A Spin Doctor slur too far.

[CatInASuit]

Well, one of the PM's closet aides, Damian McBride has resigned for some very inappropriate emails containing unsubstantiated rumour and innuendo to be used against opposition politicians. As far as Damian McBride was concerned anything was fair game.

This would include illicit affairs by Tory backbenchers, the mental health of the wife of the Shadow Chancellor, the prostitute visits of the Shadow Chancellor and the sexual health of the leader of the Opposition. Yeah, real classy stories.

So, a new era of no spin lasted all of two years, given that Gordon Brown was elected, unopposed though, on a platform of no more spin after the Blair and Campbell years of media control. Chances are Brown knew what was going on, although he will have some plausible deniability, of course.

The question is, should Gordon Brown be made to apologise. I think he should. He has allowed one of the Downing Street staff to consider spreading lies with the sole reason of attacking the oppostion party and not serving the country.

What do you think?

[lust4life]

I find it frightening that this totally conscienceless individual has been advising the head of our government for so long.
The PM must have followed his advice on some subjects in the past because you dont keep someone as an adviser if you're not going to take their views seriously.

Which of his other ideas have slipped under the bar?

And surely he has committed some sort of criminal offence?

G.Brown himself is a walking deadman anyway politically speaking,lets hope he bows out at the next election and retains at least a semblance of dignity.

I'll just make my declarations,I'm a floating voter who votes for the policies not a diehard party political supporter so I have no dog in the electoral fight.

[Stanislaus]

I'm not really interested in an apology from Brown. If he'd approved the planned smears, he needs to resign; if he didn't then getting rid of McBride now covers his responsibility. (By analogy, if I lost my mind and sent out an email from by work account saying that my company's competitors were staffed exclusively by child molestors, I'd expect to get fired. I wouldn't expect my boss to say sorry for something I did.)

What really, really depresses me about this is that the people at the centre of government have clearly given up on any idea that Labour's own policies are good enough to win. Even setting aside the morality of destabilising an opposition politician by smearing his wife's mental health, it's just a pathetic way to get elected - not just attacking your opponents, but attacking their personalities. If you don't believe in your party's policies enough to want to talk about them all the time, why the hell do you work for that party?

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Labour has lost its last vestiges of self-belief.

[tirial]

In the private sector firing the person responsible for the slur doesn't absolve the company of responsibility - the company can still get sued or prosecuted by the victim. Usually an apology covers it, but not always. In this case it looks as though even an apology isn't forthcoming, but you can't exactly sue the government (good luck collecting on your judgement).

What's worrying is how long this has been going on for. He got caught this time, but how many times has he already done something like this before? It casts a shadow of doubt over every action taken while he was acting as "Adviser" - and reflects even more poorly on the people who appointed a person who appears to be morally bankrupt.

If this is how Labour plan to win the next election, it looks as though the leadership have no faith in their own policies.

[CRSP]

What I'm not clear on: were the slurs entirely made up, or were they true/had a hint of truth to them?

[CatInASuit]

What I'm not clear on: were the slurs entirely made up, or were they true/had a hint of truth to them?

Only one of them was considered a possible investigation target, with the very vague possibility it might be true. Whether it was true or not was not the issue, just a consideration.

The others were all to attack the opposition and were unfounded. For Example: spread a false rumour that there were photos of George Osborne (the Shadow Chancellor) from university dressed in ladies underwear with his face blacked up because they would do at that kind of university and people will believe it or, as you have shown above, wonder if there is no smoke without fire.

One of the backbench MPs said to have had an affair at a party conference is considering legal action and has already contacted lawyers over the matter.

If any were true, which is looking exceedingly remote, it was an unintended consequence as all they cared about was attacking the enemies of Gordon Brown.

[tirial]

The origins of the feud surface on youtube:

Staines (Guido Fawkes) vs Derek Draper Pt 1. High points include Draper apparently not knowing that blogs are free to set up, admitting his blog was set up as a result of commitee meetings at Labour HQ and is funded by Labour figures, and written for by Peter Mandelson but of course is independant of the Labour party. He also seems quite surprised that you don't have to be a tory to hate New Labour. Andrew Marr lays into both of them equally.

Draper is probably regretting challenging Staines to produce proof of smears.

[Stanislaus]

What I'm not clear on: were the slurs entirely made up, or were they true/had a hint of truth to them?

One of the backbench MPs said to have had an affair at a party conference is considering legal action and has already contacted lawyers over the matter.

The story behind this allegation (if this source is to be believed ) is actually quite funny:

So far as I’m aware, there’s nothing new or original in any of the stories that McBride was putting up to Draper - what’s in the emails are no more than a bunch of rumours and gossip that have been kicking around in parliamentary circles for month, if not years in some cases. The Dorries story, for example, has been doing the rounds of the lobby hacks and the bagcarrier’s grapevine since last August and has its origins in what would would otherwise have been a mildly amusing misunderstanding in which a Phillips Ladyshave that Dorries, allegedly, left behind after attending a Tory away-day at Latimer House, in June 2008, was misidentified as a vibrator by both hotel staff and staff at CCHQ, to whom it was sent by the hotel in order that it could be restored to its rightful owner.

Unfortunately, another MP who attended the same away-day (according to version of this story that was related to me) also turned out to have been rather forgetful, and allegedly managed to leave behind a rather distinctive pair of personally monogrammed cuff links. These were also returned to the MP in question, who happens to be male and married, via CCHQ.

