>but your formulation suggests that some faceless people at the British Establishment Country Club put down their whiskeys, ordained that mr Murray be bullied and so it went.

Whole departments are set up to work on internal "enemies of the state". Pressure from foreign governments (cough) also points to their undesirables. People above a certain station can trivially tell what is the establishment political winds, short and long term, and which are the "annoying" people that go against them. They also know that furthering the cause against them looks good to their superiors. They can and do build organizational "vendettas" and keep tabs, harass, prosecute them, for years, or even decade.

This goes all the way. Judges and prosecutors making decisions on such cases know who can help their career and what can hurt it, and so on. No explicit coordination needed, though there's a lot of that too - e.g. some established enterpreneur calling their favorite politician and asking them to "do something about that person", special interest groups created ad hoc, and so on. Check a comment by someone called Scott in TFA.

>That’s the stuff of movies and dictatorships, right?

Oh, sweet summer child.

> faceless people at the British Establishment Country Club

That's roughly it.

The British Establishment (leaders of the main parties, intelligence officials, senior judges, senior police) wanted to make an example of him, because of his persistent exposure of their arbitary persecution of Assange. He was charged with contempt of court, for "jigsaw identification" of a witness in another case, that of Alex Salmond. That charge was prosecuted before a single judge, who was very much a member of "The Establishment", and he got 6 months in the slammer.

It's still not clear which remarks he made on his blog that contributed to jigsaw identification. Maybe it was a commenter on his blog that made the troublesome remark. But apparently other, more-mainstream journalists had been much more explicit, and most of the Scottish political class knew who the witness was from those sources, not from Craig's blog.

Basically, he was fitted-up for loudly espousing Scottish independence.

> charged with contempt of court, for "jigsaw identification" of a witness in another case, that of Alex Salmond

Worth mentioning a couple of details about that case.

Alex Salmond was the leader of the Scottish independentist party.

Arrested in 2019 with the accusation of 14 instances of sexual abuses from 8 anonymous women.

The subsequent trial cleared him of all charges.

And there's evidence (as Mr Murray documents, which was obviously his "real" crime) that this was all a fit-up by the current SNP leadership to discredit Mr Salmond so that they would be free from criticism from him about the lack of movement on independence and the SNP pivot from independence to culture war issues.

Also, probably, the reason that the SNP leadership are now pushing for jury-less trials for sexual abuse cases.

If true, it's a staggeringly cynical abuse of the Me Too movement, feminism and the wave of popular support for sexual abuse victims.

I am struck by the fact that you can be publicly disgraced while your accusers remain anonymous, and remain such (and I bet suffer no consequence) even after their accusations against you are proven false or irrelevant.

I don't know the details, but when 8 separate individuals accuse you, all without cause, it's hard to believe it's a coincidence.

It wasn't a coincidence, it was a carefully co-ordinated campaign (as Mr Murray documented).

Yes, but you can strip "UK" away from that. People habitually and casually abuse their power in almost any instance they have it. If this sounds outlandish to you, that's really nice and you probably shouldn't take that naivete away from yourself. It won't improve your life to know otherwise.

> some faceless people at the British Establishment Country Club put down their whiskeys, ordained that mr Murray be bullied and so it went.

I don't mean to go off-topic, but the last few years have shown that this is how power and influence really works in our world. There is no other way to explain (for example) why no clients of Jeff Epstein's brothels have as yet been named and prosecuted. Conveniently, a few have identified themselves through their actions. But they are all free men still, with no signs of any pending comeuppance, or really even an investigation into their involvement.

It's the same as any other large organisation. Someone at the top says "oi, so-and-so has been a real pain lately huh". Someone one level down says "is there anything we can do about so-and-so?". Someone the next level down says "well, let's start a file on so-and-so, see if he's up to anything, no harm in that". And then since UK antiterrorism law is terribly written (or brilliantly written, depending on your perspective) such that essentially everyone with even a vague interest in politics breaks it all the time, and the surveillance state means the proof will be a couple of keystrokes away, once you look for a reason to go after someone you find one.

Probably no-one sat down and designed the system to work like this. But it works well for everyone involved, so...

I wonder if something for just this scenario exists in the archives of the political comedy Yes [Prime] Minister. It feels like there should be.

See also Private Eye. Just because it's funny doesn't mean it's not true.