3 - Darius Guppy Meets Peter Stanford
Darius Guppy
Cape Town
South Africa
Peter Stanford
42 Callcott Road
London NW6
9th July 2013
Mr Stanford.
As you know, I dropped into London recently from South Africa in order to pay you a visit.
You will also be aware of the circumstances surrounding that visit.
To re-cap, nevertheless.
A few weeks ago The Spectator published an article in which I defended Boris Johnson, arguing that Eddie Mair, a member of the British media, by definition lacked the moral authority to attack Mr Johnson, or anyone else for that matter.
You then approached me by means of email to request an interview. In that mail you listed a series of questions to which you hoped – or so you stated - I would respond. These questions seemed sensible enough and I will be publishing your email on the web precisely to show how your subsequent article bore no relation to them whatsoever.
In fact my wife published this list of questions in a comment which she made on The DailyTelegraph’s website precisely to show your dishonesty. I will also be publishing that comment because it has since been removed by The Daily Telegraph, one can only presume to save your - and their - blushes. Censorship, in short.
Sensing that your representations were in bad faith and typical of the sordid profession of which you are a member - an assumption that proved correct – I declined your invitation, although in the politest terms possible. I will also be publishing a copy of my reply to you.
You then chose to write an article that was gratuitously insulting and incompetently researched. You made one error in particular – a snide calumny aimed at my wife.
Having read your article my daughter telephoned me and said: “That journalist was very personal and he was rude about my mother. Punish him” – although in truth I did not need her encouragement.
I therefore obtained your ex-directory address, flew to the United Kingdom and, having surveyed you to ascertain your routine, waited for you to emerge from your house early one morning.
When you did so on the day in question, you will have heard the sound of a car door closing about fifty yards behind you – in itself not a cause for alarm. However, as I approached you and you recognized me, you let out a scream and started to run. I chased you, caught up with you and knocked you to the ground. At this stage your hysterical cries had alerted your neighbours who now poured out onto the street to witness your humiliation.
That humiliation came when, standing over you as you were sprawled on the ground, I emptied a bag of horse manure over your head. I had brought along two witnesses who did not touch you and whose role it was to film these events, just in case in typical journalistic style you decided to allege an attack by ten armed thugs.
I now have over a minute’s footage – to which I will return at the end of this letter – which you would find truly excrutiating were I to publish it.
In it you are seen writhing on the ground, howling in sheer terror, covered in manure. You look truly pathetic. Like someone who has suddenly grown up and been thrown into the world of consequences.
Having done what I set out to do, I returned to my car and drove away through the crowd as you were lifted to your feet.
I had passed your wife who was also standing in the street. Did I attempt to humiliate her as you had attempted to humiliate my wife? No. I acknowledged her with a brief glance and left.
Below is your piece for The Daily Telegraph.
I have reproduced your words in blue font. My comments are indented and in red.
It is a tale that could have been lifted straight from the pages of an early Evelyn Waugh novel about the “gilded youth” of the Twenties. Rich, privileged young man, clever and beautiful in equal and extraordinary measure, the star of his generation at Oxford, grows up and finds adult life a terrible let-down. While his one-time acolytes wise up and rise up to the top of the tree, he slips away embittered and disgraced to a colonial outpost, firing off the occasional diatribe against his former friends and the world’s sudden indifference to his once all‑conquering gifts.
You make patronising assumptions. Foremost, that I have ever had a desire to “rise to the top of the tree” as you put it. Climbing “trees” reveals the way you think, not the way I do. In particular there is your implied assumption that the “tree” of politics or banking or journalism or the like would hold any interest for me whatsoever.
In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The evidence for my claim is clear. As any genuine “friend” would confirm, I have always held such professions in contempt – politics in particular. It is for this reason that I did not involve myself in politics at University and why I have never cast a single vote in any election – European, national or local. I would not waste my time. I have known many politicians from both my parents’ and my own generation. Apart from the Whittakers who were a fine family, I considered them loathsome - unoriginal and profoundly dishonest, guided not remotely by ideals but by what they assume will secure them the highest approval. And if you think I am alone in my assessment of the political class - or the journalistic or financial classes for that matter - then I suggest you get into the real world and talk to the man on the street. These professions, into which the majority of my contemporaries entered, are the most despised in the land.
