Paul Staines

Paul Staines was the creator of Popular Propaganda, a libertarian marketing enterprise which produced T-shirts and posters aimed at the student market. It was moderately successful and earned him a degree of notoriety in the mid-80s in student politics.

'In the Grip of the Sandinistas', his critical study of a decade of Marxist rule in Nicaragua, was published in 1989. He was a foreign policy analyst with the Committee for a Free Britain before becoming director of the Freedom to Party Campaign and later UK secretary-general of the International Society for Human Rights and editor of 'Human Rights Briefing.' [1]

Paul Staines is a former member of the Committee for a Free Britain, a shadowy organisation which was funded by Sir James Goldsmith, Rupert Murdoch and David Hart. His self described role with the organisation was as "a foreign policy analyst".

Paul Staines went on to become one of the people behind the Acid House craze of the early 90s and was involved with the "Sunrise" and "Back to the Future" M25 orbital raves that led the police on a merry dance. He features in the best selling "Altered State : The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House" written by Matthew Collin, ex-editor of trend bible ID magazine.

"Generation Ecstasy : Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture" by Simon Reynolds describes him as "a Libertarian Conservative whose day job was as assistant to rabid freemarket ideologue David Hart, one of Thatcher's favorite advisors." David Hart[2] masterminded the breaking of the miner's strike and was a favourite courtier of Thatcher. She would ask multi-millionaire Hart to make suggestions for her speeches. Staines as aides-de-camp was reputed to come up with the jokes. Hart and Staines shared a right-wing hippy libertarian outlook.

Staines wrote a seminal chapter in Nicholas Saunder's classic "E for Ecstasy" where he admits to enjoying deliberately mixing politics, dance music and drugs.

He is reputed to have made his later fortune in Asia from investing in technology companies via Bahamas based hedge fund, Mondial Global Investors LLC[3] and the Tokyo based MGI Nihon Seicho Kabushiki Fund. Mondial Global Investors is now defunct.

His current overt public political activity appears to be restricted to working with the Global Growth Organisation,an NGO he founded in 2004. GGO focuses on international trade and development issues advocating "enterprise based solutions to poverty". It campaigns against protectionism and advocates free trade for Africa and the opening up of Western economies to developing world exports unilaterally. GGO has held fund raisers at the Cobden Club in Notting Hill.

A controversial Thunderer column with the headline "You want policy? In cash?" under his byline appeared in The Times (December 20, 2005) attacking think tanks as "wonk whores" for taking covert corporate funding.

Paul Staines has neither denied or confirmed that he is the author of Guido Fawkes' Blog. The popular political gossip site won the 2005 Guardian Political Commentary Blog of the Year Award and has a large following in media and political circles. "Guido Fawkes" co-edited with Iain Dale the bestselling Little Red Book of New Labour Sleaze published in May 2006.

External links

Articles By Staines/ 'Guido Fawkes'

• Paul Staines, "Human Rights and the inevitability of politics", Foreign Policy Perspectives No. 18, Libertarian Alliance, 1990. ISSN 0267-6761 ISBN 1 85637 001 1
• Paul Staines, "Acid House Parties Against the Lifestlye Police and the Safety Nazis", Political Notes No. 55, Libertarian Alliance, 1991. ISSN 0267-7059 ISBN 1 85637 039 9
• Paul Staines, Spare us the party police, The Independent (London), December 15, 1995. (A letter to the editor on behalf of the Freedom to Party Campaign).
• 'Guido Fawkes', "In defence of the blogger", The Guardian, July 10, 2006.

General Articles

• Stephen Cook, People diary, The Guardian (London), July 16, 1987.
• Andrew Moncur, Diary, The Guardian, May 25, 1988.
• Andrew Moncur, Diary, The Guardian, September 23, 1988
• Mondial Global Investors, "Paul Staines Chief Investment Officer", undated accessed January 2005.
• Backbencher, The Guardian (London), February 2, 2005 points out that Guido Fawkes' blog shares a fax number with Paul Staines.
• Christopher Silvester, "Policemen's Helmets off to Guido Fawkes", Independent on Sunday, April 16, 2006. (About the police investigation of 'Cash for Peerages' identifies the anonymous political blogger 'Guido Fawkes' as Paul Staines.)
• Colin Brown, "'Dirty tricks' claim over Tory blogs", Independent, 5 July 2006. (Brown, the biographer of John Prescott, claims that Paul Staines was running a dirty tricks campaign against the Deputy Prime Minister.)
• "Net provocateurs invade Westminster", The Observer, July 9, 2006. (The article warns that "this could well be remembered as a watershed week in media coverage of British politics, when John Prescott's career was brought crashing down by a self-styled internet 'anarcho-capitalist' named Paul Staines - aka 'Guido Fawkes' - is the most in-your-face of Britain's new tribe of political bloggers.")