Freedom rings no more. Let all those defamed by Andrew Landeryou breathe a sign of relief, as the archives of scurrilous blog Vex News have fallen silent. Visitors to the blog, which for several years was Australia’s pre-eminent source of salacious (and occasionally true) political and media gossip, are greeted with this …

… which makes it look like at some point someone stopped paying the bills to keep the archives up. The number listed is that of web hosting service GoDaddy’s support line

Melbourne Labor-Right identity Landeryou — referred to by enemies, for obvious reasons, as “Slanderyou” — is married to Kimberley Kitching, who ran for Labor preselection in the ultra-safe federal seat of Gellibrand in 2013. By June that year she’d pulled out of the race, but in July Landeryou announced his departure from Vex News, saying the controversial website had cruelled his wife’s chances.

“It horrified me that there were people — including some who loudly profess feminism and gender equality in public forums — who wouldn’t vote for my wife, Kimberley, in a recent preselection because they assumed my views were hers. Some admitted it, quite directly, to her. I think she initially laughed about the preposterous and silly presumption that a highly accomplished woman would outsource her thinking to her husband until she realised they were deadly serious,” he wrote in his farewell editorial.

While Landeryou said at the time the website would be passing onto the stewardship of others, it ceased publication, though the archives were up until last month. Landeryou’s pre-Vex News blog, The Other Cheek, is archived by the National Library through its Pandora service. Vex News, however, doesn’t appear to have been thus preserved.

We tried to contact Landeryou this morning to ask where the site went, but didn’t get a call back.