A corrective to Rachel Stewart's fantasy

Herewith, a postscript to my item a couple of days ago about Rachel Stewart.

A friend who’s on Twitter (I’m not – God forbid) alerted me to a series of tweets by Stewart striking back at me.

I have no desire to prolong a squabble that risks being characterised as two bald men fighting over a comb (Jorge Luis Borges’ great line about the Falklands War), but what Stewart has written is a complete fiction.

She says that when she asked Oskar Alley, then deputy editor of the Dominion Post, for a column slot, “he immediately sent the email to his retired mate Karl”.

Wrong on at least two counts - in fact, pure cock and bull.

First, a quick search of my emails this morning turned up only a handful from Alley. The most recent was in 2014, well before Stewart appeared on the scene, and none of them related to her – not surprisingly, since no one had heard of her then. They all related to a daily quiz that I provided to the paper in addition to my fortnightly column.

Second, I imagine Alley would be as insulted as I am by the suggestion that we were mates. I’ve never met him, never even spoken to him on the phone, and my few emails from him were notable for the absence of any pleasantries.

Stewart appears to have forgotten that it was she who went public, in a tweet in 2016, with the suggestion that the Dom Post would be better off with her as a columnist than me.

All this makes nonsense of the wounded tone in her tweets yesterday in which she complained of a “private and confidential conversation” with Alley being relayed to me. She went on to say I’ve "had it in for her ever since", but until Wednesday I’d mentioned her only twice – most recently in 2017.

She also made a disparaging remark about gossipy journalists, by implication including me. But then as now, I have almost zero contact with journalists and not the slightest interest in gossip.

Stewart appears to suffer from some sort of martyrdom complex. Consider this post, in which she complained that a review of a documentary film about dairying, in which she featured, attacked the film by attacking her. In fact the review mentioned her only in passing and towards the end.

She then suggested she was subsequently cut from the documentary because the producers were panicked by that one brief mention by an obscure critic, and she went on to pin the blame – without any apparent substantiation – on shadowy trans-gender activists. But the post served the purpose of placing Stewart front and centre, which seems a consistent factor in virtually everything she writes.

Right, now I’ll stop.