GOSSIP CALUMNY - 5/5 - Hanging Offence

Pictures of phallic shaped potatoes with hats and googly eyes peaking above foamy bath water, were everywhere in the papers the next day. With headlines like 'Ride em Cowboy' , 'Mr Potatoe Head, 'Spud -Pedo,' Much fun was being had at his expense. The rude photos and cartoon caricatures were in the tabloids. In the mainstream opinion columns they were in fully incensed mode, frothing about how reprehensible and abusive his behaviour had been. Questions were beginning to be asked why Henry was still in his job at the Express. Henry, meanwhile, carried on writing his column, and the ongoing but failng campaign to 'expose' Andy Barnes as a swine. Though that was now really a lost cause when placed against his own ever expanding and grosser infamy. Henry finally decided maybe it would be better if he took 'Garden Leave. Hoping he might be able to sit out the furore and at some suitable date return. But then an event pushed that time still further into the distant future.

Andy Barnes, had endured weeks and weeks of negative untrue stories about himself, most of them with their origin in Henry Beddington's column. The press paparazzi hounding him wherever he went. He'd been forced to abandon his own family home, wife and children, in a vain attempt to protect them, or at least diminish the amount of gross intrusion they had to face. He'd gone to ground, hid himself way out in a bothy in the wilds of Scotland somewhere, well out of range of hassle from the Metropolitan press elite. London press journalists rarely venturing beyond the constraints of the M25, it being alien country the further north you went. Once Andy had escaped their unwelcome attention, separated from his family and emotional support, his mental robustness took a serious dive, and in one sour drunken evening he'd attempted to take his life. Leaving a simple note - 'If you want to understand why, look no further than Beddington's fuckin lies.'

That became the banner headline - Beddington's Fuckin Lies. The press were not now in a mood to find him mildly amusing anymore. They were out to roast Henry over his responsibility for pushing Barne's to an attempted suicide. Compiling a list of the stories he had promulgated about Barnes and printed a tick for TRUE or cross for a LIE by each. The majority, given Henry's 'self-brewing', unsurprisingly were found to be the latter. 

Without any further question the Express quickly suspended, then sacked Henry. Promising an investigation from its own feeble ethical standards committee. They went through all the motions of seeming to do the right thing. Neglecting to acknowledge their role, that all these lies that had been listed had once been approved by them, they'd been more than happy to print. Willing to overlook not just a little, but an immense amount of massaging of the facts. Because it sold papers, it kept folk reading online. The many victims and casualties of Henry's column over the decades, recounted their own mental struggles and grievances against Henry and his column, with pleasurable revenge. It turned into a public stoning. Andy Barnes would survive. Though now he needed to be turned into something approaching a living saint. The Sun having signed and paid him in advance for this already, the moment he'd first emerged from a comotose state in hospital.

Without his work, Henry had no scrap of purpose left. No one would let him buy things on account any more. The cafe wouldn't set aside his favourite lunch, his special secluded corner was gone, always booked by some ne'er do well  Worst of all Rebecca up and left. Without a PA, he had to relearn how to type, to deal with the messy complexity of his finances, the alimony, stock market arrangements, mortgages on his three houses, the simple daily expenditure of living in London. It became obvious, once he started to do this for himself, just how much he was living beyond his present means. Funds were fast dwindling. No one was going to offer him any work anytime soon, nor touch him with a barge pole. Not even the scuzzy end of right wing nut jobs, such as a Talk TV host, or that home for has been journos - GB News. Not a whiff of interest from these or any other quarter. 

There was, he realised one channel still available to him. he'd joined the status of those who' as a consequence of verbal slips, racial euphemisms, moral laxity or sexually Neanderthal transgressions., found themselves 'cancelled' from mainstream media  Much as he hated the idea. It cost very little to set up and create a studio. He was going online, launching his own You Tube channel. From where he could champion real free speech, sexual libertarianism, and be the scourge of trendy woke ideology.  He was going to offer the truth according to Henry Beddington, to 'his people', who ever would like and subscribe. Within days of launching, there were millions of them. Companies sought him out proffering sponsorship deals. A new destiny dawned.