George Kerevan: Party bloggers point way to exit gate for Labour

Published on Wednesday 15 April 2009 22:01

THE affair of Damian McBride's poisonous (and libellous?) e-mails has now become a "gate" – smeargate. I remember passing the Watergate complex in Washington – scene of the original "gate", the very day in 1972 when president Richard Nixon's ex-CIA plumbers burgled the Democratic National Committee offices in the building.

By comparison, smeargate is small beer. Its importance lies in its signal that the ageing Labour government has become accident-prone – proof it has outlived its political vitality.

In the past 48 hours the Labour spin machine has altered its strategy for containing smeargate. Plan A had been to dismiss Mr McBride's e-mails to Derek Draper as gossip between two private individuals that was never meant to see the light of day – nasty but "we all do it". This was disingenuous, and merely angered the press.

Mr McBride and Mr Draper were planning to form a website called Red Rag that was to spread politically damaging innuendo about the Tory leadership in a manner that would allow Downing Street to deny responsibility. Mr McBride, one of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's closest media advisers since his Treasury days, was briefing Mr Draper on invented stories that could be used to smear not just Tory leader David Cameron and shadow chancellor George Osborne, but Mr Osborne's wife.

With the story rolling on out of control, Downing Street has changed tack. Labour ministers are being sent in droves into broadcasting studios to criticise the McBride smears and – crucially – to change the story by denouncing the entire blogosphere as the enemy of democracy.

Thus Ed Balls, the Westminster education minister and another Brown acolyte from the Treasury, hammered away on Radio 4 yesterday that he, too, had been "smeared", by right-wing blogs such as Guido Fawkes (who first leaked the McBride e-mails).

Mr Balls went on to say: "All of us in politics – in all political parties – need to look ... at the people we employ, the activities they are undertaking, the things they are doing, and we all need to work to raise standards and stamp this out." You get the not so subtle point: the Tories are just as bad; their bloggers are really nasty; we were wrong to reply in kind; so let's all rise above this sordid thing, led by Saint Gordon.

This new line of Labour defence will not work because it is duplicitous as well as being wrong. For the record, I too have been whacked on the Guido Fawkes blog. But I took it as fair comment, and posted a reply which Guido (real name Paul Staines) happily let stand.

The reality is that the influential right-wing bloggers such as Guido and Iain Dale are influential only because they raise issues Labour spin doctors want to hide (eg, ministers and MPs milking their expenses), not because they invent sexual innuendos about their political opponents, like Damian McBride.

Mr Dale is a serious Tory who is always careful to direct readers to bloggers of differing views by way of encouraging debate. Guido is more of an anarchist than a Conservative; his blog treats all politicians with equal disdain. I worry that Guido's cynicism about politicians is bad for democracy, but it certainly fits with the popular zeitgeist.

Guido became the focus of attention from the Brown spin machine after he exposed the then chancellor's use of the Smith Institute (named after the late John Smith) as a vehicle for his campaign to oust Tony Blair and seize the premiership. The Smith Institute is a registered charity and should not be involved in party politics. As a result of Guido's efforts the Charity Commission issued a withering condemnation of the way the Smith Institute was run, leading to the resignation of the director, Brown's old friend Wilf Stevenson. That made Guido enemy Number One in the Brown camp.

For some time, Labour has been organising to dominate the blogosphere in preparation for the upcoming general election. By comparison, the Tory efforts are amateurish. John Prescott has been rescued from political obscurity to front a personal (and rather jolly) blog. Disgraced former spin doctor Derek Draper reappeared last year to set up LabourList. This is a supposedly "independent" website for Labour Party activists – so independent that its launch was attended by Cabinet ministers and Mr Draper was invited to lunch with Mr Brown at Chequers.

Mr Draper also planned the notorious Red Rag website, for which Mr McBride supplied the invented gossip.

Meanwhile, Labour-influenced attack blogs have suddenly appeared in Scotland and Wales. One is called A Leaky Chanter (as in taking the wind out of the SNP's pipes). It is more juvenile than offensive, but it conforms to the strategy of spreading gossip and innuendo rather than engaging in serious debate, eg, "14,000 bill for Alex Salmond's phantom home", "Salmond in Monaco tax haven row", etc. I do hope Jim Murphy, the Scottish Secretary, will take the earliest opportunity to dismiss A Leaky Chanter in the same vein as Ed Balls, ie: "We all need to work to raise standards and stamp this out."

Some of my fellow Nationalists can also be juvenile and offensive in their blogs, and no-one should condone that. The difference is, like paranoid Richard Nixon in 1972, it is the government machine that, with the backing of civil servants such as Mr McBride, is deploying the political black arts against its opponents. That is a bigger threat to democracy than Guido Fawkes and his like will ever be.

This is the same Labour government that has ordered internet service providers to log and store for state perusal every e-mail you send or website you visit.

Not all the dirty tricks that emanated from the Nixon White House were thought up by Nixon himself. But his paranoia created the dark political culture that led his acolytes to burgle the Watergate building and so destroy his presidency. Is history repeating itself?