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The McBride affair has therefore turned an already Herculean challenge for the Chancellor into an outright political nightmare: as the email scandal continues to rage, Mr Darling is under stupendous pressure to get the government on to the front foot again. Even in benign economic conditions that would be a difficult task. Now it looks next to impossible.
The emails between Damian McBride, one of the PM’s closest aides before his enforced resignation on Saturday, and Derek Draper, a Labour blogger, mark a new low in mainstream political culture in this country. This uniquely ugly episode has nothing to do with the role of special advisers or the daily rough-and-tumble of ‘spin’. What has been disclosed is nothing less than a systematic dirty tricks operation, orchestrated in Number 10 itself, with the intention of smearing senior Tories and spreading lies about their medical histories, the mental health of their spouses, and their sexual proclivities. Mr McBride, who earned a six-figure salary paid for by the taxpayer, sent his vile ideas to Mr Draper from an official government email address. The venom was pouring forth from the very heart of Downing Street.
For once, comparisons with Watergate are apt: the dirty tricks — or ‘rat-f***ing’ as it was known in the Nixon era — can be traced back to the inner sanctum of government. ‘Everyone is involved,’ Deep Throat told the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward. Naturally, Number 10’s principal objective this week has been to convince the media and the public that this was an aberration, the unilateral activity of a rogue agent who has since left his post. In his letter on Monday to Sir Gus O’Donnell, the head of the civil service, Gordon Brown declared that, ‘I am assured that no minister and no political adviser other than the person involved had any knowledge of or involvement in these private emails that are the subject of current discussion.’ But that sentence seems to have been very carefully worded. It does not exclude the possibility that ministers or other senior aides knew about the smear operation in general, if not the specific emails between McBride and Draper.
More to the point, the organised smearing of senior Tories matches a long-standing pattern of behaviour in the PM’s camp: for years, senior Labour figures who have dared to stand up to him or to position themselves as potential rivals have experienced the full force of the Brown attack machine, ending up as road-kill on Whitehall after they have been smashed down by the tartan juggernaut. The most compelling objections to Mr McBride’s conduct have come not from the Conservatives — who are privately delighted by the disgrace of one of the PM’s closest allies — but from Charles Clarke, Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers and other past Labour casualties of Brownite brutality. They, and many others, can attest that for years this vicious culture of personal attack has been nurtured and given tacit authorisation by Brown himself.
On Tuesday’s Newsnight, Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, and a former adviser to Mr Brown, denied the PM’s involvement, tacit or otherwise, declaring that ‘it’s not the Gordon I know’. This suggests that Mr Miliband doesn’t know his boss that well. He further suggested that it was time ‘to draw a line under this, and say “let’s get back to the issues that people really care about”’. Was the minister deliberately trying to sound detached from reality — or does it just come naturally? What the voters are indeed wondering is why, given the state of the economy, Number 10 has been busying itself with savage personal attacks on senior Tories and their families.
What will Mr Darling announce on Wednesday? The Chancellor knows his Conservative opponents are no more keen than he is to commit to painful tax and spending decisions ahead of an election. He may therefore do surprisingly little — some tinkering reliefs for small business, a belated ‘scrappage’ allowance to breathe life into the motor trade, a token tax attack on ‘the rich’ and their bonuses — in the vague hope that clearer signals of recovery will allow him to do more in the autumn.
Much firmer action now, particularly to control spending, is urgently needed — but we are not likely to get it from a government with its back so firmly pressed to the wall. The inner wiring of this regime has been laid bare and it is not a pretty sight: desperate men, resorting to desperate measures, with nothing left in the locker than a ready supply of poison and a pathetic pack of lies.
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