worth my while getting bogged down in discussions about taste. People, there is no such thing as a victim-less joke that works. Humour is sadistic. That's the point of humour. Somebody has to get it in the crotch, and when it hits you in the crotch, it hurts. But, that is point of the ad - that it's pretty bad discriminating against fat people, just the same as it is discriminating against other types of people. It's not exactly a difficult concept.

You can see how it got played out here.

This segment of The Gruen Transfer was scheduled to appear on the ABC-TV program on May 13, 2009. It was not approved for broadcast by the ABC. We are grateful for the ABC’s consent for us to put the material on this website, as it facilitates further debate and discussion.

This is a confronting ad. We at Gruen feel that it may be offensive to some people, but we stand by the fact that The Foundry agency made it with a considered and legitimate intent to persuade Australians to reconsider their prejudices.

It is clearly an anti-discrimination ad, an argument for tolerance, not divisiveness. As road safety advertisements sometimes use horrific accident images to make a point, so too this ad uses shock to drive home the ugliness of prejudice. It was made by a highly experienced advertising creative, winner of a Cannes Gold Lion, one of advertising’s greatest honours, for a previous anti-discrimination campaign.

As a show about advertising, we feel that it is appropriate for an audience, with fair warning, to consider and judge the ad for itself. And so we are making it available for viewing through this site.

To provide a clear context for the ad,The Foundry and JWT agencies were asked to come up with a campaign for the idea of Fat Pride, to end shape discrimination and make overweight Australians feel less humiliated by the constant public disapproval of anyone who isn’t a size 10 or under.

The following video includes not only The Foundry’s ad, but also a panel discussion with its creator about the reasons for the ad’s approach.

If you are likely to be offended by issues of discrimination in race, religion, sexuality or body size, please don’t watch.

Oh my word. Talk about a lame caveat, but there's no pleasing the extreme radical faction of the politically correct. And the discussion that follows the ad is just bizarre. Todd Sampson makes no sense. He says the ad doesn't work because it's too shocking and then might be perceived to be condoning other types of discrimination by mistake. I think his political correctness switch melted down during the first joke. God knows how he'll ever survive listening to Frank Zappa. To say the jokes are nasty, therefore the ad doesn't work is a crappy argument that lacks any understanding of what is laid bare by the jokes. As a result Todd comes across as being a lot less intelligent than I previously thought. Well-meaning but thick as 6 planks of wood.

Wil Anderson seems almost apologetic to have kicked off the segment with a fat joke, only to see an ad Agency that took the brief ultra-seriously and come back with a very hard-hitting product.

But here's the thing: Executive Producer Andrew Denton was quoted as saying The Foundry missed the point of the brief: "to sell being fat as a positive". ...and in the calm light of day, The Foundry missed that point. Their ad says end fat discrimination; it doesn't say it's good to be fat. The rest of the discussion about the nature of discrimination is somewhat tangential and redundant.

Me? I know what real discrimination is like. It's not the jokes they tell about your ethnicity or the way you look or the way your accent might betray your native tongue. The jokes in the ad might be shocking to some, but frankly, I've heard worse in every which direction. Jews in Nazi ovens, Blacks riddled with drugs, homosexuals being the object of scorn and ridicule, fat people caught in the eye of a needle, all being standard tropes for nasty commentary and stereotyping. These are all things that get said and hurt.

But real discrimination is a whisper you don't hear. It's the quiet agreement to lock you out of the 'mainstream'. It's the procession of blondes on TV in a multi-cultural Australia while all the 'ethnics 'get paraded on SBS; it's the coming second to a white kid at school because the duxe has to be a white kid - and if the 2 leading candidates are not white, heck, they just cancel the duxe that year - Yeah, I've seen that one somewhere. :) The jobs you don't get because the other candidate is white; the breaks or opportunities or the lenience from the law you don't get because you're not white; over and over and over again.

My point is, if those 4 white men thought those jokes were the beginning and end of discrimination - and I should include the ABC censors in on this, I have to say they have no fucking idea what discrimination is in this country. NO FUCKING IDEA.

The ABC Has No Balls

I'm trying to get my head around the ABC that censors that above ad, and the Four Corners they aired on Monday night where the trial-by-media circus has resulted in the public scapegoating of Matthew Johns.

I don't intend to defend what Johns did. My opinions on Matthew Johns are already stated in my previous entries here and here. He did a crappy thing. The way the media has been carrying on about it, you'd think he killed somebody. So far, the New Zealand police have said they won't re-open the case, and charges were never laid. The general public I've run into are of the opinion that this scapegoating is highly suspect and hypocritical.

The things I heard at the local lunch tuck shop today:

• After all, there must be some TV journos who get laid just because they're famous. Why don't they get outed?


• There are some regular folk who go cruising for pro athletes for sex. What about those people?


• It's not just Matthew Johns, so why don't they out those other players?


• Has there ever been a sport like NRL where the sport just keep stabbing its supporters in the heart over and over again?


• how is this supposed to end? With the Johns marriage breaking up or as Johns as a drug addict, derelict and homeless and dead in the gutter?


• Who is this woman 'Claire' and why is she saying this stuff now? Got to be money, right?


• Didn't this woman know better than to hang around footballers?


• It was consensual, so why are they dredging this up now? If she can change her mind, can there ever be ever-lasting consent?


• Why is the media reporting about athletes' sex lives? Why do we need to know, even if there was a revolting culture in NRL?

If you thought I was conflicted about Roger Clemens, these people were incredibly pissed off by the whole thing from Johns to Gallop to Gyngell to the Sharks to the woman 'Claire'.

So, hooray for the ABC who were too scared to air some racist jokes that were clearly portrayed as smug, but were brave enough to throw Matthew Johns under a bus without trial, devil may care.

I'm really, really unimpressed with the ABC this week.

That being said, I'm fascinated by the fissures that are being exposed in our society as result of these two things this week. Clearly the media on the whole is out of touch with community sentiment and I'm not alone in thinking they're fucked up.

UPDATE:
Oh, and then there's this:

A former work colleague of the woman at the centre of the Cronulla Sharks sex scandal involving Matthew Johns claims her co-worker bragged about the incident.

Tania Boyd has told the Nine Network that the woman in the ABC's Four Corners report, identified as "Clare", had boasted to her workmates about bedding several players and only contacted police five days after the alleged incident.

"She was absolutely excited about the fact. She was bragging about it to the staff and quite willing, openly saying how she had sex with several players," said Boyd.

"We were quite disgusted about it. There was no trauma whatsoever.

"I'm disgusted that a woman can all of a sudden change her story from having a great time to then turning it into a terrible crime.

"One minute she was absolutely bragging about it, she did not know names. These names only came to light to us in the last day.

"We all just thought it was hilarious until five days later the police came to work and were horrified she had now changed her story to say she was now a victim of crime.

"It was definitely consensual, absolutely.

"She is saying she is still traumatised et cetera, well she wasn't for five days, or four days at least, after that affair.

"I can't work out what's happened. Does it take five days for it to sink in?"

Make of that what you will, but that's somebody corroborating Johns' version of the character of 'Clare'. The confusion alone suggests the public bonfire of Matthew Johns may have been set alight too quickly.