Genius.

Classic.

Via

Beau Bo D'or

Tory fingerprints are all over this...

Donal Blaney

has got the scoop:

"It is, however, abundantly clear that the Tories have a real case to answer. Tory fingerprints are all over the scandal - as I can exclusively reveal here.

Theresa May - once possibly bought a copy of The News of the World. What did she know that we ordinary mortals didn't, eh?

Michael Gove - worked for The Times (wink, wink) which is also owned by Rupert Murdoch (nudge, nudge) and believed to have maybe picked up a copy of The News of the World on a train once. What clearer evidence of Tory complicity in this could you want?

William Hague - wrote a weekly column for The News of World. Rumoured to have been the real editor, publisher, proprietor and driving force behind the entire newspaper since 1977.

Boris Johnson - was one of The News of the World's victims but in his case he deserved to have his voicemail hacked into because he's a Tory toff and he stood for the Mayor of London against St Kenneth of Livingstone, the High Priest of Political Correctness.

John Gummer - might own a Sky satellite dish. Or might not. BSkyB is owned by Rupert Murdoch. So is The News of the World. Ohmigod, the circle of connectivity gets closer still.

Richard Ottaway - represents Coulsdon, Surrey in the House of Commons. Coulsdon sounds like Coulson so clearly he too had intimate knowledge of what The News of the World was up to."

The fake Labour outrage is pathetic. John Prescott was nailing his staff on his desk while he was Deputy Prime Minister. Of course he was going to be targeted by journos.

The

real attack dogs

are very quiet today.

Busy...

TB is not only very hungover but extremely busy.

Apologies for the radio silence.

Brian Coleman is being a twat.

Pack it in.

Enough said.

Guest Post: Ahh University

Recent graduate and co-author of an upcoming book with the bear, Ed Kozak has written another guest post. Never a man to mince his words, his last post caused quite a storm. Here he reflects on that bastion of left-wingery - university.

Ah, university. Having just graduated and, like so many of my fellow graduates, being unemployed, I've recently had the time to reflect on the past four years of my life. I was trying to think of what, if anything, truly defined my time at uni. Was it the boring lectures and seminars? Or maybe the heavy drinking and occasional use of rare herbs? Perhaps it was the ridiculous post-Marxist bullshit masquerading as 'social' and 'economic' history I had to learn as a historian, destroying all real interest I ever had in the subject. Close, but no.

What truly defined my university experience was, in a word, opposition. Opposition to the legions of left-wing students of various shapes and sizes, opposition to their monopoly on student government, opposition to their bullying tactics and oppressive measures that monopoly enabled them to implement, and opposition to the P.C. propaganda shoved down our throats at every turn as 'fact' or 'truth'. You see, for a conservative-libertarian like myself, a university isn't just an academic institution, the time spent there no simple educational experience. It is, rather, a sort of mild form of torture, each lefty slogan yelled and lefty action taken a drop of water on the forehead, driving one slowly insane.

I've been interested in politics for years, and strongly right-wing for almost as many. But when I graduated high school I was under the impression that my political views would mellow out, that I'd inch closer to the political centre with each passing year. I was leaving New Jersey, that bastion of rampant left-wingery it is. I was going back to the United Kingdom, there had to be like-minded conservatives there, right? Maybe not ones as avidly and gun-totingly libertarian as myself, but still conservatives nonetheless. After all I could only assume that there would be others who loved Margaret Thatcher as much as I did, especially having had to deal with New Labour for the better part of a decade. Of course there were and, being one of maybe five conservatives I knew growing up in the States, that was wonderful. But then there were the lefties. And they were everywhere.

I wasn't at university too long before the alarm bells started ringing in my head. As I walked through the square where lectures were held and through the union buildings for the societies fair, I could hear Robin Leach's voice in my head; welcome to lifestyles of the left and dirty, with their champagne socialism and communist dreams. Seriously, before I went to university, socialist was just a dirty word, an insult I used to fling at my Democrat-supporting buddies in America. Surely after the horrors socialism inflicted upon the twentieth century - the horrors of National Socialism, the mass starvation, torture, and murder in the USSR, the crimes of men like Pol Pot and Che Guevara - no one could possibly think it was a good idea. How wrong I was.

I was soon taken over slowly by the painful realisation that I had landed squarely in the middle of one of the most oppressive, free-thought-stifling, bleeding-heart, left-wing environments imaginable. I would see and hear things that would make Hilary Clinton and Stalin blush. To put it bluntly, the amount of utter left-wing crap spewed daily from the mouths of students and professors alike astonished me. I couldn't help but recall Thomas Sowell, 'socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only and intellectual could ignore or evade it''. God was he right, and I certainly couldn't ignore or evade the plethora of lefty radicals, of tree-huggers and champagne socialists, working-class heroes and coffee shop revolutionaries that populated my university.

Ah, university. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Editor: Three guesses what the book is going to be about.

They say 10% like it's a bad thing...

