On the front of two national newspapers last night, Grant Shapps hit Newsnight to deny adding negative info to Wikipedia pages of cabinet rivals — attempting to blame the whole thing on blogger Tim Ireland.
But his denials would carry a lot more weight if:
- he wasn’t already a proven liar
- he hadn’t already admitted editing his Wikipedia page
- his YouTube account hadn’t already been used in an apparent botched attempt to pretend to be a Liberal Democrat during a by-election
The assertion that he was elsewhere when the edits were made would also be much more powerful were it not for his links to sophisticated automation software.
His family company’s Google manipulation kit Traffic Paymaster was designed to illicitly ‘scrape and spin’ content from other websites unaided. And he is still using auto follow/unfollow software on his Twitter account to this day in a bid to generate ‘follow backs’.
Here is a graph of Shapps’ following count for the last three months:
The account unfollows literally hundreds of people per day in chunks:
Is he claiming he did all these by hand? Clearly, automated edits timed to clash with his diary are certainly not beyond the wit of this utter spiv.
One statement on Shapps’ alleged Wikipedia profile page certainly rings true with Scrapbook:
“I’m a floater”.
Grant Shapps this morning
Yes: primed and ready to be flushed by whoever is Tory leader after the next election.
At this rate will he even make it to conference season?