Dale's Diary Envy: LOL Fact Check Service

This very morning Mr Dale harrumphed and claimed that his least favourite National Inky diarist, the girly diarist Katherine Bergen of the Sun's Whip column had lifted "at least a third" of her stories today "from the Independent".

Dale is nursing a grudge based on acute diary envy, and who knows what else? Girls can of course piss much higher and much farther than boys. Could be KB beat ID in a pissing contest one time?

In the interests of fair play LOL has wandered into Morrisons and scoped the Whip's content. There are six stories. So at least a third means, er, two. But which two would that be?

Story one. Sir George Young, the privatiser of Railtrack, having a laugh about the West Coast Mainline. Nicked from the Independent? Not guilty. Though similar fare can be found on Young's "on a lighter note' blog (20 May) and indeed in the Birmingham Post (22 May). And all over really. Proper meme.

Story two. Portraits of old queens. Katherine sticks a detail from a pic from Peter Phillips' nuptials and rather agrees with the Torygraph that this Freud effort, with fraud (right) may be the best portrait of her reign".

Story three. Something about Ffion Hague, 14 pints of bitter, and an encounter with David Lloyd-George, the louche former statesman and peerage seller. In The Independent? No, sadly it is not. Another meme lost on the Indy.

Story four. Matt Frei has a book out. This was in The Independent yesterday. And also meme like in 1000 other places, including The Whip today. Coincidence? I rather think so.

Story five. Intrepid M Dame Judi Dench ignoring safety advice and heading straight for the barrio, favella, off piste, whatever. Like you do. Also fails to search up from The Independent.

Story six. Bit of a stocking filler. Something or other about Caroline Flint. And yes, The Indy did have a "You Ask The Questions" piece yesterday. Nothing extraordinary in that. Pretty meme-ish. Zeitgeist as a German scholar like Dale might have it.

For my money: Katherine Bergen 6, Iain Dale 0. Again.

Worse than a drubbing by United.

Here's a post of mine from a year ago linking Dale's former vendetta against Melissa Kite, with his vendetta against Katherine Bergen, and the near certainty according to rightist bloggers than Cameron was about to jump or be pushed.

How prescient. Things have been quite fluid this last year, no?

The first fifteen (count 'em) hits searching for "Sun Whip" on a Google search of Iain's site (which returned 466) are all direct references to The Whip, mostly negative or highly negative.