Politician, banker or journalist – I am glad I avoided the criminal path.
The use of the word “embittered” is a classic example of a journalist projecting onto his subject his own thought processes. It also shows that you clearly did not engage in an iota of genuine investigation before writing your article.
Journalists are in fact the most embittered professional group in society, driven to anger, cynicism – and often drink - by their own inadequacy.
In my own instance it profoundly irritated them that my family and I were not phased by the hardships which faced us. It angered them when they attended my trial and heard only laughter from the Defence’s rooms during breaks while the Prosecution looked glum; that my co-accused and I did not buckle when we were convicted; that we managed a joke as we were led to the cells; that we did not rat on each other but remained loyal and to this day are the best of friends; that we ignored the press’s endless requests for interviews; that we got on with our sentences like men and made friends with our fellow inmates; that I received over a thousand letters of support from the public while incarcerated; that our relationships did not crumble; that we did not betray confidences to the media regarding high profile friends despite offers of fortunes to do so; that we did not accept the press’s self-proclaimed moral authority; that we ignored the pathetic barbs of your profession and thrived when we left jail.
Can you imagine if everyone had a little backbone and behaved like us? If they weren’t frightened of the press but viewed it with the contempt it deserves? What subversion! Where then would the ‘power’ of the press go?
South Africa is not a “colonial outpost.” It is one of the most beautiful and exciting countries in the world. England is in fact the miserable little backwater.
Please point to me a single “diatribe” which I have directed against “former friends.” None exists.
But this is not fiction, it is the story of Darius Guppy, erstwhile BFF of Earl Spencer and Boris Johnson, subsequently a convicted fraudster, and now living in exile with his loyal, long‑suffering wife Patricia in South Africa.
It is conceit to imagine that people who choose not to live in England are thereby “exiled.” Who in their right mind would exchange paradise for England? You clearly are not a well-travelled man.
And the notion that my wife is some downtrodden beta female – proof positive that you did not even pick up the telephone in your ‘research’ - is more amusing than insulting. Come to South Africa, repeat the insult to her face which – thousands of miles away you felt comfortable enough to make in writing a little further on - and we will see which of the two of you is the beta.
It ought by most standards to be a tragedy, but there is something about 48-year-old Guppy that leaves a nasty taste in most mouths.
In a flamboyant rant in this week’s Spectator, for example, Guppy seizes the moral high ground as if by divine right to demonise a BBC presenter who accused his former friend Boris, the Mayor of London, of being “a nasty piece of work”. And this high‑handed trashing extends not just to the journalist in question – Eddie Mair – but to every single journalist and, for good measure, every single politician. All are either “morally bankrupt” or “clowns”, arrogant language that begs the question whether Guppy could do any better, or could even be bothered to try.
I suggest you read my essay again. I did not attack “every single” politician or “every single” journalist.
I have already discussed my view of English politicians and journalists – as professional groups – above, and I suspect the majority would concur with my opinions.
I have also written recently in The New Statesman at greater length about why I consider Britain’s ‘elite’ to be comprised in the main by “clowns” – an opinion with which, once again, I am convinced the man on the street would agree. See: http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/society/2013/03/elite-clowns where I discuss the “elite’s” total failure in particular to foresee the financial crisis or put forward any antidotes that have the remotest prospect of success.
Now, the way to defeat arguments is to advance better counter-arguments, not to insult peoples’ wives. If you have at your disposal such arguments then by all means let us hear them.
Presumably not, since he proceeds to get himself in such a tangle of righteous indignation that he ends up attacking the very man he has set out to defend, lecturing Boris Johnson to “cherish the mother of his children, and the family God has given to him”, and to rethink “a career made by pretending that Ian Hislop is actually funny”.
