Paul De Laire Staines (born 11 February 1967) is a British-Irish right-wing political blogger who publishes the Guido Fawkes website, which was described by The Daily Telegraph as "one of Britain's leading political blogsites" in 2007. The Sun on Sunday newspaper published a weekly Guido Fawkes column from 2013 to 2016. Born and raised in England, Staines holds British and Irish citizenship.
Staines acquired an interest in politics as a libertarian in the 1980s and did public relations for acid house parties in the early 1990s. He then spent several years in finance, first as a broker then as a trader. In 2001, he sued his fund's financial backer in a commercial dispute. Consequently, Staines declared himself bankrupt in October 2003 after two years of litigation, and legal costs on both sides running into hundreds of thousands of pounds.
In September 2004, Staines started publishing his political blog Guido Fawkes. The blog was named after the Spanish name for Guy Fawkes, an English Catholic involved in the failed Gunpowder Plot to assassinate King James I in 1605.
Early life
Paul De Laire Staines was born in Ealing, London, to Irish-born Mary (née Cronin) and Indian-born Terril De Laire Staines. Staines' father was a Fabian who went to work for John Lewis because it was a cooperative; he is from Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh. Staines' mother is from a working-class background and grew up in Finglas, Dublin.
Staines grew up in Sudbury, London. Raised a Catholic, he attended Salvatorian College Catholic grammar school in Harrow. Subsequently, he read business information studies at the Humberside College of Higher Education, but did not complete the course. While a student there Staines wrote to an organiser of the British National Party proposing joint "direct action" to disrupt the meetings of leftwing students.
He was a member of the Social Democratic Party, sitting on the national executive of its youth wing, and the Conservative Party. Whilst studying at college in Hull in the 1980s, he was a member of the Federation of Conservative Students.
Staines lives in Ireland and was a member of the now defunct Irish political party, the Progressive Democrats.
Politics
Staines is a libertarian who described in a 2000 publication, how he became a libertarian in 1980 after reading Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies. He joined the Young Conservatives whilst at Humberside College of Higher Education, "because they were the only people around who were anti-Socialist or at least anti-Soviet". Having joined the Federation of Conservative Students, he described his politics as "Thatcher on drugs". He relates that at college he was a "right-wing pain in the butt who was more interested in student politics than essays", who went on "to work in the various right-wing pressure groups and think tanks that proliferated in the late eighties". He once said, "I never wore a 'Hang Mandela' badge, but I hung out with people who did".
Staines was active in the Libertarian Alliance. He was pictured at the 1987 Libertarian Alliance conference with a T-shirt supporting UNITA, produced by his Popular Propaganda enterprise (while at college), which produced posters and T-shirts. Staines worked as "foreign policy analyst" for the Committee for a Free Britain, a right-wing Conservative pressure group, alongside David Hart. Staines acted as editor of British Briefing, a long-standing publication by the group that was a "monthly intelligence analysis of the activities of the extreme left" that sought to "smear Labour MPs and left-leaning lawyers and writers".
Staines relates of his work with the committee: I was lobbying at the Council of Europe and at Parliament; I was over in Washington, in Jo'burg, in South America. It was 'let's get guns for the Contras', that sort of stuff. I was enjoying it immensely, I got to go with these guys and fire off AK-47s. I always like to go where the action is, and for that period in the Reagan/Thatcher days, it was great fun, it was all expenses paid and I got to see the world. I used to think that World Briefing was a bit funny. The only scary thing about those publications was the mailing listpeople like George Bushand the fact that Hart would talk to the head of British Intelligence for an hour. I used to think it was us having a laugh, putting some loony right-wing sell in, and that somebody somewhere was taking it seriously. You've got to understand that we had a sense of humour about this.