Once you know those two elements of the backstory, and that the Tory MP who [allegedly] misplaced his cuff links is both male and married, then it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the rest. Office gossip being what it is, two and two inevitably adds up to five and before long a rumour began to circulate around Portcullis House which suggested that the monogrammed cuff links had been found in the same hotel room as Dorries’s personal grooming device.

... at least, as a piece of workplace gossip, the story is quite funny. When senior officials start thinking it'd be a good idea to get it into the papers, not so much. Especially when, by virtue of the small, gossipy world that is Westminster, all the journos no doubt had already decided not to publish it.

[ivan astikov]

This is why I hate politicians in general, and Tories in particular. If Labour were doing such a bad job, the Tories shouldn't even need to be getting up in arms about a member of the opposition's gossipy emails, in order to score political points.

[tirial]

This is why I hate politicians in general, and Tories in particular. If Labour were doing such a bad job, the Tories shouldn't even need to be getting up in arms about a member of the opposition's gossipy emails, in order to score political points.

And if Labour were doing such a good job, they wouldn't need to discuss publishing personal slurs on the opposition. Whichever party does it, slandering the opposition rather than arguing policy is the part of politics I find worthy of utter contempt. In this case it was Labour and they got caught.

By the way are you really genuinely more annoyed that the people slandered aren't taking it lying down, than you are that the slander took place in the first place?

[ivan astikov]

This is why I hate politicians in general, and Tories in particular. If Labour were doing such a bad job, the Tories shouldn't even need to be getting up in arms about a member of the opposition's gossipy emails, in order to score political points.

And if Labour were doing such a good job, they wouldn't need to discuss publishing personal slurs on the opposition. Whichever party does it, slandering the opposition rather than arguing policy is the part of politics I find worthy of utter contempt. In this case it was Labour and they got caught.
By the way are you really genuinely more annoyed that the people slandered aren't taking it lying down, than you are that the slander took place in the first place?

It's only slander if it's said in public isn't it? And who actually brought these slanderous suggestions into the public eye? Labour politicians may have discussed it in private, but it was offended Tories who told the world.

[Stanislaus]

This is why I hate politicians in general, and Tories in particular. If Labour were doing such a bad job, the Tories shouldn't even need to be getting up in arms about a member of the opposition's gossipy emails, in order to score political points.

As far as actually making political points goes, here's the wisdom from political betting :

However much excitement there has been over the past four days it’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves that “Smear-gate”, or whatever you want to call it, has failed to persuade the serious political punters who play the spread markets to pile onto the Tories or to sell Labour seats.

As for the attitudes of those directly involved, and the Tories generally, I imagine that they are both genuinely outraged and glad to see Labour take a kicking in the headlines.

[ivan astikov]

I bet they are, but the reason McBride has lost his position of trust is far different than the reason that top cop recently had to step down.

I don't give a shit what politicians do in their private lives as long as it doesn't directly affect the job they are meant to be doing.

[Petrobey]

Andrew Marr lays into both of them equally.

He seems to have put on a lot of weight recently . . .

[Stanislaus]

It wasn't his private life. As far as he was concerned, he was doing his job. This wasn't just "banter between two mates" as Draper tried to characterise it. It was a concrete plan to set up a new web site (Red Rag) for the explicit purpose of releasing stories which McBride knew to be unsubstantiated gossip, in order to destabilise the Tory leadership.

The Tories are making hay out of this. The leak of the emails was carefully timed - they date from Jan and Staines had been dropping hints about them on his blog well in advance - for a slow news day. The insinuation that Brown knew about this has been carefully made by various Conservative commentators and politicians. But all of this pales into insignificance besides the enormity McBride's scheme - crude, vicious, immoral, pathetic and cowardly. He and Draper deserve everything they get, and to the extent that Labour and Brown knew the kind of person they were employing, so do they.

[CatInASuit]

Not to mention that the new site was registered to the House of Commons under the name "Ollie Cromwell".

This was a deliberate attempt to affect the private lives of politicians and so preventing them from doing a good job.

IMHO, the best comment so far was from Alistair Campbell who described it as "So incompetant".

[Stanislaus]

This is getting silly:

The cabinet secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell, expressed disapproval that Gordon Brown planned to retain his political aide Damian McBride as one of his special advisers when he became prime minister, according to former aides of Tony Blair

O'Donnell, the sources said, had doubts about McBride's suitability that dated back to 2005 when McBride worked as a civil servant in the Treasury.

O'Donnell, who was then permanent secretary to the Treasury, asked for McBride's status to be changed to special adviser because of his involvement in political briefing, a practice that could undermine his neutrality.

Do these people ever listen to themselves? "Anonymous sources today condemned the practice of giving anonymous briefings. Friends of Tony Blair said that Brown's reliance on faceless briefers to attack his opponents made him look weak and cowardly. Asked exactly what made this hatchet job different, the unofficial spokesmen covered their heads and shrank into the shadows, screaming, 'The light, it burns us, preciousss.' (Only kidding, there's no way on God's green earth that a political journalist would even consider asking that question, or outing these sources for the worms they are.)

Actually, that's an overlooked point - McBride had been smearing people in briefings for years, and journalists have been lapping it up. Now his smears are a story - but one any journo could have run any time in the past five years simply by growing a spine. It matters because at least in theory, political journalism is our means of keeping politics honest.