Noncegate revisited

What's the difference between AC Grayling and a Grenfell fraudster? Well, it turns out, not a lot. Sharife Elouahabi, 38, falsely said he was living in the building when fire ripped through the tower block. He said he was staying with relatives in a flat on the 21st floor of the block, where a family of five is known to have died. He was in fact living at a different address in Kensington and had no links to Grenfell Tower.

Basically all you have to do is make up a sob story, fill in the forms and file it with the right bureaucracy. Sometimes you get away with it, sometimes you don't. The main difference here is there are different channels through which to abuse the system.

For the already well-to-do there's the British libel system. Regular readers will already be familiar with "noncegate" whereupon Grayling has taken it upon himself to take weaponised mob offence taking to the next level. Grayling padded out his case with bogus claims about the harm done to him by a solitary tweet made in jest about him. The full violin works. 

In mine and your world, if someone tweets something unkind to or about you, you simply block them and move on. If it's a bit more serious (which this isn't) you can approach that person before taking further action. That's how I play it anyway. I'm often accused by lunatic remainers of taking money from the Russians or being employed by shadowy corporate interests. Grayling, though, did not. Instantly came a demand for a sum of around five thousand pounds. Naturally I told him to go and fuck himself. 

That he did not do. He instead set upon a wholly futile course of action by taking me to court in what is essentially a case of politically motivated vexatious legal harassment. I could have taken this seriously and employed the services of a legal practitioner at enormous expense, but if I didn't have £5000 for Mr Grayling then I don't have it for an ambulance chaser either. As to legal aid, there's just too many forms to fill in and I don't have the time - assuming such assistance is even available. 

Y'see for an already well-to-do chap like Grayling, the point of this is to get me to jump through hoops and waste my time and money - in a case where a technical precedent means that any defence is largely futile. Had I bothered to turn up he'd get to watch me lose and suffer a condescending ticking off from a pompous judge who is oblivious to how he and his court is being abused. This is not the first case of its type and it won't be the last until the law is repaired or reformed.

The problem for Mr Grayling, however, is that his shyster lawyers saw him coming. That's what you get when you're a graceless pensioner pushing a petty political vendetta. His lawyers, Lee & Thompson LLP, know the drill and they can't not have done the basic research on who and what I am, ie. a total nobody. The best they can muster is "ex-UKIP candidate" which was nearly twenty years ago.

It takes only a postcode search on Google Streetview to hazard a guess that the occupant of a rented band D property is not going to yield a payday. Somebody is going to have to pay the exorbitant and grossly inflated legal fees and it's not going to be me.

In respect of that, I need to make it clear that I will not part with a single penny - not just because I don't have it and never will, but also because I do not yield to this kind of cynical performance and whatever they take from me they are going to have to take by force. Good luck with that! Presently this consists of a collection of Normandy era plastic model tanks and a collection of 90's death metal CDs. They won't even cover the bailiff fees and somehow I doubt Mr Grayling is interested in the early works of Cannibal Corpse and Napalm Death.

As to my legal obligations as per the judgement, I make no promises that I won't take the piss out of AC Grayling ever again, though his total insignificance probably means I have bigger fish to fry. As far as an apology goes, I will never apologise for taking the mick out of public lunatics - especially leaders of political campaigns. 

Ultimately Grayling was hoping to scalp a "lead campaigner" from the leave side in order to taint the cause by association - hence the attempt to link me to Ukip. As it happens the Brexit blob in London has nothing to do with me and I am very glad of it. The most this will do is clutter up my Twitter notifications for forty eight hours before the mob moves on to the next target. I'm afraid that's all you get for £25,000 in lawyers fees. I'm just not that interesting. As far as political assassinations go, this couldn't be more ridiculous. But what else would you expect from a such a ridiculous, petty little man? And we're still leaving the EU. So there's that.