The site Boris Johnson called the dung on the rosebush of politics was the first to report on Corbyn’s seder dinner with Jewdas

When Guido Fawkes, the online scandal sheet, celebrated its 10th anniversary at a swanky cocktail party and dinner in Westminster four years ago, the prime minister sent a video message apologising for being unable to attend, and half the cabinet were on the guest list.

The website has an unapologetically two-faced approach to the establishment it claims to disdain. It is comfortably embedded in its fleshpots while shovelling steaming piles of ordure on its members.

This week, Guido was first to report on Jeremy Corbyn’s seder dinner with the left-wing Jewish group Jewdas. The site’s detractors accuse it of misrepresenting left-wing Jewish groups in the row over antisemitism, but as Boris Johnson, then London mayor, put it at that 10th anniversary party, Guido has long been the dung on the rosebush of politics.

Once, in the early days back in 2004 when the website, a kind of knock-off of the pioneering Popbitch gossip site, had barely 100 hits a week, the person behind Guido Fawkes was a closely guarded secret. But Paul Staines, now in his early 50s, has become familiar in TV studios and last year he claimed nearly a million hits a week on the various Guido sites.

Staines, a former Hong Kong trader, is now editor-in-chief of an outfit with a seven-section website covering tech and media as well as politics.

He swaggers along what ought to be the tricky line between feeding off politicians and biting them, often with a drink in hand. Five years ago he told the Guardian: “I still hate politicians. My contempt for them is undiminished.” The politicians know this, but they appear to nervous of crossing him. “We cringe and simper around Guido,” Johnson said at the anniversary celebration, “in the pathetic delusion that we may thereby encourage him to be merciful to us.”

Guido’s originator does not hate all politicians equally. He is a committed Brexiter: remainers get a particular beating on the Euro Guido pages, where their referendum predictions are vigilantly policed (the same treatment is not applied to Brexit promises). And though Staines insists anything stupid or hypocritical is fair game, he appears to find politicians on the left disproportionately worthy of his opprobrium.

But then it is no secret that his politics are right wing, free market, Thatcherite. At university in Hull in the 1980s he was a member of the Federation of Conservative Students, an organisation so right-wing that it was disbanded by Mrs Thatcher. “I never wore a ‘Hang Mandela’ badge, but I hung out with people who did …” he once said. Later he worked for close Thatcher fixers like David Hart, and he reminisces about Africa and AK-47s like a character from late LeCarre.

His breakthrough was to see early on just how the alcohol-fuelled gossip and backbiting of Westminster that makes and breaks individual careers could be translated to, and magnified by, the digital blogosphere.

He recognised how the world of the political gang, of in and out, of foolishness and deceit and political manipulation and retribution could have been purposely designed to provide rolling content for the voracious appetite of a news website.

What he created was a cross between a comic and a propaganda machine. Its common denominator is to belittle politicians, and anyone else (currently the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr for her award-winning expose on Cambridge Analytica) with whom he disagrees.

The website is no stranger to the law courts, and Staines has boasted that he likes a good vendetta. But from time to time the procession of gossip, recycled tweets and leaks from the special advisers and bag carriers who provide the daily bread and butter for the site is interrupted with a serious story.

Staines claims the scalp of the former Lib Dem MP for Portsmouth, Michael Hancock, who stood down after it emerged that he had had an inappropriate relationship with a constituent. The site also demolished the career of Damian McBride, who it discovered was planning to smear senior Tories, and had a leading part in the destruction of Chris Huhne, another LibDem MP, over the speeding offence that ultimately forced his resignation and ended his marriage.

The website sets stories running. It rarely does the hard slog of hunting them down. For example, it heard well sourced reports about bullying by MPs of staff, but it appears never to have tried to build up the kind of case that could prevent injustices being perpetuated.

Instead it chucks a rock of innuendo into the pool and moves on, always hungry for a new way of entertaining its readers, while confirming their prejudices. Staines might one day be a footnote in the history of democracy, but his purpose has never been to promote its long-term health.



• This article was corrected on 7, 9 and 11 April 2018. Chris Huhne was involved in a speeding offence, not a drink-driving one, as stated in an earlier version. That version also mistakenly said a Guido Fawkes contributor belonged to the Westminster lobby. A subsequent revision named the contributor as Alex Wickham and wrongly described him as a member of the press gallery.

