The Art of the Smear

How to make a defamatory accusation without ever quite saying it.

Simon Edge on GB News.

How does one libel an opponent and get away with it? I’ve lost count of the number of people online who’ve made false accusations against me. Sometimes I’m a fascist, other times a communist. Sometimes I’m a homophobe, other times a degenerate sodomite. Some have branded me a ‘racist’ for supporting Martin Luther King’s ideal of a colour-blind society. White supremacists have denounced me as a traitor for my opposition to racism.

It’s all noise, of course, and best filtered out. These aren’t serious people, and no serious person would believe their smears. However, last week an author called Simon Edge, well-known in gender-critical circles, published a blog post about me that I can only describe as defamatory. He’s very lucky that I’ve no appetite for litigation, but I think it’s worth discussing the nature of his smearing technique because it’s become so common among activists of the more mendacious ilk.

It’s a form of libel by sleight-of-hand. Perhaps we should call it prestidefamation. Here’s how it works. You take a series of unremarkable facts, out-of-context quotations and tenuous associations, arrange them in a suggestive manner, omit any contrary evidence, invite the reader to draw the worst possible conclusion and then congratulate them for drawing it.

Edge has done precisely this. I have a long and well-documented record of opposing fascism and the far right. I’ve written books and articles about it, spoken about it endlessly on television, radio and podcasts. My latest book The End of Woke makes the case against all forms of authoritarianism, and opens with an epigraph explicitly attacking Nazi ideology. Yet Edge has managed to write an article insinuating that I support Nazis. It would be like writing a piece about Oscar Wilde’s robust and unwavering heterosexuality.

Here’s how he did it. Recently, it was announced on X that Oldspeak Books, which bills itself as ‘Britain’s only centre-right bookshop’, has closed its doors. The manager posted a message on social media to explain.

‘Over time, it became increasingly difficult to maintain a welcoming environment due to the constant hostility I experienced. The uncertainty around which customers were genuine, made it hard for me to greet everyone warmly, and my customer service suffered.’

This looked like a clear case of cancel culture to me and, since Oldspeak had been kind enough to stock my books, I reposted her message with a comment to the effect that it was a shame that she had been pressurised into closing her shop. This was, according to Edge, my first foray into the murky world of fascist apologism. Who knew it could be so easy?

But it gets worse. There was another post: a screenshot of an email from someone demanding that the manager take down her flags. I had no idea who this was, or why he should object to flags that I presumed were either St George’s Crosses or Union Jacks. And so I posted the question: ‘What’s it got to do with him?’ The manager of Oldspeak Books replied: ‘It’s the estate agent that marketed the building, Andrew. Don’t you know anything!’ I didn’t know, as it happens. I hadn’t noticed the agent’s logo and details at the base of the email. And it was only later that I learned the flags were indeed Union Jacks but with the phrase ‘Remigration Now’ added to them.

This was enough for Edge to jump to the conclusion that I must support the messaging of flags I had never seen. For the record, I don’t remotely support forcibly removing legal migrants from the UK. But nor do I object to anyone displaying a lawful political slogan on their own property, whether I agree with it or not. Edge could easily have contacted me to learn my opinions on this subject, but my answer would have disrupted his precious narrative.

As a result of this one post, Edge decided to construct a spurious – and frankly deranged – argument that I was aligned with the far right. His article is fairly scattershot. It’s mostly guilt-by-association nonsense, an exercise in score-settling that drags in anyone against whom Edge holds a grudge. He takes a swipe at various feminists who write for ‘UnHerd, The Critic, Spiked and The Spectator’ and who know ‘they’ll get a sympathetic ear from Julia Hartley-Brewer of Talk TV or Josh Howie of GB News’. He cites genuinely far-right figures and tries to connect them to individuals and organisations who have nothing whatsoever to do with them.

Gratuitously, he goes on to name and shame authors whose work has appeared on the shelves at Oldspeak Books. He concedes in the same breath that none of them has any say over who sells their books, which rather raises the question of why he named them at all. The disclaimer does not undo the association; it merely provides cover for making it. It’s a variation on the same trick.

That’s not all. He posts a tweet by Josh Howie – a list of political opinions, nothing more – as putative evidence of wrongthink. He complains about ‘Islamophobia’, by which he means concerns about the more reactionary aspects of Islamic culture, including the oppression of women and gay people. He sneers at those who have written tributes to the late Rod Liddle, approvingly quoting a trans activist who repeated the widespread but asinine claim that he was a ‘wife-beating paedophile’. With all the argumentative fallacies and smear tactics, Edge’s article is a masterclass in how not to structure an argument.

For his pièce de résistance, Edge closes with a direct attack on me. Having cited my question about the man complaining about the flags, this is what he says:

‘The owner of that account is the GC author and former GB News presenter Andrew Doyle (who doesn’t even have the excuse of May stocking his work). No doubt he, like other big-name GCs, will continue to laugh dismissively at the notion that he is part of the far right. But in this instance, he seems very clear which side he’s on.’

So far so fatuous. I am not, as it happens, ‘part of the far right’. Anyone who has cared to read anything I’ve ever written will know this already. But because it is in the nature of unthinking ideologues to go too far, Edge has not yet perfected the skill of plausible deniability. And so directly after his statement about the ‘side’ I’m on, he posts the following image.

Note the sequence. Edge does not explicitly call me a Nazi, presumably because he knows I’d have no choice but to sue. Instead he says that my allegiances are ‘very clear’, and then immediately shows the reader a post with swastikas and symbols of the British Union of Fascists. His screenshot is of a post I had never seen, let alone commented on, and yet it is placed directly beneath the reference to my ‘side’.

This is prestidefamation of the most obnoxious kind. The accusation is made, and it is made by arrangement rather than assertion. That is the trick: the reader supplies the word Edge was careful not to write, and Edge keeps his hands clean. And all because I had replied to a tweet to ask why some busybody was asking for flags to be removed from private property. That is the entire charge sheet.

It is astonishing to see the man who edited and published Graham Linehan’s excellent memoir reduced to this. Edge has become the archetypal online activist: a zealot who spends most of his time roaring away at monsters of his own imagination. He’s like the last drunk in the pub, swinging his arms and shouting ‘come on then, you slags’ while everyone else just shakes their heads in pity.

Still, if the rules of the game mean that we must now throw false accusations at people we happen to dislike, I feel obliged to point out that Edge enjoys nothing more than dressing up as Adolf Hitler and copulating with livestock whenever the moon is full. Oh, and he once appeared on my show on GB News, so by his own rules I’m afraid that makes him fascist-adjacent.

---