Your obsession with Neil Clark is revealing Stephen. If the man is the idiot that you claim why don't you just ignore him? Or is that you're annoyed that he was proved right on Iraq and Yugoslavia and you have been proved wrong? I'll leave readers to draw their own conclusions. I've already drawn mine.

"I've already drawn mine."

Ah do declare, ah just heard a mouse fart. Yessum.

Ah has said time an' again to Mista Stephen, it doan do no good mixin' with no account w'ite trash.

"Your obsession with Neil Clark is revealing Stephen."

Well, it's true that if you search for "Neil Clark" on this blog, you turn up 24 citations.

However, if you search for "Stephen Pollard" on Clark's blog, you get 43.

So who's the obsessive?

And if you search for "Oliver Kamm" on Clark's blog, you get 25 citations...

...but the last one was on 9 March of this year.

Now we know why!

Focusing on Neil Clark certainly beats talking about little things like the Iraq war, doesn't it chaps? It's now officially labelled a 'disaster' by Stephen's beloved Prime Minister, though you wouldn't know it from reading this blog. Stephen posted on Iraq almost every day in the first half of 2003; now he scarcely mentions it. I wonder why....?

Do you really not think the failure of the first British blogging libel action is worthy of attention?

Regardless of what you think about the participants, it was vitally important that Clark lost this case, and lost it as publicly as possible. It is patently ludicrous to turn to the courts if you already have your own platform with which to rebut allegations - quite apart from the chilling effect such behaviour has on people who post on controversial subjects.

But half of me wishes that it had come to court - because if Clark patently couldn't lay a finger on Kamm in the relaxed and controlled environment of his own blog, how the hell did he think he was going to be able to cope in the high-pressure, high-stakes environment of a courtroom?

Particularly given that Kamm's alleged libels clearly counted as fair comment (backed up as they were with supporting evidence, such as the extraordinary superficiality of Clark's review of his book), while Clark posted two months' worth of unsupported drivel about Kamm that any competent lawyer would have used to bludgeon him into the ground. Frankly, he had a lucky escape.

Neil Clark has published a response to Kamm on his blog.
http://neilclark66.blogspot.com/2006/11/very-tawdry-affair.html
It seems that Kamm is the one who's been trying to do the silencing.

"Neil Clark has published a response to Kamm on his blog."

Except that it isn't a response. It is an attempt to change the subject, to move the goalposts.

Clark's post does not address any of the substantive elements of Kamm's view of events. Kamm makes clear that he offered Clark the chance to clarify exactly which Institute he was using as a source. Clark did not do so.

Nor does Clark address his abuse of process.

In fact, Kamm is not trying to "silence" Clark - he is merely ensuring that editors know that Clark's articles are based on a fundamental misrepresentation of sources. That is not the same thing at all. Editors may still choose to use Clark's material - it's just that they will look a little silly if they do.

Assuming the e-mails actually originated from Kamm - and neither you nor Clark provide any supporting evidence - in what way is this trying to "silence" Clark?

It seems to me that George Courtenay is merely trying to bring the editor's attention to the (strongly evidence-backed) fact that Clark's research is sometimes very sloppy and his conclusions are therefore suspect - and given that much of what Clark writes includes personal attacks on named individuals, this is clearly a subject his editors might wish to know about, since they have to carry the can for any fallout.

And since Clark has his blog, he's also free to express whatever opinions he likes. And he's also free to censor - or 'silence' - the comments of others: do you seriously believe that NO-ONE has tried to leave a comment on his blog in the past twelve hours?

Incidentally, the George Courtenay e-mail reproduced on Clark's blog is dated February 20. If you look at the entries in the run-up to that date, you'll notice an obsession with Oliver Kamm that borders on the pathological.

I thnk P-G is quite wise in what he says above. It worries me that too much pre-emptive comment is being made because travesties of justice have occurred before in this country on lesser pretexts than this. Oliver needs all the advantage he can get.

The plot thickens – one of Clark's regular commenters has attempted to 'out' the mysterious 'George Courtenay', with whom Clark is currently obsessed (not unreasonably, to be fair) by naming a specific individual. And Clark is equally culpable, since his insistence on pre-vetting comments means that it can only have appeared with his approval.

But if this allegation is false, surely this is far more directly libellous than anything that Oliver Kamm ever wrote about Clark? After all, complaining that a book review is so sloppy and superficial that there's no evidence that its author has even read the book is one thing, but alleging that someone's out to destroy someone's career is quite another.

(And for various reasons, I don't believe that this person is 'George Courtenay', as I vividly recall his vividly-expressed outrage - in language that's decidedly not work-safe - over a similar incident of someone contacting a blogger's employers in an attempt to get them sacked).

Needless to say, I've alerted the person in question. I doubt he'll be suing for libel, but it will be interesting to see how this plays out. And whatever the accuracy of this particular 'outing', it unarguably 'outs' Clark as the most despicable kind of hypocrite.