One of the things TB found most hilarious about the Mr 10% Cuts attack, devised by a

liar out of his depth

, was the fact that when the 10% cuts figure was suggested to anyone not playing politics, anyone with the interests of the country at heart, they said "good.. and then what?"

Rachael Sylvester

has an a fascinating scoop in today's Times, that no doubt DC/GO are slightly annoyed has leaked:

"A few weeks ago an extraordinary meeting took place that could determine the future of public spending in this country. The venue was a white stuccoed house in Carlton Gardens. The chairman was Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary. Under discussion was whether drastic cuts in expenditure — of up to 20 per cent — will be needed to tackle the spiralling deficit. In the room were senior officials from across Whitehall and Conservative frontbenchers — but not a single minister.

In 1994 Canada was running a deficit of 9.2 per cent of GDP, about the same as Britain’s today. It had tried “efficiency savings”, public sector wage freezes and departmental budget cuts with little success.

Then the Liberal Government launched a fundamental review of the role of the state. Public expenditure was cut by a fifth across the board, and the number of state employees reduced by 23 per cent. Although health had only a small reduction in funding, defence spending was cut by 15 per cent, the transport budget was halved and industrial, regional and agricultural subsidies slashed. Within three years the deficit had been reduced to zero and the Government re-elected. “There was blood on the floor everywhere, but at least everyone could see that others were hurting too,” said Marcel Massé, the minister responsible. Voters told him: “This is butchery, but at least you seem a good surgeon.”

How long do we have to wait before this much needed surgery can start? Labour are going into scorched earth mode. Once again the Tories will be the ones that have to pick up the pieces but perhaps the most exciting prospect comes toward the end of Sylvester's piece:

"Senior Tories cite Tesco’s slogan “every little helps” in discussing cuts. But the real aim, they say, is to follow the Canadian example and rethink the role of the State. “There will be examples of painful decisions that we will need to take — but that’s more about showing people that we are serious rather than solving the debt crisis,” says one strategist. “You are not going to get anywhere near enough just by cutting even quite big things, the real point is that we have got to make fundamental changes in how we do things.”

Hallelujah!

Ver are your paaapers?

Oh wait we aren't allowed to make that joke are we...

Oh well.. another day,

another step closer to that police state

.

TV's TB...?

They seem to have cropped Sky News biggin' up torybear.com but for those of you who missed it, check out TB chatting about Palin and computers...



Think TB could do with a couple of day's in the sun.

Email Gordon

The Number10 website has finally managed to get it's arse in gear and fix the system for emailing the Prime Minister...Why not drop him a line:

Closest guess left in the comments at what TB emailed in will win a prize.

Who is TB?

TB will be on Sky News tonight talking about the web's biggest stories of the day.

Will be on sometime between 19.15 and 19.30. If you can't get to a telly you can watch the program online from seven

here

.

Not blowing his whistle now is he?

Independent candidate in the Norwich by-election

Craig Murray

, the volatile former Ambassador to Uzbekistan who "

quit

" on an apparent crisis of conscious, has begun his campaign with some heavy spin. He is standing on an anti-sleaze platform. His

website

is full of rants and ravings about expenses and, generally, he isn't a fan of politicians. This is his first leaflet:

However Craig fails to mention the fact that he

hard-balled the FCO out of six years full salary

before he would fall on his own sword and is thus still on the taxpayer funded payroll to this day.

Surely the voters of Norwich have a right to know about this little bit of hypocrisy eh Craig?

Crash Gordon

Another weekend gone and time for another cartoon from

Posh Tory

.

Another cock up for Crash Gordon...

Check out PT's work

here

.

Guest Post: The Truth About Cats and Dogs

After his diatribe against vegetarians last week,

Working Class Tory

goes all Doctor Doolittle on us for a moment:

Cats are independent, free minds and spirits who are capable of gathering material through their own enterprise and thought. If the cat owner represents the state, cats regard the state with a healthy degree of scepticism and perhaps, even, contempt. They act outside the state, and exercise their civil liberties to the polite maximum. Whilst they take advantage of some state-provided benefits (such as food), they only take what is necessary, and they do it sparingly. They also take less than any other animal.

Conversely, dogs are socialists. For the most part, they possess a lower level of intelligence, compared to cats, and they are entirely dependent on state benefits. They wait for the state to tell them to do something. They never exercise their civil liberties, believing submission to the state to be the best way forward. Throwing a stick for a dog to retrieve it, it simply wears the dog out, and produces nothing for either the state or the dog. In fact, if we consider that fox-hunting is about the only time they are free to use their instinctive individual enterprise, it is only under heavy regulation by the state.

Another dimension to this is that when dogs, or socialists go wrong, they become wolves, or communists. Yes, wolves are communist. They are isolationist, protectionist, secretive, belligerent, act as packs, not as individuals and are treated as dangerous pariahs by the mainstream animal community.

Bears, are a little like Tories. They’re more libertarian, though. They don’t need the state, they rely on their own good instincts, and they are also rather wild.

Well TB would agree with that one...

