Comment Central: Smears - A pattern of behaviour
10 political smear campaigns
I am going to take Damian McBride's resignation statement in which he blames me alone for his demise and hang it above my keyboard. It will go next to the smear of me he authored and e-mailed that led directly to his demise. He took the trouble to read and round up some off-colour and politically incorrect comments left on my blog one Friday afternoon and forward them to my rival Derek Draper for republishing. There on his LabourList blog the cut-and-pasted headline screamed “Racist”. I was tarred as a racist over things not written by me, and that I had not even read. On a live TV debate months later Mr Draper denied three times when challenged that Mr McBride was the true author of that smear. Those three denials allowed me to crucify him in the media this Easter weekend.
If they had not decided to try to put me beyond the pale by unjustly screaming racist at me, a whistleblower with a sense of right and wrong might not have come forward. That whistleblower took great personal risks and took them, despite reports to the contrary, for no reward.
The explosive proof of a smear and spin operation in the heart of Downing Street was met with a universal lack of surprise inside the Westminster village. Everyone who was interested knew it existed. Labour Party rivals to Gordon Brown had long been on the receiving end of poisonous briefings retold by pliant lobby correspondents. The Tories knew of and expected it from Mr McBride. Even so they were aghast at the sheer jaw-dropping viciousness of the unexpurgated smears he planned. Reading them was like the first time you see hardcore pornography - revolting and intriguing at the same time.
Old school mafiosi who executed close rivals reputedly looked after the widow and the family. Mr McBride was worse than the mafia: he would scare Mr Brown's rivals with threats against lovers and wives. Ivan Lewis, a government minister, dared to say something off-message about Mr Brown's leadership late last year; it was not long before he was exposed as a “text messaging sex pest”. The cabal in the Downing Street “war room” tipped off their friends on the Sunday tabloids.
The past few days have been cathartic for political reporters. In newsrooms, journalists swap and recall the terror of the text message tirades that they had received from the man known to all as McPoison. The feature pages are full of anecdotes of poisonous text messages and the brutal dispatches of Labour MPs on behalf of the man who according to Tony Blair wields a “great big clunking fist”. Mr Blair and his allies know better than anyone how Mr Brown's henchmen pound enemies into submission and the names of the owners of the mobile phones used to deliver the anonymous smears.
For the past five years my blog has squarely blamed lobby journalists for failing democracy. Though the fourth estate may not have a formal constitutional role, its task is real. Journalists are to there to “speak truth unto power”, not trade favours for tittle tattle, not report spin as truth. From the start of this era of spin the lobby pack have been willing accomplices. It is hard to name journalists who can hold their heads high. There are only a handful of political reporters who can do so - victims of Mr Brown's war room such as Martin Bright, hounded off the New Statesman for failing to yield sufficiently to Downing Street.
Cowardice and cronyism run right through the lobby, who are fearful of being taken off the teat of prepackaged stories served to them. That is not journalism; that is copytaking. The many stories filed this week that reveal just how horrible Mr Brown's cabal have been are of mere historical interest. They would have been brave if they had been written before McPoison was toppled. They knew - and wrote nothing of it. They knew - and went along with it. Their revelatory articles of the past few days are merely confessions of previous personal professional cowardice.
It is not as if it was a secret. As an outsider, my blog, which is devoured daily by the lobby, has been campaigning for them to get some backbone and stand up to the spin machine. That has at times been met with a ferocious counter-attack. It is all right for you, they would tell me, you don't have to file copy to a deadline or worry about the mortgage. They forget that 50,000 readers every day can be demanding; no sub-editor corrects my copy; no editor proffers counsel; no shadowy backer pays for my bandwith. My advertisers want readers, who in turn want news and gossip.
Alas not a penny has changed hands for these front-page revelations. Worried that I might be the victim of a heavy-handed police inquiry, I took legal advice. In this country, I discovered, if you want to use the defence that you acted in the public interest you cannot, unfortunately, have personally benefited. Charlie Whelan talks darkly of calling in the police; too late to arrest the truth. Did not the Prime Minister himself say, somewhat disingenuously in my view, that there was no place in public life for disseminating these kind of smears? Mr Brown will be the first witness for the defence if any is needed.
In the court of public opinion it is believed that expense fiddling by politicians is rife. Inside the Westminster bubble the political correspondents of the lobby, who drink in the same subsidised bars as the MPs, have been slow to sense the popular anger. It has taken a while for it to dawn on them that this is no longer acceptable. It seems clear from where I am blogging that the cosiness and very closeness has softened the edge of the journalists. Some politicians are guilty of fraud and if it were not that the political class is its own judge, jury and lawmaker they would be explaining themselves in criminal courts. If outside bloggers had more influence on insiders, we would have brought these corrupt arrangements to an end sooner.
I have long felt like the little boy who dared to point at the naked lobby and was laughed at on live TV by Jeremy Paxman for this unworldly naivety. As you read the many reviews of the years of terror and spin by the journalists who were on the receiving end, remember their shameful complicity. I was too far below the salt to join the lobby or to be privy to the favoured briefings from Downing Street. Nevertheless I won't ever let lobby journalists forget that they sleep safe in their beds tonight because a rough blogger was prepared to do violence on Damian McBride.
Paul Staines writes the Guido Fawkes blog www.order-order.com
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