There is no “tangle” except in your second rate mind. Once again, re-read the essay. I pointed to the three specific criticisms which Mr Mair had leveled against Boris Johnson and argued that, as a member of the British media he did not have the moral authority to do so. Moreover, these criticisms concerned events which seem mere peccadillos next to acts committed by politicians and journalists every day and to which Mr Mair made – conveniently – no allusion. More tellingly, I argued, was Mr Mair’s complete ignoring – as with the rest of his profession – of the one genuine criticism which could be directed against Mr Johnson, namely his treatment of his wife. This was meant less as a rebuke of Boris Johnson than of the press, illustrating quite clearly the hypocrisy of its moral posturing.
Once again, had you done even one second’s actual research you would have realized that my view of the sanctity of the family and my detestation of society’s best attempts to undermine it, are entirely authentic. The evidence is obvious: I have been married to the same woman since I met her in my early twenties.
As a former editor of The Catholic Herald, your failure to get the point is alarming.
There is more than a touch of David Icke-like self-delusion about the outburst. Carried away by his own oratory, Guppy appears utterly oblivious to the hypocrisy of throwing around accusations of moral bankruptcy after you’ve been caught red-handed defrauding Lloyd’s of London out of £1.8 million in a staged jewellery heist. But to Guppy, the law seems to be something that is there only to constrain lesser beings than himself.
I accept that ‘God’ is an unfashionable term these days, although why it should be so for a former editor of The Catholic Herald is mysterious. But I am not the sort of man who seeks the approval of your profession. I am a believer and am comforted by the fact that I am joined by the greatest minds in history as well as the vast majority of humanity in this regard. It is, sadly, typical of your profession that anyone who makes reference to God is referred to as a “David Icke.”
Your argument regarding “hypocrisy” is stupid and – well – hypocritical. I will not list the countless individuals who have had some form of conviction and who opine regularly in the media – Stephen Fry being only one obvious example. If you have a problem with someone’s arguments then you attack the argument – with better counter arguments – not the man, (and certainly not his wife). By your logic we should remove Plato from the school curriculum because Socrates fancied young boys and would today be on some sex offenders register.
Once again, your inability to see the irony in you - a member of the press - accusing anyone of “hypocrisy” is staggering, especially coming from a former editor of The Catholic Herald. I suggest you re-read your Gospels. If you cannot see that were he on earth today Christ would consider the media as the world’s number one collection of pharisees and would far prefer the company of my former cell mates in HMP Brixton to any journalist’s, then you are blind.
Perhaps that explains why he is so relaxed about pleading guilty in the same article to the charge that resurfaced in last week’s now infamous Mair televised interview with Johnson – namely that the pair planned in the early Nineties to take the law into their own hands and give a tabloid journalist “the hiding which most of us secretly admit such people deserve”. Any regrets? “Only that I was never able to finish the job,” Guppy writes.
The journalist in question, Mr Stuart Collier, was employed by The News of the World – in itself not an auspicious beginning. He was looking to smear certain members of my family, typical of the newspaper for which he worked. For that he deserved punishment. Once again, get into the real world Mr Stanford and ask the man on the street what he thinks such individuals merit. He might not, if he thinks that he is being recorded by a journalist, admit it openly, but I can assure you that in private among friends and with his guard down he would agree with me that they deserve a good smack.
And that is precisely what you got for insulting my wife. You had to learn the lesson the hard way. Let us hope that you are not too slow a learner.
Mr Collier is, like you, a piece of scum. And if ever I meet him he will be dealt with severely.
“The tone is very familiar to anyone who knew Darius as a young man,” says a friend of Guppy from Oxford in the mid-Eighties when he was a mainstay of the Bullingdon Club, the upper-class outfit that regarded trashing a restaurant as a rehearsal for high office. “But the high moral thing is new. What I find so sad reading it is the howl of pain that comes through so strongly, that sense of loss.”
