 Marcus Rashford is everything right-wingers hate. He's a talented working-class black man who speaks with force about politics in this country. He has also embarrassed Boris Johnson more than a few times. That meant it was no surprise at all when a spectator and magazine Boris Johnson used to edit prepared a hit job on the footballer. We know this because Rashford tweeted about it at the time. On the 20th of July Rashford tweeted, just heard the spectator are planning to run a story on me tomorrow about how I have benefited commercially in the last 18 months. To clarify I don't need to partner with brands. I partner because I want to progress the work I do off the pitch and most of any fee I would receive contributes to that. Last summer 1.3 million children had access to food support through my relationship with Burberry. Children have a safe place to be after school where they will be fed following the November. Investment vulnerable children have safe places to go this summer holiday and due to my relationship with Macmillan 80,000 children now have a book to call their own. Do I have a larger commercial appeal following the utens? I'm sure but I'm also a Manchester United England international footballer. Why has there always got to be a motive? Why can't we just do the right thing? P.S. I actually enjoy reading bits from the spectator now and again but this is a non-starter have a good night all. From that tweet Fred it was clear that the spectator were planning an article about Marcus Rashford where they were saying the reason he forced these U-turns on Boris Johnson is because he wanted to make more money himself with these brand deals. Didn't sound particularly persuasive. Marcus Rashford got a lot of support for this tweet. Fred it was retweeted 35,000 times. We were then all waiting with baited breath to see what the spectator would come up with the following day. Marcus Rashford said the spectator have informed him this will be printed the next day. It never came so that article vanished. At the time people were suggesting oh is this just that the spectator got cold feet because the backlash on Twitter had been so severe. Had they just succumbed to Marcus Rashford's woke mob? They didn't want to take the hostility that would be directed towards them if they went for Marcus Rashford. That was potentially convincing. We actually have a better explanation now and it's a more entertaining explanation because the mystery of the disappearing Rashford story has now been solved and it turns out the tweet from Rashford was the end result of an elaborate prank played on the right wing zealots. Author of the prank revealed all in a sub-stack post. Danny Graffiti writes, The events I described were born of a familiar cause. I speak of course of the seemingly never-ending search for ways to keep oneself occupied during lockdown. I noticed one evening that the spectator had launched a new enterprise, Woke Leaks, heralded as a regular column by an anonymous whistleblower operating deep within the social justice movement, asking for leaks of classified information about woke culture. Graffiti continues, Woke Leaks was asking for people to send in anonymous examples of woke culture war crimes from workplaces and other settings, so I decided to amuse myself by sending them some fake stories. Surely they wouldn't take this seriously, I amused, as I hammered out frankly ludicrous claims about the great and the good and fought a little more of it. A few weeks later, I was somewhat surprised to receive a reply. The Woke Leaks writer Edward Snowflake, they then pronouns, wanted to know more about the gossip I had. Out of all the bizarre stories I'd claimed to have, the one that interested them related to a certain Marcus Rashford and the talent agency he worked with at the time, Rock Nation. She goes on to say, I'd claimed Marcus Rashford's interest in campaigning to keep free school meals was inspired by his mother being a member of the Communist Party who wanted to nationalize all food. But I'd also said, in the same email, the food poverty campaign was nothing to do with Rashford at all, but was fought up by a bunch of wealthy white liberals at Rock Nation who had opened his eyes to the reality of food poverty. So she sent an email to the spectator saying, this is all because Marcus Rashford's mom is a communist who wants to nationalize food. But also at the same time, Marcus Rashford doesn't actually have any interest in food. This was a campaign which was drawn up by the wealthy white liberals at Rock Nation and Rashford just went along with it. Sounds kind of ridiculous. They bought it and at this point, the prankster includes an email from the writer of the Wokey Leaks section. I'm so sorry this is taking so long to make happen. We've been waiting for Fraser, who's Fraser Nelson, his spectator editor to read and approve. He finally has today and suddenly he's extremely excited. I don't think he had any idea. Now he thinks they might make it a cover and says it might be the best story spectator have or will run all year. Great news, though frustrating it's taken him so long. It also means that we have to go back and double check everything with the lawyers. We're penciling next week. Spectator doesn't really do investigative stuff, so this is all a bit new to them. So if I have any further questions from Fraser, am I okay to ping them over this week? Really excited? I think it will be a real splash. You should be proud. So this writer at the spectator who admits we've never done any investigative stuff. The only time they're actually investing in investigative work is to try and call out a footballer who had to go at the Prime Minister, not to uncover any kind of controversy in the dark echelons of power, but no, it's to try and smear a celebrity, essentially. Better than this reply from the journalist, though, is the quotes from a first draft of the spectator article. This is as they plan to publish it, and it was sent to the prankster, obviously, to get her to read over it, because she was the source of the stories. So in the first draft of this article, the spectator had written, Mercifully, Rock Nation apparently scratched an idea to have Prince Harry lend his support to Rashford by living on free school meals himself for a week. Bobby Sands, eat your heart out. Rock Nation, they say, regularly dictates the issues that their clients campaign on. Apparently, Andy Murray asked the company