by Vincent Moss
“LIKE dung-rolling Scarab beetles, you can bet the Tories are squirrelling dirt away on us to use ahead of the next election”, one Labour minister told me this week. The graphic image was his response to the furore over the “smear” emails sent between Gordon Brown’s now departed special advisor Damian McBride and political blogger Derek Draper.
McBride is the first to admit that sending the emails to Draper, a former spin-doctor to Peter Mandelson, was wrong and a huge error of judgement. Downing Street, Labour MPs and ministers have been quick to condemn the lurid emails which consisted largely of unfounded sex slurs against David Cameron, George Osborne and other Tories. But there is a deep uneasiness about the way that Cameron has attempted to exploit the leaks masterminded by right-wing blogger Paul Staines – the man behind the Guido Fawkes website.
“I don’t know what Gordon Brown knew and when he knew it, but what I do know is that he hired these people, he sets the culture”, said a furious Cameron as he desperately tried to implicate the Prime Minister. But Labour MPs are wondering how Cameron “set the culture” at Tory HQ by hiring ex-News of the World editor Andy Coulson as his media chief in 2007. It was Coulson, they point out, who was forced to resign over his newspaper’s covert phone-tapping operation on the mobiles of the Royal Family which saw the paper’s royal editor thrown in jail.
The Conservatives have beetled away to supply pro-Tory papers with the information which ultimately led to the scandals over the housing expenses of Labour ministers, I’m told by a well-placed Tory source. The party also has a well-funded army of eager young staff looking for information – if not exactly smears – to embarrass the PM and Labour MPs. Despite his protestations, some of Cameron’s troops are just as involved in the Machiavellian arts of politics as they ever were. Dirty tricks are not the preserve of any single political party.
Their efforts are bolstered by an array of anti-Government and pro-Tory bloggers only too happy to pedal the unfounded rumour and gossip which Cameron has been so swift to attack. Among them is Staines, whose Guido Fawkes site has regularly hosted comments from posters about Brown that were far more obscene than anything penned by McBride about the Tories.
Those aware of McBride’s abilities realise that Labour has lost one its sharpest strategists and most brilliant minds over his moment of email madness. But his unswerving loyalty to his boss cost him dear. A string of Blairite ministers incorrectly blamed him for briefing negative stories about them. Unfortunately for him, some senior Labour figures – including at least two Cabinet ministers – had decided long ago that McBride was to be a fall guy. It was only the “crime” and the moment of his exit which remained to be determined. Well, now we know.
Vincent Moss is political editor of the Sunday Mirror