“Howls of pain?” You sound truly camp, Mr Stanford. Had you so much as picked up the phone to South Africa you would have learned how wide of the mark is your comment. There is an assumption in your piece that anyone who rejects living in England – and there are plenty of us – feels a sense of “loss” and suffers deep psychological “pain.” I have made the point above: who would trade paradise for England? And if you think that deep down all I really desire is to return to a circuit of tedious Notting Hill cocktail parties then you are simply dreaming.
And who are these “friends“ or “guests” or “contemporaries” – all conveniently anonymous - referred to throughout your piece? As anyone reading your article will appreciate, it is a depressingly unsubtle trick of journalists to attribute anything they want to anonymous “sources” and is in fact the first indication that they have not actually spoken to anyone authentic.
That has always been the press’s big problem when it comes to my family. Not a single genuine “friend” has ever spoken to it precisely because they recognize the press for what it is. You must wake up, Mr Stanford. People are increasingly bored of your profession and its utterly dreary members. As a consequence journalists such as you have no alternative but to fall back on their imaginations. And, bearing in mind that they have no real imaginations, the result is exactly this type of article.
Had he still been in touch with London’s Mayor, Guppy wouldn’t have had to address his remarks to him in print. And he is similarly estranged from Earl Spencer, who sheltered him and his family during his brush with the law, despite Guppy’s bad behaviour in marring Spencer’s first wedding to Victoria Lockwood in 1989.
I have made my position with regard to Boris Johnson clear elsewhere. I have fond memories of certain individuals from my past and would rather keep it that way for fear of disappointment were our paths to cross again. Many of these individuals, including Mr Johnson, attempted to re-establish contact with me upon my release from jail. This is how it should be, although loyalty is not a quality which your profession holds in esteem. But I had no desire to travel the same road as them and, with a light heart, went my separate way. Politics in particular is a sordid business and I am far too honest for it. In fact one of the reasons it has never held any attraction for me is that it would require me to fawn to people just like you, something which any genuine “friend” would confirm is inconceivable.
It is a typical trick of your profession to attempt to drive wedges between friends. It makes you feel better if people behave like you – rats who eat each other. But my family and I are better in every way than people like you and you resent us for knowing it. We have had literally hundreds of offers from media outlets to betray confidences and squeal on high profile friends and acquaintances. I have kept these offers and will no doubt publish them one day to illustrate the nature of your sordid profession. Never have we fallen for such evil tricks and, disappointingly for you, there is no rift between Mr Johnson and me.
As for my falling out with Earl Spencer, he and I, coming from an altogether different class to people like you, do not discuss such issues with your profession - one of the benefits of going to the school of which you and your colleagues are so envious.
“Darius clearly had a severe personality defect,” one of the guests recalled this week. Like everyone else who has known him in the past, she wants to remain anonymous. “You’re never quite sure what sort of revenge Darius might attempt if he feels you have crossed him.”
Another anonymous “guest” this time - and one of those examples where a journalist would have done well to believe his own propaganda. No doubt you should have heeded this imagined “guest’s” advice.
Guppy’s falling out with Spencer is said to have come after he accused his friend of hitting on Mrs Guppy (a former model with a colourful professional past) while her husband was behind bars. Earl Spencer has always denied any impropriety but there ensued a gladiatorial bout of mortal combat on the front lawn that left Spencer with a broken cheekbone and bloody nose.
Just like old times in Oxford, then. Only the world has moved on for everyone but Guppy. He begins his article by insulting Eddie Mair as having “more front than Harrods”. The choice of shop is revealing. Sainsbury’s didn’t feature in Guppy’s childhood. His father, Nicholas, was the latest in a line of monied writers and explorers, one of whom gave his surname to a fish. His mother was the Persian writer and singer Shusha, a descendant of Grand Ayatollahs and a confidante of Bob Dylan, who had left the illiberal politics of her home country for the West and who brought up her two sons as Christians.
