Boris and Cranmer

Peter of ‘The Blog That Peter Wrote’ (@PME2013), fresh from a wonderful group thrashing of our old friend Andrew Gilligoon, has a piece up about the tiresome religious/EU nut Archbishop Cranmer, aka Adrian Hilton.  Hilton, who has a bonnet full of anti-EU bees of such proportions as can be seen from space, was once a Conservative candidate for Slough, until it was pointed out to Michael Howard that he’d written a piece in the Spectator full of dribbling anti-Catholic eurobollocks:

Mr Hilton outlined his view that European integration would lead to a “Catholic Caesar presiding over the [British] Protestant monarch” in an article, headlined Render unto the Pope, published in the Spectator in August 2003.

Even Dracula couldn’t stomach that, and fired him as a candidate.

This being 2003, the editor of the Spectator who published the piece is obviously one Boris Johnson, coincidentally also later sacked by Michael Howard for lying about one of his affairs.  Boris’s quoted defence of Hilton in the inevitable WTF from the Catholic press is entirely in keeping with a man whose anti-Irish traits, in particular, aren’t particularly far from the surface:

Mr Hilton’s supporters include Spectator editor Boris Johnson, who describes him as a “highly talented man who promises to be an exceptional spokesman for Conservative principles”.

He’s also an Enoch Powell fan, inevitably.

Mr. Hilton’s Boris-love was still aflame in 2006, along with some rather familiar sock-puppet/desperate walt business:

Finally, Hilton stood as a Conservative candidate in the local elections in Slough in 2006, without success.  It was also around this time that the Cranmer blog came into being.  One of Cranmer’s first posts praised Boris Johnson’s “Dream of Rome”, but said it needed following up with Adrian Hilton’s “The Principality and Power of Europe”.

Six years on the feeling appears to be as strong as ever, given that Hilton (now at the Mail) has recently written Boris puff-pieces including this one [Warning: Mail Online] showing Boris the way to Number 10.

Now, the world’s full of people Boris has conned into thinking he shares their views so is this a decade-old case of Boris’s appalling judgement of personnel (as Peter points out, Hilton also brings along a homophobia is of the deep, unpleasant US Tea Party variety), or something longer lasting?  Certainly, having tame puffers in the press is a Boris tradition – Gilligan being the obvious other one to follow a route from the Boris era Spectator to Associated Newspapers.  Either way, it’s an interesting one for the pro-Boris but fervently Catholic fraternity at the Telegraph blogs.

P.S. The Guardian piece exposing the scandal was co-written by Matt Tempest, with whom I travelled on the first day of the East London Line.

P.P.S. The whole frantic tenor of Hilton’s anti-EU conspiracy is pretty much what I was on about here and here, which led to Gilligan’s attack on me in the Standard, which led to Alex’s take-down, and to Gilligan’s exposure as a sock-puppeter.  Ah, nostalgia.  Freaks and weirdos from top to bottom and left to right.