Monday, April 16, 2012

Declan lodges our defence to Possession Order

This morning Declan lodged our defence to Possession Order with the Clerkenwell and Shoreditch County Court (see last Thursday's blog Court issues accelerated procedure for possession of our flat - we have until Monday to file defence form). Our live-in landlady, Belinda McKenzie, a human rights activist, wrote a Note to the Court so outrageous that even if we had £1m we couldn't let it stand. She had, for example, written off the first £1,000 we paid her in rent under Haringey Council's Housing Benefit scheme. If we didn't have the receipts for the first two months rent we paid her back in August/September 2009, we could well have been looking at prosecution by the Council. And there's a lot more besides:

MI5 whistleblower David Shayler lived in one of the rooms below us for a couple of years, until 2007. As Declan says to the Court (see Additional Information, para. 4), it is unfortunate that Shayler then declared that he was the Messiah, became a squatter, and was subsequently ridiculed in the press for changing his name to Delores Kane - Belinda believes that this sentence defames her because it looks like Shayler went mad under her roof!

The Esquire article below is mentioned in a Guardian article dated 27 March 2012. It is an eye-opener, highlighting the monitoring and surveillance that Shayler had to live with back in 2000, and the contradictory briefings and slanders that were coming out of the British establishment and the media. The author, Dr Eamonn O'Neill, now a lecturer in journalism at Strathclyde University, also intelligently tries to address the motivations of a whistleblower.


BBC PANORAMA: The David Shayler Affair (August 1998)

According to BBC Panorama, Shayler "caused the biggest crisis of official secrecy since the spy catcher affair". In 2002, he was jailed for seven weeks for breaking the Official Secrets Act.