The errors of detail in this passage are too many to enumerate here – the result of rapidly trawling Google and cutting and pasting a few juicy anecdotes. My mother did not bring us up as Christians. She was more a Sufi who prayed every day in the Muslim fashion while deeply attracted to many aspects of Christianity and she allowed her children to develop their own religious ideas; it was actually the British Museum, not my ancestor, who attributed a Latin name to the tropical fish which he discovered in the British West Indies and which then came to be known more commonly by the family name in honour of its discoverer; “more front than Harrods” is a cockney expression and has nothing to do with not shopping in Sainsbury’s which, incidentally, is exactly where I shopped in my childhood, and so on and so forth.
But the big mistake you make in this particular section is of course to insult my wife – in an utterly cowardly and carefully worded way (no doubt with a nod from The Telegraph’s legal department).
Does it make you feel big Mr Stanford to attack a woman who lives thousands of miles away from the comfort of your PC? You certainly didn’t look big when you had to face me and were crawling on the street, screaming at my feet. You certainly didn’t look big covered in horse manure as your neighbours watched on in silence.
Anyone reading this letter, even if they have disagreed with every comment I have made up to this point, will accept that here you cross the line.
It is almost as if you have thought to yourself “none of my pathetic barbs will of course get to Darius Guppy, so let’s snipe at his wife.” And it is precisely this sort of reasoning, so common in your profession, which makes British journalists in particular reviled the world over. It is also precisely why my premise in the article which I wrote for The Spectator was correct: journalists like Mr Mair specifically – but as a group in general – simply do not have the moral authority to point the finger.
Now do you get it?
“She called Darius 'Duchey’ and his brother Constantine 'Cous Cous’,” remembers a contemporary who knew the family. “She used to lament, 'What can I do? My Duchey is a criminal and my Cous Cous is a saint.’ Both boys had this slightly exotic mystique, coupled with a remarkable poise and self‑confidence, but Constantine was always more laid back and hippy-ish, more like his mother.”
Let me give you a genuine quotation from my mother: “There is no such thing as a respectable English journalist.”
Darius, on the other hand, a contemporary from Eton recalls, was “initially more strange than starry. He was an outsider and had this insecurity about wanting to fit in”. By the time he arrived at Magdalen College, Oxford, that anxiety appeared to have been buried. “He had a very powerful brain, a phenomenal memory and a very different, very passionately held view of the world,” says another former friend. “Coupled with his astonishing good looks, it gave him a god-like status.” Then she adds: “But that element of madness was always there. Tragically, it all unravelled so quickly afterwards and he ended up in prison. I don’t think he has ever recovered.”
Yet another anonymous “contemporary” and also another anonymous “former friend.”
Surely, Mr Stanford, even for you, there has to come a point at which professional pride kicks in? Are you not ashamed by the drivel you write?
Guppy’s downfall was a self-inflicted wound. His unworldly father had been a “name” in the Lloyd’s of London insurance market, but in the late Eighties, like many others, was ruined when an extraordinary series of claims forced them to cover losses. When the government refused to bail out those left bankrupt, his son decided not to slog his guts out to restore the family fortunes, but to steal the money as an act of revenge. And, unheroically, it was a bungled one. The resulting insurance scam was uncovered and left him with a criminal record.
There has been no “downfall.” And the way in which my family, my co-accused and I have conducted ourselves is a matter of intense pride and satisfaction for us.
Moreover, the only doors which have been closed to me since the events in question are ones I would not wish to go through in the first place. In fact, those events have caused me no problems in business or in any other arena at all. People are not as stupid as your profession would like them to be. They realize that the real reason for the press’s fascination with my case has nothing at all to do with the events themselves to which you refer and everything to do with its own obsessions: class, the Bullingdon, Eton, Oxford, “Royal connections”, social contacts, high profile friends and so on - all this coupled with pique at not being taken seriously by my family or me.
Three telling examples will suffice to illustrate the point.
1) When I moved to Ireland I opened a bank account. Having completed the necessary documentation the branch manager accompanied me to the lift and winked: “We like customers like you. Well done”, he said patting me on the back.
