“Do you really think that it was coincidence that a story about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s true parentage broke just as the Prime Minister was becoming embroiled in the tax avoidance scandal precipitated by the publication of the ‘Panama Papers’?” asks investigative journalist Chas Bender. “It was clearly a diversionary tactic, intended to distract the public from David Cameron’s tax problems and the rest of the fall out from the ‘Panama Papers’. Just look at the way the news media kept on with the Archbishop story, putting at the top of every news bulletin all weekend, despite the fact that it was really of interest to no one other than the Archbishop himself, and virtually ignored the fact that thousands of people were marching on Downing Street demanding Cameron’s resignation.” According to Bender this, and many other ‘news stories’ have, in fact, been invented by a shadowy secret spin doctor working for Conservative Central office, in order to divert the electorate’s attention every time the government finds itself floundering in the face of serious economic or political crises. “This time it didn’t work – they really cocked it up by not making the diversionary story sensational enough,” he explains. “I mean, who cares if his real father turned out to be Winston Churchill’s private secretary? If they’d had any sense they would have had it that Churchill was the one who’d cuckolded his old man. Possibly in the stationary cupboard at the 1955 Downing Street Christmas party. In fact, they should have said that it was shagging the Archbishop’s mother which gave Churchill that massive heart attack which forced him to resign. Now, that might have had a chance of pushing the ‘Panama Papers’ off of the news agenda.”
When the story that the Archbishop of Canterbury had discovered that his real father had been Winston Churchill’s private secretary failed to capture the public’s attention, Bender claims, a new sensational sex scandal had to be sprung onto them instead, in the hope that this would divert their attention from Cameron. “Culture Secretary John Whittingdale had to take one for the team,” he alleges. “But again, they’ve fumbled it. This story that he dated a woman for several months without realising she was a sex worker just doesn’t hold together. Do they really think that we’d believe that he thinks that it’s normal to pay every woman you have sex with for the privilege? The public just aren’t buying this one either – sooner or later the spotlight is going to fall back on Dave’s tax affairs.” These sex scandals are only the latest in a long line of manufactured news stories and events devised as diversionary tactics by the Tories’ secret spin doctor, the journalist contends. “The man’s a PR genius – I mean, who else would have thought of precipitating the whole Tata Steel crisis in order to divert attention from the government’s divisions over the EU referendum,” he declares. “The media might like to present the imminent collapse of the UK’s steel industry, with thousands of workers potentially losing their jobs, as being the result of China dumping huge quantities of cheap steel onto the market, but is has actually been carefully staged. Sure, the government might suffer some short term damage, but the fact is that the people who lose their jobs were never going to vote for them anyway. But you have to look at the bigger picture – while everyone is focused on steel plants closing down, they aren’t watching the cabinet self destruct over Europe!”
Bender claims that for years now, this shadowy figure has been secretly manipulating events in order to best favour the conservative party’s electoral fortunes. Everything from sex scandals to supposedly ‘natural’ disasters have been planned and scheduled by him to deliver maximum positive impact for David Cameron and his cronies. “The Tories secretly recruited him after Tony Blair’s third landslide election victory – they realised that just relying on events eventually moving in their favour, they had to start manipulating them instead,” Bender reveals. “Inspired by the way that Blair’s top spin doctor, Alistair Campbell, manipulated the media to ensure the most favourable coverage for his Prime Minister and the most advantageous, for the government, interpretation of news stories, Tory party grandees decided that their best hope lay in actually creating news stories and events which would favour them.” The financial crisis of 2010 was one of the mastermind’s first successes, Bender claims. “He planned the whole thing in meticulous detail,” the journalist says. “It involved getting hordes of financiers and bankers – who had been craving a Tory government for years – sabotaging the globe’s financial markets so as to destroy the Labour government’s economic credibility and popularity.”
But even this wasn’t entirely successful – despite billions being wiped off of the value of shares and the government having to massively intervene to prevent the collapse of High Street banks, the Labour vote proved surprisingly resilient during the subsequent General Election campaign. “He came up with something far simpler to alienate traditional Labour voters from Gordon Brown,” says Bender. “That woman who Brown was overheard describing as a bigot? She was actually an actress, who was performing from a script prepared by the spin doctor when she made all those comments about immigrants to him during that walkabout. It proved the coup de grace, eroding the Labour vote enough to allow the Tories to scrape into power in coalition with the Lib Dems.” But just who is this evil genius, manipulating world events to sustain David Cameron in power? Rather than a mad genius operating from a subterranean lair, this ‘super spin doctor’ is, according to Bender, a retired university lecturer working from his home, a modest semi-detatched house in Wimbledon. When approached by The Sleaze, Seventy two year old Alan Frond, former senior lecturer in home economics at the University of Staines, denied that he had profited from his work for the Conservative party over the past ten years. “It’s really little more than an intellectual exercise for me. Something to keep my mind active now that I’ve retired,” he told us. “I never get involved in the actual execution of any of these plans. Someone from Central Office phones me up, outlines the current problem and I just come up with some suggestions of how best to divert attention from it – stage magicians call it ‘misdirection’.”
Frond admitted that the failure of any of his schemes so far to misdirect public attention from Cameron’s tax woes was beginning to perplex him. “I’m beginning to think that the only solution might be to start a war,” he muses. “Not that that turned out too well before, when we bombed Libya to divert attention away from those rumours about William Hague’s private life.” Not surprisingly, the mainstream media have poured scorn on Bender’s claims, especially his allegations that the steel industry crisis was devised by a retired lecturer as a piece of political misdirection, pointing out that the UK’s steel plants are privately owned and that the government has no direct control over them. “It’s quite obvious that the government has paid Tata off, using the money that minister’s saved through tax avoidance schemes to compensate them for losing the plants,” he says. “Of course the media are going to try and trash my story – Frond’s work provides them with some of their biggest stories! There’s no way that they want that exposed.”
