Conway of Tehran

Where do disgraced Tory politicians go? Neil Hamilton hit the pantomime circuit, starring as the rear end of a horse. After serving half of his sentence in HMP Hollesley Bay for perjury and perverting the course of justice, Jeffery Archer has returned to book-writing. Jonathan Aitken, the disgraced former Cabinet minister who served a prison term for perjury, is heading a policy review for the Centre for Social Justice.

But what of Derek Conway, the latest Tory politician to be ejected from frontline politics? The MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup, who was sacked by David Cameron for employing his son (a full-time student) as a political researcher, has taken a job hosting a book review programme on Press TV, an English-language news channel funded by the Iranian government.

To figure out what kind of outfit Press TV really is, look up the article “The Walls of Auschwitz” by Nicholas Kollerstrom, which is on Press TV’s website. In the article, the author “argues that the alleged massacre of Jewish people by gassing during World War II was scientifically impossible.” In another article, author Alan Hart describes Zionists as “The New Nazis” and argues: “Europeans and Americans could have stopped the original Nazis and prevented the extermination of six million Jews. If Europeans and Americans do not stop the New Nazis, it is likely that their end game will be the extermination of millions of Palestinians.”

But this kind of editorial choice is not reserved for articles alone. In a supposedly neutral news story, Press TV’s website covered Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s performance at this week’s UN conference thus:

“Ahmadinejad is widely criticized by Western backers of Israel for saying that ‘this (Zionist) regime occupying Jerusalem will vanish from the pages of time.’ Having been taken out of context by western nuclear-armed countries and their media outlets, his remarks have been translated into Israel should be ‘wiped off the map'”