2) When introduced at a certain event to an Irish Government Minister, this man, knowing who I was and that I was a supporter of Irish Nationalism, shook my hand warmly and said: “we’re proud of you for what you did!” – very Irish in style.
3) Upon my conviction a well-known English newspaper editor told my mother: “stealing from Lloyds is a contradiction in terms”, although I wonder whether he would have had the guts to say the same thing publicly.
Your remark about “not slogging (my) guts out” is erroneous. You have no idea whether I slave twenty four hours a day or spend my time sipping pina coladas on a beach somewhere since you did not conduct the slightest research for your article. Nor will I make your job easier for you save to say that whatever I have done it will have involved no small personal risk since I do not believe that reward should come without peril, unlike the banker who profits parasitically from the misery of others and risks nothing or the journalist who makes his snide remarks from the safety of his PC.
The notion that in modern Britain there is the slightest correlation between hard work or talent or risk or virtue – and reward – is a liberal myth for the propagation of which vested interests rely on useful idiots just like you.
While it would not be appropriate for me to brag, the events to which you refer were not “bungled” at all. The operation was entirely successful and the trial Judge’s and Prosecution’s comments are well-known and well-documented. The clearest evidence being that the insurance monies were paid out in full and within six weeks of our gems heist occurring. In fact, it was the total embarrassment of having been outwitted by some youngsters which stung so much and caused the Court such irritation.
Sixteen months elapsed before we were arrested and it is here where I accept that the one genuine “bungle” did occur, namely in our choice of accomplice.
That accomplice, a certain Peter Risdon, was a petty crook and registered police informer. He worked at the time for the Counter Spy shop in South Audley Street and then set up his own espionage company, specializing in surveillance and counter-surveillance. His former business partner has made clear in a sworn statement which is readily accessible on-line that his practices included charging his clients for sweeping their offices for bugs only to plant listening devices in the hope of being able to pick up useful information over which he could blackmail them subsequently. The result of one such bugging episode is of course the recording in which I am heard asking Boris Johnson for the address of The News of the World journalist as referred to above.
How typical of your profession’s hypocrisy that it should profit from this illegally obtained communication while turning its nose up at the illegal interception of messages left on voice mails.
Having participated in our gems heist as a gunman, Risdon was impressed. He invited us after that operation to his offices and suggested a number of extravagant schemes including a repeated robbery. We declined, as always, politely.
He then decided to go it alone, thinking that he was up to the task and attempted to imitate many aspects of our own sting. Briefly, he and a South African accomplice insured a large rough diamond and proceeded to show it round London in order to establish its existence and value for a future insurance claim. His accomplice then deposited it in his own name at a branch of the Midland Bank. Risdon turned up some time later with a false passport in his accomplice’s name with the intention of withdrawing the diamond whereupon the real owner – his accomplice – would turn up sometime thereafter and, shocked at his diamond’s disappearance, claim the insurance monies.
Mr Risdon had invited me to participate in this scheme and I declined, having already achieved what I had set out to achieve with respect to the Lloyds matter and sensing that his own venture was incompetently conceived. I was correct. Risdon was arrested at the first stage – a full year after participating in our heist in New York. He then squealed, angling within minutes of being interviewed under caution by the police for off the record chats where he hoped to trade information for leniency.
Thereafter he knocked on every door in Fleet Street, eventually selling his story to The News of the World.
Since that time he has been been prosecuted by the DTI and disqualified as a company director for defrauding the Revenue and his various business ventures have been typically disastrous – a fine example of karma. He has also been exposed as a blogger for the English Defence League who goes by the pseudonym of “Peter Pedant.”
He has of course come up with a series of excuses to justify his actions but these excuses are so asinine that one actually pities him.
Indeed, many of the journalists who attended our trial and even certain of the police officers who investigated these matters made the same comment to us: “why on earth did you employ such a self-evidently weak and treacherous individual?” – a sentiment with which I concur entirely.