Hack Watch

TB was bored and sniffing out a developing story that somehow resulted in him ending up on "Labour Feminist" Grace Fletcher-Hackwood's

Twitter page

. Despite having a good laugh at the name that could have come straight from the pages of Private Eye, the funniest was yet to come when he attempted to follow this mouthful:

What exactly does this "

amateur vegan

" have to hide from the bear, and what if anything does blocking TB achieve? He can still read every one of her bleeding heart tweets, and if anything the fact she has attempted to stop him doing so has spiked his interest.

Guess TB will just have to add Gracie to the list of New Labour careers to end.

UPDATE 18.09: TB is going to tread carefully with this one, it seems The Hack has a

history of thumping tory boys

and thus her political career is

pretty much dead already

.

Brave for the BBC...

If you have half an hour then listen to this hilarious episode of

Electric Ink

. The plot revolves around a fictional journo who gets the exclusive that the fictional Prime Minister is in the middle of a mental break down.

Can't think who it might have been based on.

Game changing or more of the same?

Alex Hilton and David Prescott's new PR firm

Game Changer

has certainly got some attention this weekend. Perhaps they are going for the all-publicity-is-good-publicity route, or perhaps their tactics have been called out very early on. Will this really be a game changer for Labour online or will it just be more of the same old New Labour spin and dark arts?

Today's

Mail

makes for a very different read from last week's glowing report in

PR Week

. Essentially the Mail accuses Game Changer of honey trapping the already accident prone Andrew Lansley with the classic pretty lady stitches up politician and then runs back to the enemy camp with the dirt tactic.

Now while Donal Blaney goes further than the Mail and notices

a pattern emerging here

, Alistair Campbell has

gone on the denial

and has attempted to bat the issue away with awkward laughter. While TB thinks the Mail might have over hyped the story some what, a quick look at the the personalities and histories of those at Game Changer will show that they are not as fluffy and glossy as they would make out.

Firstly Alex Hilton, as charming as he is, has previous. Recess Monkey, which has conveniently gone offline in time for GC's launch, used to savagely attack the Tories and it is well known that Hilton is a leading light in the online fight against the Conservatives. He would have jumped at the chance to do over Lansley, it's in his blood.

And then of course there is a familiar face from Labour's darkest days online. Yes that's right sports fans, Draper minion and smear puppy Tom Miller is on the Game Changer payroll. What exactly qualifies Miller as a "consultant" has left this bear baffled - when Draper was forced out of Labourlist, his loyal servant went with him after four months doing the dirty work. This is the first time Miller has resurfaced and TB wonders how long he will be able to stay out of trouble.

There is no way that it was by some coincidence that this story emerged on Campell's blog. He has been very loud in his praise of the Game Changers and they even boast on their website about their ability to get him to pick up on stories as one of the

services they offer

. Campbell is close to both Prescott junior and senior and would not have thought twice about sticking an oar in to help his friends push a story. Putting his impartial hat on for a second or two, TB can see very little wrong with him doing so. Why the need for the big denial? It was clearly a stitch up. Hilton's girlfriend gets a scoop, phones Hilton, who phones Campell and the rest they say is history...

They are trying to create a successful spin machine so why deny it when they score a victory?

Quote of the Day

This one from

Atticus

cracked TB up:

He lost his job as a Downing Street aide, and now faces legal action (apart from that, how do you think it went, Damian?).

Comedy aside, Roland White does raise some interesting points about what Nadine's libel case against McBride could bring out in the wash...

What's all this then...?

Whatever could Rouse Media mean with

this little post:

"Tory Bear is currently undergoing intensive surgery at a top Coventry clinic - or so rumour has it. As this possible leaked photo reveals the focus of the operations are to surgically enhance pixelated lines that are visible when people get up close and personal to the bear. It’s said that the surgery is the first of many operations the bear is undergoing…"

Guess you'll all just have to wait and see...

Reflections on 1776

TB's good buddy and co-author of certain book (watch this space) Ed Kozak has just sent him these words;

Two-hundred and thirty-three years ago American colonists were fighting and dying for their rights and liberties, guaranteed to them as British subjects, denied them by a tyrant, His Majesty George III. One-hundred and forty-six years ago men of the South were fighting and dying for their rights and liberties, guaranteed to them as American citizens, denied them by a tyrant, Abraham Lincoln. Now, we're still fighting for our rights and liberties, guaranteed to us by the Constitution as Americans, yet denied us by a tyrant, Barack Obama. How long, I wonder, before Americans start dying again to protect and reclaim those rights and liberties?

It's not me, it's you...

Oh Lily

what are you on about

? To think TB thought you were one of the good team. She has now dropped considerably in this bear's estimations:

"With Gordon Brown at his lowest ebb, begging forgiveness for the failings of his party and the scroungers in Parliament, it will surely reassure the PM to know that he still has the vote of one woman. “Of course I’ll still vote for him,” says the 24-year-old pop megastar Lily Allen.

She has said that Gordon Brown is “a nice man” and that she could never become a Tory, although she does say that the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is “a cool guy”"

Well "fuck you very very much" too.