My former colleague Craig Murray posts at some length about Andrew Mackinlay MP including the allegedly shocking FCO libel against him that he frequented Warsaw strip clubs.

This, says Craig, shows the perfidy of how MI6 and the FCO in alliance with New Labour are attacking Andrew Mackinlay for his robust indepentent and anti-war views.

Shocking indeed.

Not.

If you read the Murray-asserted FCO assertion of Andrew Mackinlay’s Warsaw strip-club forays as via Craig’s own site, the text is 100% ambiguous:

I have heard from others that he (Note: viz Craig) has patronised strip clubs in Warsaw (where he encountered Andrew McKinley (sic) MP).

This poorly drafted sentence could be taken as reading as a claim that Craig encountered the MP in ‘strip clubs in Warsaw’.

Or it also – and arguably more plausibly – could mean simply that he encountered him ‘in Warsaw’. 

Craig’s noisy allegation starts to melt away quite briskly?

Scottish spelling bafflement note: if we are all referring to the excellent MP for Thurrock, his name as per the front page of his official website is Andrew MacKinlay. Oddly enough the same website refers to him elsewhere as Andrew Mackinlay, as do the House of Commons website and Hansard. His daughter Sarah who edits the wonderful new magazine Total Politics is described there as ‘Mackinlay’ but her emails appear as ‘MacKinlay’.

Help!