In our defence, however, Risdon had helped us on other, unrelated, matters before we hired him and he begged to be involved in our venture, promising that he was up to the task. It was our error that we ignored our instincts about the man.
All of this, including the informer’s charge sheets, his police interviews, his business partner’s affidavit and a mountain of additional evidence are freely accessible on-line and would have been known to you had you researched your article properly.
On release in 1996, he tried initially to trade on his “posh bad-boy” reputation by penning a racey memoir, Roll the Dice. Next he tried hawking himself as an after-dinner speaker with “a James Bond lifestyle”, but found, to borrow out of context a phrase from his Spectator piece, that “real crimes do not even raise an eyebrow”.
Once again, pure nonsense, and mistakes which you would have avoided with even the most rudimentary investigation. There was no attempt to “trade” on any reputation. A number of family friends had clubbed together to pay a fine which was outstanding and once settled secured my release from custody. The sole purpose of the book was to make the money required to pay back these family friends – which is exactly what occurred. The deal with the publisher was structured by lawyers and the funds to pay the fine as well as the funds received from the publisher were all passed through these lawyers’ accounts to provide an audit trail. I made it a condition of my contract with the publisher that I would betray no confidences and I then turned down all requests for the book to go into paperback edition or to be made into a film, having achieved my objective.
I will donate a six figure sum to a charity of your choice if you can provide one jot of evidence that I have uttered so much as a single syllable in any after dinner speech. This is total fabrication and, as any genuine “friend” would confirm, simply not my style.
So he disappeared, first to Ireland and since 2004 to Cape Town in South Africa, shedding old friends and those legendary good looks en route.
I am sorry, Mr Stanford, but men – real men that is – do not write like this. There is something of the bitter old queen in your words. You had never met me by the time you wrote your piece and your newspaper even had to rely on a photograph years old. While it is not for me to comment on your assertions perhaps you should reflect on the following: although beauty may well be skin deep, ugliness – such as your own – goes straight to the bone.
Today, in spite of his stated dislike of the press (“a métier which is almost single-handedly responsible for the cultural degradation of an entire nation”), he likes to turn his hand to the occasional article in praise of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran or likening bankers to counterfeiters.
The articles you refer to are on-line and speak for themselves.
Here is a selection of links:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/NC08Dj02.html
http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/society/2013/03/elite-clowns
I suggest we allow interested readers to judge for themselves rather than being steered by you.
But only on his own terms. In declining an interview for this article, he was courteous to a fault: “I prefer to write essays – because the contents speak for themselves.” And cannot be challenged or tested.
Thank you for admitting my courtesy, which only amplifies your own discourtesy.
Furthermore, I fail to see how being courteous could ever be “to a fault.”
Please, by all means “challenge” or “test” my arguments – with argument though, not invective. The evidence that you never had any intention of doing so is of course obvious - your own email to me. Had that email been in good faith, and had you had even the remotest desire to “test” my arguments then you would have done so. However, your article bears no relation to so much as one of the questions which you put to me in your email. Who do you think you are kidding? From the outset you never had the slightest intention of “testing” any argument. Your aim was to do a hatchet job. You did no research whatsoever in attempting to do so, you knew that your efforts would not effect me and so you decided, like the coward you are, to insult my wife. That is the simple truth of the matter.
His estrangement from his Establishment friends has coincided with him embracing Islam, and he is now reported to spend a lot of time in Iran. “I am a globe-trotting man of international mystery,” he remarked tantalisingly a few years back. “I am not an arms dealer [but] put it this way, if we were to go to war with Iran, I would be in trouble.”
Fact or fiction? Fiction, say friends unanimously.
Once again, your words tell us far more about your own thought processes than they do mine. I have zero desire to be in with the “Establishment.” Quite the reverse. While it is true that I have had many friends and acquaintances from both within and without its ranks, as a class I have always viewed that “Establishment” as somewhat corrupt and effete and certainly nothing like its predecessors as I understood them from my study of History.
