Dark days for the son of the manse
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Contributing editor
Emily Hohler Apr 17, 2009
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The PM is "Brown by name and now Brown by colour, collaterally covered in the filth sprayed by his personal muck-spreading operation", says Dominic Lawson in The Independent. The McBride scandal broke on Friday, after private emails sent from No 10's head of strategy and planning, Damian McBride, to Labour blogger Derek Draper fell into the hands of political blogger Paul 'Guido Fawkes' Staines, says Leo McKinstry in the Daily Express. They contained "vile, often libellous rumours" about senior Tories for future publication in a planned pro-Labour blog, to be called Red Rag.
According to No 10, as soon as Brown heard about the emails, he asked McBride to resign. Not true, says Lawson. In fact, it was only later, after senior colleagues put pressure on Brown, that the PM, with "extreme reluctance", dispensed with the services of his disgraced henchman.
Brown's reluctance is unsurprising: he has relied on McBride for years – first at the Treasury and then at No 10, says Rachel Sylvester in The Times. Brown is in "many ways a high-minded politician", but for all the talk of his moral compass, he has always surrounded himself with "attack dogs" who are not afraid to "bite on his behalf". Indeed, it is the PM's reliance on the likes of McBride, and Charlie Whelan before him, that make his "son of the manse" act so repellent, says Peter McKay in the Daily Mail. His claims of ignorance about the emails don't wash; would McBride think "this kind of stuff was appropriate if his master did not"? Almost every elected leader, "surrounded by a hostile press and potential rivals, turns to the dark arts of briefers and ear-whisperers", says Jackie Ashley in The Guardian.
But it's too late for Brown to shrug off McBride as if he hadn't noticed the "portly vulture" sitting on his shoulder for years. The truth is that Brown the "ideologically serious, morally driven statesman has always had a sinister twin, spinning and dealing" – and McBride is "an extension of that other self". So much for Brown's promise to banish spin when he took office, says Steve Richards in The Independent. How ironic that those he hired to protect him were inept enough to leave "fingerprints at the scene of the crime", with the result that the people most damaged were not the smeared victims (usually Labour ministers), but the smearers and their political master.
The "ultimate stupidity" of McBride is that one doesn't need to make up stories about senior Conservatives to cause political damage, says Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph. The Tories' programme for government is "painfully thin" and there is doubtless a "rich seam" to be plundered by dirt-mongers hunting for dodgy expenses claims or personal misdemeanours. Until now it was hard to make a case for voting Tory, but this sorry spectacle is enough to make "even hardened sceptics hold their noses and do it". The worst aspect is that McBride, as chief of government strategy, is supposed to be coming up with ways of helping people through the recession, says Boris Johnson, also in The Daily Telegraph. Instead, at our expense, he is devoting his time to a "load of pathetic and invented smears". The prime minister and his allies "have lost their moral case to govern the country. They must go."
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