Dogwash

Mr Dacre's massive organ reports a murder trial. The headline reads


and the article begins

A BNP supporter - whose terrifying collection of knives included a swastika-embossed dagger - was jailed for life today for slashing a lost Indian man’s throat on Christmas night.

Sheet metal worker David Folley, 35, was convicted of murdering 36 year-old Inderjit Singh - known as ‘Raj’ to friends - in the early hours of Christmas Day 2010 and will serve a minimum of 26 years.

Now Mr Folley is clearly a nasty, violent individual. It seems a fair bet that his seething, obsessive resentment would have found violent, possibly fatal, expression eventually, and the unfortunate Mr Singh seems to have drawn the short straw.

But what is the link with the BNP that is so significant that it is referred to in the headline? And remember that an awful lot of readers of the dead-tree edition of the Mail will see only the headline and possibly the first couple of sentences of the article before moving on to something else; headlines, and first paragraphs, are important.

Ah, here we are,

Police later found a BNP flyer displayed in the defendant’s flat and seized a t-shirt, with the words: ‘F*** off. We’re full,’ depicting a boat called SS Asylum heading for the white cliff of Dover.

Displayed? What does that mean exactly? Sellotaped to the wall? Professionally framed and mounted over the fireplace where decent folk show off the stuffed head of the rhino that great uncle Albert shot in Rhodesia? Lying provocatively on the top of a pile of dirty underpants on the floor by the sofa?

I've had BNP flyers in the house — and Labour flyers for that matter. They come through the door, mostly at election time. I don't keep the document shredder behind the front door so they are generally glanced at and cast aside but not necessarily immediately thrown out. As I type, I can see a copy of TNT magazine and a copy of Wetherspoon News on the shelf. That doesn't make me an alcoholic Australian backpacker, despite what you might think.

Nonetheless, I think we can reasonably infer from the article as a whole that Mr Folley doesn't like immigrants or Darkies very much. I would hazard a guess that there are other groups that he doesn't greatly care for either. He looks like a bit of an equal-opportunity hater to me, to be honest.

I think we can also reasonably assume that he is "sympathetic" to the BNP, certainly to what he perceives the BNP to be anyway. But to refocus the article onto this clearly minor and incidental factor is not only a deliberate smear but a pretty clumsy one too. Look at the comments "below the line". The rabble readers are neither fooled nor impressed.

Yep, there's definitely an election in the offing.