In my youth I far preferred the company of the musicians, artists, writers, scientists, academics and ordinary folk who lived in Chelsea - at a time when it was affordable not only to Goldman Sachs bankers and Russian Mafioso - than to any “Establishment” individual I can think of.
This was a sentiment reinforced in me by my period in jail where I met men who had nothing to their name except for their spirits and who impressed me far more than those in the “Establishment” I had known. It is not so much that my period of incarceration radicalized me, therefore, but more that it confirmed certain long held intuitions.
In fact I am grateful for the events about which you and your colleagues are so obsessed. As one rather more perceptive journalist once hinted, it may even have been a subconscious desire on my part to avoid being part of that “Establishment” which led to those events in the first place. You may reject such a hypothesis but a more objective and balanced analysis might have considered it nevertheless.
Upon emerging from jail, countless invitations were extended to me. I could easily have gone down the Jonathan Aitken “mea culpa” route and nothing would have pleased people more than for the stray sheep to come back to the fold. But I chose to reject those invitations. For me the logic is simple: if you are contemplating doing something which you might regret – though only if discovered – then don’t do it in the first place. Moreover, outside is always the best vantage point for those more interested in seeing things clearly than in “climbing trees.”
The reference to “international man of mystery” was quite clearly made tongue-in-cheek as any objective reading of the article from which you quote would confirm.
As for the “fiction”, as you call it, that is not for me to comment on but for you to determine, though not through quoting yet more anonymous “unanimous friends.”
However, you may care to bear the following in mind: for Muslims and people of faith in general, gambling is prohibited. As a result, bluffing is not in their nature – a truth which certain Western Governments are having to learn the long hard way. A truth too which you have just come to realize very humiliatingly.
“Even at Eton he always had these mad schemes to seize a castle in Iran and raise an army,” another contemporary reflects. “There was a megalomaniac streak in him that made him believe it was possible, but I think all this talk of Evelyn Waugh and gilded youth misses the mark. Darius is more the Great Gatsby, forever trapped by his own insecurity and his past.”
Yet another conveniently anonymous “contemporary.” And what a clichéd, utterly unoriginal ending. You are an embarrassment, Mr Stanford.
In sum, nothing would please you and your colleagues more than to think that my family and I have suffered at the hands of your profession and nothing irritates you more than to realize that the opposite is the case.
Your article was vindictive.
But I too can be vindictive.
You attempted to degrade my wife.
Now I have degraded you.
You have done your disgusting profession – and this really is an achievement – a disservice. Anyone reading can consider this episode a classic example of just why it is that British journalism is so reviled.
The reader should take heed. Do not trust journalists - ever. It is a pity because no doubt there are some who are perfectly decent. But the default position must be one of caution and even hostility. It is for the journalist to prove his bona fides and the assumption must be from the outset that he or she has none. And be robust - if they cross the line with you then don’t be shy but hit back. In particular, be wary of any approach by Mr Peter Stanford.
To return to the video recording of your disgrace to which I referred at the beginning of this letter.
I will be publishing on-line a one or two-second audio snippet of your screams as evidence of your humiliation.
I shall withhold the rest of the video as I have no desire to cause additional hurt to your family since this would be to descend to your level. It is your misfortune that you did not think in similar terms when it came to my wife. Bait me again, however, and even my chivalry may be tested.
It has been my duty and my pleasure to deal with vermin like you, Mr Stanford. I only wish I had more time at my disposal to make it a habit. It is unfortunate that certain of my contemporaries do not have the moral courage or honesty to do likewise.
Next time you are at your keyboard, know that in the verbal and written aggression which your trade has made so commonplace there is violence every bit as harsh as that which I practiced against you. Far more so in fact, since it reverberates throughout the world.
I was polite to you and it was you who chose to attack me first, not vice versa. You picked a fight and a fight is what you got. Never forget that. I urge others who will read this letter to adopt a similarly forthright approach. The bully – and that is what the British media is – understands only one language: force.
Do not cross my path again.
Darius Guppy
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