And her blog comments feature was among areas of very serious technical trouble.

Naturally these were to be moderated. She does write provocative, some would say annoying stuff. But when one writes a comment as I have done from time to time there is no indication that it has been received. No receipt or sign of success. And as far as I remember the button was not annotated with “one click is enough” or the like. This alone explains comments being “re-posted 40 times”. Probably someone thought it was working and clicked many times to try to make it work. No harrassment just shoddy web building coming home to roost.

And I also think it is true that whatever we may think about the so called Choice and so called Life positions that Nadine’s Minority Report and the utterly unfounded accusation of a leak against both Ben Goldacre and her committee colleagues would have been risible if it were not on such a very serious issue where feelings do run high.

Yesterday, I think, she posted news that she has become British Computer Society-recognised â€?Princess of the Blogsâ€?? Er, not. She actually, at a stretch, arguably tied for 13th with George Galloway. Lynne Featherstone was 2nd equal. And in this way – not mentioning any of the real winners etc – Nadine Dorries brings these things on herself.

By defending her you have made yourself look as foolish as she has. If she finds it impossible to admit her mistake perhaps YOU would like to publicly state that her allegations about Ben Goldacre were clearly mistaken and advise her to do the honourable thing and retract them.

As a friend and admirer of Dorries I would have thought the best thing you could do is to have a word in her ear and try and encourage her to salvage her reputation over this issue. Cyberspace has a long memory.

You say that you respect Nadine’s judgement on this. I just wanted to clarify that you understood what has happened here.

In her Minority Report, Nadine says:

We were greatly concerned to read in the Guardian on 27 October an article clearly aimed at undermining the credibility of Professor John Wyatt, which contained detailed information about Wyatt’s evidence, which was passed by him to the committee after his oral evidence session, and which could only have been passed on to the journalist concerned by a member of the Select Committee.

Which casts serious aspersions on Ben Goldacre as a journalist. In a response to this report, Ben writes:

My article did indeed contain detailed information about Prof Wyatt’s evidence, but I suspect any enquiry set up to examine how I managed to obtain that information would finish its work well before the first set of tea and biscuits arrived, since all the facts came from the written evidence published openly and in full during the select committee hearing.

So it seems to me (and to a few others by the look of it) that Nadine accused Ben of getting hold of information by nefarious means when actually Ben just used information that was in the public domain.

Do you still respect her judgement on this?