As spin seems to be the main topic of the day, let’s repair to the London Evening Standard where an ‘old friend’ of the Ministry has seemingly resurfaced:

Fury as BBC gives money to disgraced Holocaust denier who ‘pestered bereaved families after the 7/7 bombing’

The BBC paid expenses to a disgraced academic who has pestered families bereaved by the 7/7 bombs, claiming the attacks were an intelligence agency plot.

Nicholas Kollerstrom was recompensed by the corporation for his part in Conspiracy Files, a documentary about theories surrounding the terrorist outrage.

He has admitted he phoned the father of one victim to tell him how he believed the man’s daughter’s body had been planted at the site of the Tavistock Square bus bombing.

The victim’s family has described the phone call and subsequent claims posted on a website as ‘very upsetting’.

He has also been accused of pestering the relatives of victims and survivors of 7/7.

The ‘fury’ in this case is that of a couple of people who lost members of their family in the bombings who the Evening Standard seem to have rung up in order to get a comment, which as you might expect turns out to the be the usual ‘how dare they pay this man expenses’.

That it was known that he’d been interviewed for the BBC documentary in question at the time he was outed as Holocaust Denier – in fact Blairwatch and others were accused of outing him in order to try and stir up the kind of shitstorm that the Evening Standard is now quite obviously attempting to engineer – seems rather lost on the Standard, whose fearless team of investigative journalists were otherwise engaged sifting through the contents of Ken Livingstone’s bins while bloggers took on the job of exposing Kollerstrom’s prurient and ahistorical views on the Holocaust.

It remains to be seen quite what tone the BBC’s Conspiracy Files adopts towards Kollerstrom although one would certainly hope to see him and his fellow conspiraloons on the wrong end of a good old-fashioned debunking, but in the context of such a documentary his views on the Holocaust, which were not exposed until after he’d filmed his interview with the BBC, are of limited relevance but for the fact that they tend to support the view that he’s something of a nutball whose opinions should not be taken as being either reliable or grounded in anything that remotely resembles material fact. As such, I think the most that one might reasonably expect from the Beeb is one of those just before the credits type captions that you get on many documentary films, noting the circumstances in which Kollerstrom’s association with University College London came to any end.

That the Beeb paid his travel expenses and probably fed him at some point is neither here nor there.

In short, chalk this one off as yet another bout of faux right-wing outrage against the BBC that, as usual, turns out on closer examination to be entirely lacking in substance.

Fans of the kind of errant hypocrisy that tends to go hand in hand with right-wing media frothing about the BBC might like to note that as yet the Evening Standard have not seen fit to report another recent Kollerstrom-related story, the one in which his prurient writings on Auschwitz were prominently featured on the website of the Iranian government funded broadcaster, Press TV. Not uncoincidentally one of their journalists, Andrew Gilligan, happens to be the presenter of a Question Time style panel show on the same TV station.