Monbiot and Watson used Twitter to give legs to a BBC Newsnight report suggesting that a senior Tory, closely associated with Margaret Thatcher was implicated in the sexual abuse of boys in a North Wales children’s home in the 1980s.

The Conservative grandee, a party treasurer under Baroness Thatcher, was not identified in the Newsnight programme eight days ago.
But yesterday his lawyers accused the current affairs programme of “taking the coward’s way out” by encouraging people to seek out the accused politician’s name on the internet.

….and Monbiot and Watson were only too happy to oblige.

The BBC is now furiously back pedalling but a comment at the Guido Fawkes blog hits the nail right on the head

At the very least, the BBC are guilty of astonishingly shoddy research, and, potentially more likely, of using the tragedy of the victims of abuse in that care home to overshadow the scandal that is enmeshing the BBC over Savile.

But there was something else about the story that gave it a magical appeal to the left wing media and it’s supportive trolls – the link with Margaret Thatcher….

They hate her and their hatred is unceasing. They hate her for the fact that she broke the power of the left and her policies were endorsed by the electorate in three successive elections. That’s why they will grab at anything – Hillsborough, coalminers, paedophiles – to try to extract some kind of delayed revenge. It’s their crazed obsession and, to me, it is good news…..because the left has only two attitudes towards its opponents. Most of the time they simply despise the Heaths, Majors, Camerons and Cleggs who seek compromise and don’t wish to be branded as “nasty”.

But the ones they hate – the Thatchers, the Powells – they hate through fear….and if someone is feared by the left then to me it means they are doing a good job.

Schadenfreude….mmmmm….tastes so good when applied to the BBC…….

Santelli is a financial journalist who previously was a trader at the Chicago Mercantile exchange.

But he’s not a politician.

Surely the only sort of person who can unravel the mess that politicians have created is another politician – and anyway Colin Powell has decreed that nobody who identifies with the Tea Party could possibly win because compromise is the name of the game.

Powell’s sentiment has also been bolstered by the threat of the magisterial David Frum that he will leave the GOP if anyone but Romney or Huntsman is nominated

Still Santelli has one major ace in his hand should he actually make a play for 2012.

UK Guardian left wing AGW guru George Monbiot hates him

the most alarming example of cheap demagoguery you are likely to have seen.