Profile: Guido Fawkes

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

In September 2004, Order-Order.com was created and Guido Fawkes began writing anonymously about politicians of parliament. In 2005, Guido’s blog was voted the best in the Political Commentary category of The Backbencher Political Weblog Awards, run by The Guardian. In May 2006, Guido co-authored a book with Iain Dale about instances of sleaze from the Labour Party since taking office in 1997.

He was named at number 36 in the “Top 50 newsmakers of 2006″ in The Independent, for his blog, and his role in the Prescott and his affair scandal in particular.

Several conventions and idiosyncratic traditions have developed over the years on the blog, which may confuse new readers. On Fridays, a caption contest is run usually featuring an amusing political photograph. The caption contest is one of the most popular features on the blog and usually results in a large number of entries in the comments.

The blog does allow anonymous comments. If Guido replies to an anonymous comment, he addresses his retort invariably to “anonymong”. This is a term that has gained some currency with other bloggers despite the pejorative and politically incorrect connotations of the word.

An almost certainly apocryphal story which has legendary status in the comments section of the blog involves Gordon Brown, a rocking horse and a nappy. The story is frequently referenced, despite the absence of any evidence of its truth. Because of the blog’s popularity, the rocking horse story achieved good Google search engine rankings. To date, Guido himself has not endorsed this story.

On Monday mornings, the blog features a Monday Morning Point of View cartoon by “Rich&Mark”, cartoonist Rich Johnston, archived at the RichAndMark website.

Over the weekend of 11-12 April 2009, Guido exposed in his blog that a series of scurrilous e-mails had been prepared by Damian McBride, a political adviser working at 10 Downing Street, gratuitously smearing a number of Conservative MPs which had been sent to Derek Draper for publication on the Red Rag blogsite. This led to the resignation of McBride and expressions of regret to the MPs concerned from the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. Guido provided copies of these emails to the News of the World and The Sunday Times and states that, contrary to the comments of his detractors; he did not receive any payments for this.

If you would like Guido to speak on your campus please contact YBF’s Operations Director, Steven Dent at steven@ybf.org.uk.