Sharpe's Opinion

It’s fun to be Guido

Excellent bit of character analysis on our dear friend Mr Fawkes, from the folks at Samizdata.

The thing about Guido is that he doesn’t just believe in liberty in an abstract this-is-the-best-system sort of way, although he certainly does believe that as well; he really loves liberty, his own liberty. His throwaway remark yesterday to the effect that he started his blog “on a whim” captures this quality very well. Tactically, this makes Guido worth about ten ordinary Guidos, because of the ten things he just might do tomorrow morning to make you wish you’d never been born, you just don’t know which one he’ll pick, if any of them. (He might just stay in bed.) Why don’t you know? Because he doesn’t know himself. Oh, he has schemes afoot. “Plots have I laid”, as Richard says at the beginning of Richard III before he acquired his numeral. But just when the knife will go in, just which applecart will be upset, which bandwaggon will have its wheels ripped off, which establishment forehead will disintegrate in the face of an oncoming sniper bullet, you never really know. I would hate to have him as an enemy.

If “smeargate” provides nothing else, at least we may be able to look back to this article and say that this is the moment when the legend of Guido Fawkes’ Blog of Plots, Rumours and Conspiracy became larger than the man Paul Staines.

Many thanks to Anonymong