Here's how Brown's filth machine was exposed, and the story has the
ring of truth about it.
I have visited Guido Fawkes from time to time only. In future I will
pay it more attention.
xxxxxxxxxx cs
===============================
THE TIMES 17.4.09
Why did so few stand up to the spin machine?
It was being branded a racist that prompted me to expose the vicious
smear operation at the heart of Downing Street
Guido Fawkes
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. [How many times have you
read my attacks on 'lazy journalists' merely rewriting handouts? -
cs] 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 bandwidth. 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
Let's face it - the powers that be are shit scared of a situation in
which they cannot get people to have a quiet chat with editors or
proprietors. And more importantly that people outside the elected
bubble are prepared to make them accountable in public rather than in
party deals and understanding tuts from opposition benches.
Guido has done a great service both in this and in his ceaseless
pressure on the donations for bungs scandal. But in addition the more
unobtrusive geeks who thought up things like Public Whip and Fix my
Street have also been instrumental and I should think that now they
will also get more hits as people find there is information out there
on which they can really judge the effectiveness of their
representatives rather than just having to believe spin in
constituency news-letters and election campaigns.
All this is, in effect, a form of direct democracy and engagement that
can do nothing but good as our parliament has abrogated its
responsibilities for scrutiny and accountability - probably much
better than the threat of undermining our representative system by
holding out for referendums on issues.
The fact that so many on the inside keep rabbeting on about
"corrosive, anti-democratic, party politically motivated" bloggers and
the like shows that they have not really yet grasped that most of us
are simply at the forefront of critical analysis of their policies and
activities. I have long said that the internet is how liberty will
become a real force again - by viral networking and making
information, counter-opinions and discussion available to a
potentially mass audience.
My worry is that when they do realize it rather than responding by
being better and more accountable at their jobs they will try to
silence this uncontrollable criticism by the people whose lives they
impact on daily. To attempt to do so is identical to the heavy handed
response to public protest outside Westminster and similar issues and
will truly mark down whoever tries to silence or control wider public
opinion as wholly self-serving interested in power rather than good
government and policy, and they will, of course, fail - and hopefully
in the process reap the whirlwind!
They have long moaned about the lack of public engagement in politics,
and when it does happen their reaction is to disparage it and threaten
it. They are being shown up for what they are.
xxxxxx j
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