Yet again the Labour Party is paying a heavy price for giving free rein to political attack dogs who have the status of civil servants but whose uncontrollable behaviour is undermining the democratic process. Damian McBride’s crude attempt at smearing both the leader of the Opposition and the shadow chancellor is par for the course in the every day story of the apparatchiks on whom the Prime Minister and his cabinet colleagues have come to rely. But while Gordon Brown is rightly being blamed for having lost control of his politically-driven spin doctors, David Cameron should also be in the frame. He too has some questions to answer.
Why has Cameron abandoned the Conservatives’ long-standing promise to halve the number of special advisers and force them to obey the civil service code of conduct? More to the point, has Cameron found a neat way to keep the Conservatives’ own attack dogs at arms length from Tory Central Office by giving them the freedom to put the boot in via the blogosphere? At the root of the McBride debacle is Labour’s inability to generate political blogs on the left which are anything like as effective as those on the right. When it comes to influencing the news agenda Guido Fawkes (www.order-order.com) – ably assisted by www.iaindale.blogspot.com and www.conservativehome.blogs.com – are making all the running. And there is no doubt that because of their ability to deliver exclusive stories, these blogs are causing Labour immense damage. McBride’s forced resignation is the latest in their lengthening list of political scalps. Derek Draper established his blog – www.LabourList.org– three months ago in a desperate attempt to retaliate. McBride’s inept email smearing Cameron and George Osborne was sent in response to Draper’s urgent call for gossipy stories which were intended to embarrass leading Conservatives and were destined for use on Draper’s new online offshoot, the aptly-named Red Rag blog. Just as in the USA, where the Democrats’ campaign team built up a commanding online presence for Barrack Obama, it is the hunger for power on the part of political activists on the right which has helped to put the Conservatives way out in front in the blogosphere. Political websites are having an increasing influence on the news agenda because they can publish risky stories which established news outlets dare not print or broadcast. But the bloggers know only too well that once the information is out on the internet it is considered to be in the public domain and will almost certainly be followed up by other journalists. Draper acknowledged at a seminar organised last month by the Hansard Society that Labour had a “massive gap” to fill because the Conservatives’ bloggers were dictating the online agenda. Political blogs acted as a catalyst for news about politicians and Labour were missing a trick. He insisted he was not “some lunatic” setting out to be create a name for himself but a Labour activist who was in the “mainstream of the party” and whose site had already attracted comments from cabinet ministers like Peter Mandelson and union leaders such as Derek Simpson of Unite. Unless Labour established a commanding online presence Draper feared the party could lose out. He predicted that in the thirty days of the next general election campaign, there was every likelihood that for “three or four days at least” the news would be dominated by stories which started in the blogosphere. His prediction could hardly have been more prescient: the McBride-Draper tale of intrigue dominated the news for four days, over the entire Easter holiday. In a determined attempt to close down the story Brown sent personal hand-written letters expressing his “great regret” to the Conservatives smeared by McBride. The Prime Minister also asked the Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell to strengthen the code of conduct for special advisers to make it clear that anyone found in future to be involved in the “preparation or dissemination of inappropriate material or personal attacks” would automatically lose their jobs. While Brown deserves no sympathy having made similar promises in the past and having failed to curb the activities of spin doctors like McBride, David Cameron does need to explain what a future Conservative government would do. He should be reminded of the repeated undertakings given by his immediate predecessors – Michael Howard, Iain Duncan Smith and William Hague – that an incoming Tory administration would halve the number of unelected advisers, curb their powers and cut the taxpayers’ bill for spin. Cameron did establish a “democracy task force” but no fresh commitments have been made. Given the fact that he was a political adviser himself, the Conservatives’ media-savvy leader is only too well aware how effective spin doctors can be in attacking either the government of the day or the Opposition. At the age of 25, he cut his political teeth in the 1992 general election preparing campaign briefings for John Major. Cameron was one of the leading lights in a Tory brat pack that was mockingly dubbed “Patten’s puppies” because of their predilection for stunts endorsed by the then party chairman Chris Patten which were aimed at destabilising Neil Kinnock. The Conservatives won the 1992 election against expectations and it was the Tories’ success in humiliating Kinnock which drove on Alastair Campbell once he was appointed Tony Blair’s press secretary in 1994. In the long build-up to the 1997 election Campbell and his acolytes ran a brutally efficient campaign which often outsmarted even the most cunning of the foot-in-the-door journalists whom he had to deal with. Once Blair was elected, the Labour spin machine began slowly but surely to fall apart. Along the way were epic, grisly moments like the resignations of Charlie Whelan (for briefing against Peter Mandelson) and Jo Moore (author of the “now is a good day to bury bad news” email). What more contemptuous compliment could McBride have deserved than Campbell’s taunt that on reading the offending emails he had been “struck not just by their unpleasantness, but also their incompetence”. After all Campbell can rest on his own laurels: he did more than anyone else to feed the despicable journalistic witch hunt to out Andrew Gilligan’s source which ended in the death of the weapons inspector David Kelly and the destabilising of the BBC. If the existing code of conduct had ever been applied – let alone the new stipulation forbidding the “preparation or dissemination of inappropriate information or personal attacks” – then Campbell & Co should have lost their jobs within weeks of Blair taking office in 1997.END