James Billingham aka Mac Harrison aka Sprout

This page is linked to from my blog about James Billingham.

Billingham claims that the man behind the successive ‘Sprout’ accounts is one ‘Mac Harrison’, with whom he marches in perfect lockstep. There is not a single thing they disagree on even slightly and that is because ‘Mac Harrison’ doesn’t exist outside Billingham’s imagination. The Sprout’s main purpose seems to be to express the same opinions as Billingham but more aggressively and to take the rap for what Billingham himself is accused of doing. It’s a bit of a bad cop, very bad cop act. Handy to have a sock to behave in a way that wouldn’t reflect well on you, should the wrong people see it.

Someone devoted a lot of time to collecting evidence that Billingham is Harrison/‘Sprout’ and uploading it to this site (archived here in case it ever disappears). I have no idea who the owner of that site is and I don’t think anyone else does but Billingham makes much of the fact that this person lifted pictures of his kids from his wife’s Facebook page. As someone who has had private content lifted from my FB pages and made public, this is not something I would defend. But Billingham’s outrage seems not a little hypocritical of him considering that he uses fake Facebook accounts specifically to infiltrate feminist Facebook circles, proudly posting their content on Twitter, using this hashtag #TERFLEAKS.

Of all the evidence posted on that site, the only bit that Billingham has been keen to highlight – apparently in relief at what he sees as his doxer’s ineptitude – is the one about he and Sprout ‘allegedly’ both going on holiday to Naples during the same week in 2018 after Sprout had publicly declared he was about to holiday there. The site owner has posted a holiday pic of Billingham’s family, claiming – wrongly, it seems – that they are at the Flavian Amphitheatre in Naples. This has resulted in Billingham repeatedly and triumphantly posting that the pic shows he and his family were actually at the Colosseum in Rome – as if Naples and Rome were the other sides of the world from each other and it would be impossible to visit both during the same vacation.  In fact, they are just 140 miles apart.

Curiously, he protests this holiday allegation more frequently using the Sprout account than as himself, suggesting ‘Mac Harrison’ is, for some reason, even more anxious than Billingham himself to prove they’re not the same person, while failing to provide an iota of evidence that he exists as a separate entity in real life. Stranger still is the fact that both Billingham and Sprout clearly struggled with their spelling in their early tweets about it but had both learned how to spell Colosseum for later tweets. Amazing, is it? Anyone would think they’d been separated at birth!

Of all the ‘coincidental similarities’ between Billingham/Oolon and Harrison/Sprout exposed on that site, my favourite is the grammatical error repeatedly made by both ‘Harrison’ and Billingham, which is so deeply ingrained that Billingham can’t stop himself even after it’s been revealed.

Here are a few more examples.

 

 

 

For crying out loud, Billingham: Write out the following one hundred times!

When using the passive voice in the present tense, the object of the verb ‘to be’ takes the present participle – NOT the past simple. The present participle of ‘run’ is ‘run’ NOT ‘ran’.

Or get your imaginary friend, ‘Mac Harrison’ aka Sprout, to do it for you.

By the way, in British English practice is a noun. The verb (that’s a ‘doing’ word) is spelt practise. But at least you’re technically literate.

What was he saying about ineptitude?

These are but a few of the…let’s say ‘linguistic idiosyncrasies’ that suggest Sprout’s real identity is indeed Billingham and there are plenty more where they came from. Both accounts use an identical register; both accounts make the same mistakes.

Enough said.

 

Update:

 

Oh, nice one, Billingham. Hmm…let’s think about this one. Remember you emailed the complaint to Humanists UK as someone who ‘really doesn’t want his membership money spent that way’. Could the reason you didn’t use your sock account to complain be that ‘Mac Harrison’ aka ‘Sprout’ isn’t a member of Humanists UK and you are?

You are truly the gift that keeps on giving.

Yes, to my delight, Billingham really did post that tweet in his reassuringly predictable reaction to this page. If only he’d engaged his brain before posting, he might have thought better than to have publicly admitted having visited the page when his sock had just done so too. A glance at the back end of this site confirmed to me that at the time this public conversation with his sockpuppet took place, he was the ONLY visitor to this page and to the post it is linked from. Unsurprisingly, he uses TOR.

No doubt some of his followers are dumb enough to be taken in and will be imagining him and ‘Mac Harrison’ on their separate devices in their separate locations but we know better, don’t we?

My work here is done.