Let’s all give a slow hand-clap to Conservative Alice Terry, who tried to jump on the anti-Corbyn bandwagon with claims of abuse – only for them to turn out to be fake.

At first, it all seemed genuine…

… although those of us with a nose for the facts would have smelled something fishy as our attention was drawn to it by the Guido Fawkes blog. Guido boss Paul Staines writes as ‘Steerpike’ in The Spectator, I’m told, and would therefore be responsible for the lies about me, published yesterday.

Tory vice-chairman and useful idiot Ben Bradley – the man who wanted to vasectomise the poor (and reporters), who wanted to turn water cannons onto “chavs”, and who libelled Jeremy Corbyn and had to make a grovelling and very public apology – lent his dubious endorsement to the story…

… and got the response he deserved:

See, it turns out that Ms Terry’s complaint may not be genuine.

Skwawkbox debunked it so let’s go to that site for clarification:

Ms Terry has helpfully provided screenshots of the abusive messages she has received. They appear to consist of direct messages, rather than tweets – and the accounts sending them smell more than a little… fishy.

Many have mysteriously and more or less simultaneously disappeared from Twitter after remaining long enough to send abusive messages:

Others seemed to share an odd telepathy, sending almost identical messages in spite of them being ‘DMs’ (private messages):

Those that appear to represent actual people show more signs of being obsessed with football, UKIP and, in some cases, Twitter-banned racists – and don’t seem to mention Jeremy Corbyn in their timeline

In spite of the ease of identifying these right-wing affiliations, curiously the Tories have attributed the abuse to ‘Corbyn supporters’.

Any genuinely abusive message is, of course, abhorrent. But – and Ms Terry may not, of course, have known – many of the messages look far more like a propaganda campaign by opportunistically created-then-removed ‘sockpuppet‘ accounts than any ‘abuse by Corbyn-supporters’.

If the offending tweets were Direct Messages, then they came from people who had not only followed Ms Terry – she must have followed them back. So they know each other – even the accounts that seem to have been created solely to abuse her. Doesn’t that seem dodgy?

And it seems the victim of these not-very-leftie abusers is not much of a victim either. Here’s the very lovely leftie Tweeter Aleesha (apologies for the strong language but you can understand why she temporarily lost control of her vocabulary:

Here’s the evidence:

Add it all up and it seems highly suspicious indeed.

Some have suggested that MPs should be a little more careful about who they support. This Writer wouldn’t put it past the MPs concerned – Labour MP Jess Phillips apologised prematurely to Ms Terry, and of course both Mr Bradley and Tory chair Brandon Lewis chipped in – to have their own reasons for trying to smear the left with a false and malicious accusation.

In fact, I wonder if any of them had a hand in it.

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