to help him with a campaign on alternative voting systems, but it was rejected as too dry. Man City midfielder, Kevin De Bruyne, wanted to do a pro-EU protest, but that was too divisive. Another client was allegedly mocked in the office for proposing an anti-literating campaign, and a rising soccer star was keen to do something against the badge of coal, but apparently that wasn't controversial enough. So this was the story that the spectator were planning to publish. Obviously, swallowing whole, all of these ridiculous tales that were told to them, essentially by a prankster. They were so desperate to smear any celebrity that dared intervene in politics that they were willing to swallow any old lie because they have no idea how investigative journalism works. Anyway, as described in the blog, the spectator sat on the story for months, planning to publish it after England came crashing out of the Euros. That was another email from him. And it was following the blowback from Rashford's tweet that for the first time, the prankster was invited to a conference call with Fraser Nelson, the magazine's editor, and Freddie Gray, who is his deputy of that meeting, she writes, I could go into more detail on the call itself, how the emails I had sent were described as proof how they were doing somewhat of a hatchet job rewriting the article during the call, but I think the following exchange speaks for itself. Fraser Nelson. But look, if you actually were a wind-up, I think we would have worked it out by now. And Freddie Gray, who's the deputy, if you are hats off to you, they still haven't got it though. So even though there's been all of this pushback clearly, they've told Marcus Rashford's lawyers, we're going to write this story. Marcus Rashford's lawyers have said none of this is true. They still haven't worked out that they've been fed a tall tale by this particular prankster because then they try and get her in for more meetings. She writes that after that Skype call with the editor and deputy editor, they continue to get in touch, asking me to meet with them in trying to convince me they compared our situation to WikiLeaks. I invested in a burner phone, started calling Snowflake H. The last I heard there were discussions relating to how they could go about presenting Rock Nation with a text from an episode of PPC Comedy Series, The Real McCoy, and asking them for comments. Some people on Twitter were saying, oh, you know, actually maybe this prankster has just caused Marcus Rashford unnecessary stress because she's fed a lie about Marcus Rashford and then the spectator have contacted his lawyers about it. He obviously felt he had to preempt it with his tweet thread to say, the spectator are going to publish this hit job on me, none of it's true. At the same time, it is pretty funny and it does make the spectator look pretty stupid, doesn't it? I mean, they are pretty stupid, Michael. I mean, the whole thing about Kevin De Bruyne, pro-EU, you know, protest, I mean, you read that and it's just kind of, I mean, it's clearly made up. And the thing that you said, it's so on the nose, Michael. With the spectator, we advertise ourselves as this 200-year-old, you know, one of the most respectable, most influential publications, periodicals on the center right in the United Kingdom. We don't do any original reporting. That just sums them up. And if this landed on our desk, obviously immediately, after we'd stopped laughing, we would have emailed the person back and said, please, weigh somebody else's time. However, if you get a story like this, yeah, of course, the first thing you do is you check the legals and you need it to be very robust, because if you say things which aren't true about really wealthy people, Michael, you're screwed, right? You're in really big trouble. There's a part of me that almost wishes they'd run the piece and that, you know, Kevin De Bruyne and Marcus Rashford and Andy Murray just sued them out of existence. I mean, that would have been quite funny. I don't agree with libel law in this country, but that would have been a very funny thing. If it had, you know, wiped the spectator from the face of the earth, that would have been a very positive thing for our media culture in this country. So, yes, it tells us how daft right-wingers can be. It also tells us something quite troubling about, you know, the state of media in this country, that you have some like Fraser Nelson or people at the spectator just being quite open about what we don't really know how to do contentious reporting, which will need a lawyer, you know, and Navarra does it all the time, by the way. And we are tiny compared to the spectator. They have a huge, huge, huge print circulation. Like, I mean, maybe it's changed recently. There's like 70, 80,000 copies a week. And yeah, some of that is they're giving it away to pad the stats to sell advertisers, you know, so basically they can get more advertisers in, but they sell lots of copies and they get lots of traffic. And this should tell you it's crap, right? It's not very good. And actually speaking of the spectator, you know, we talked about Oliver Cam last week. You know, it's a part, this kind of story is actually very similar to what we saw with the Jewish Chronicle, where, you know, the Jewish Chronicle ran out of this piece on Navarra Media. They ran an article, an article we ran. And like you said, Michael, at the time, you thought, oh, God, there's going to be a correction. Have we not gone to somebody? Have we not legal this properly? No, they wrote an article on the basis of two unhinged people's tweets, right? That is the state of the right wing media in this country. The Jewish Chronicle is a right wing publication. It's a community publication, but it's quite clear from the people involved in it that it's a right wing publication. These people have no commitment to truth. These people have no commitment to professional integrity. And yet, and yet, they will be on your TV screens and on the radio and the very highest levels of public discourse in this country. You know, for Christ's sake, Boris Johnson, the prime minister was formerly the editor of the spectator, right? That tells you something quite significant. Andrew Neal, the anchorman of the BBC, is a chairman of the spectator. And this is how they were almost caught out. They're not serious journalists. They're not interested in the truth. And they're not interested in informing people.