Poke Derek with a stick
First things first; Derek Draper is a cretin, a loathsome, revolting, humourless lickspittle. that much goes without saying to anyone who has ever followed him. On the other hand, he is not credible and poses no threat to anyone. he is someone to be poked with a stick occasionally, ointed at and laughed at, roused from his intellectual permasleep and kicked in the figurative head.
On the other hand, he is a media bot, and the BBC is a mouthpiece for the Labour party, so he tends to ooze around its media relatively effectively. He may be a virulent sack of cat-vomit, but sometimes that comes across as polish on television (cf. Andrew Neill)
Guido
Guido Fawkes, from the blog http://order-order.com, is not a simpering simpleton, has a good wit about him, and tends towards the freedom of speech angle. As a result, he has not had the time to develop an oily nastiness about him; he appears normal on TV, which can look like someone unprepared.
In normal circumstances against a less towering pillar of puke, Guido would have been the obvious destroyer; in fact he made good points today but appeared considerably more, sort of, normal.
Guido won, but what did he win?
I think Guido won the discussion today clearly, but the question for me was whether it was a discussion ever worth having. Guido had nothing to gain, and Draper, the disgraced idiot in the middle of the first New Labour scandal, had no reputation to lose. The protagonists were so dissimilar, it was like having an eight minute category mistake.
Derek Draper is a party stooge, a Labour ablative, a character designed to be at the vanguard of some theoretical New Labour push to earn mindshare amongst the blogging population. Guido Fawkes blog is nothing of the sort; it’s a free-speech blog not aligned to any party, but where Labour supporters are thin on the ground. As a result, Derek Draper has an incentive to be visible and known, in order to be the vanguard face of the blogging Labourite. it suits his powerful desire for glory, his all-consuming arrogance and his deep need to be valued and regarded by other people.
Let it lie
Arguably, Guido Fawkes has no need for publicity of that sort and in fact cannot benefit from exposure. The blog is the organ, the medium is the message, and the comments from users is the engine force driving the users to return and share group thinking. Arguably, putting the person responsible for it into the public sphere harms the premise on which it is based, and damages the whole proposition.
Nothing can take away the fact that Draper is a bullshit artist whose misdeeds will find him out; he will be involved again in some moronic plot and he will be consigned to the obscurity which leads people to misrepresent their credentials. Until then, he is an unelected troll, a wannabe somebody has-been, and unworthy of the attentions of the order-order blog.
