http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/13/damian-mcbride-email-gordon-brown-cameron-osborneThere's a juvenile, jeering, nasty side to Westminster politics; always has been, always will be. But it rarely hits the front pages and causes the resignation of a senior No 10 staffer. Damian McBride is not a name known to most newspaper readers but his most common nicknames, McNasty and McPoison, give an idea of his reputation since arriving in Downing Street with Gordon Brown.
Like any good villain, he's a hard man to kill off. They thought they'd got him before, when the cerebral Stephen Carter was made Brown's head of communications. McBride, a red-faced and sociable former Treasury civil servant, was shoved into a cupboard. But after months of turf wars, it was Carter who went, and McBride was re-established at the heart of Brown's media operation.
He can apparently be very good company. He is reportedly very clever, well-read and politically shrewd. But I say "apparently" and "reportedly" because McBride has always been a man who speaks only to a favoured cabal of Labour apparatchiks and chosen journalists. Outside the circle? He doesn't return your calls or acknowledge your presence. This has made him more enemies than friends; if you spot glee in the reporting of his fall, you're right.
Some parts of the story are absolutely familiar and should shock nobody with the haziest political memory. McBride's ruthlessly focused support for Brown, and Brown's need for McBride, has parallels with the Joe Haines operation in Harold Wilson's heyday, or Bernard Ingham's in Thatcher's, or of course the Blair operation, which Brown felt the rough edge of himself.
Almost every elected leader, surrounded by a hostile press and potential rivals, turns to the dark arts of briefers and ear-whisperers. In recent times, the sheer number of media outlets makes the favoured circle almost inevitable.
This gives the political leader "deniability". Ingham could use the secrecy code of the original "no names, old boy" lobby system to denigrate ministers with whom Margaret Thatcher was exasperated - remember John Biffen being "semi-detached" or the ruthless dispatch of Francis Pym? Thatcher could then smilingly greet her bemused and hurt ministers with an air of exasperating innocence.
In the same way, McBride used an "inner lobby" of carefully selected reporters. The chancellor, Alistair Darling, wakes up to discover that key aspects of Treasury policy are being second-guessed in No 10 and that his decisions were really Gordon's. There are the stories, in cold black and white. But whose fingerprints are on them? They are a little too smudged to be sure. Labour's deputy leader, Harriet Harman, is rubbished as useless in stories which seem to have No 10's marks on them. But Gordon can smilingly deny any involvement.
It's not just those two. Douglas Alexander, once one of the keenest Brownites of all, discovers he's being dumped on for the shambolic "election that wasn't called" last autumn. David Miliband is not only hung, but drawn and quartered too, for daring to put his head above the parapet with ideas about Labour's future.
A press operation can also be a silent assassination squad. All that makes this aspect of the McBride tale unusual is he has been sacked for spreading malice about Tories; as one senior Labour person put it to me, "I could have fallen off my chair - most of his operations are against us, not them." If there are journalists toasting McBride's fall, then there are plenty of Labour ministers and civil servants who feel the same. He was regarded as the heart of a Brownite shadow operation, based around a Wednesday afternoon meeting of just five or six people, which spent far too much energy plotting against ministers.
Some will say this gives the prime minister a chance for a fresh start, for him to shake off his enthusiasm for the black arts. I think it's too late. He could have changed his attitude to press briefing when Charlie Whelan, the first Brown attack dog, left. But he found another Charlie. He could have learned his lesson when he brought Stephen Carter in. But he couldn't quite banish McBride, which meant a succession of new press officers had no real authority.
The truth is that Brown has always been double-sided in his political personality and now the whole country knows it. The ideologically serious, morally driven statesman, whose steely determination was most recently on view in his successful handling of the G20, has lived his life with a sinister twin, spinning and dealing. McBride has been an extension of that other self.
Let's pause to consider where that's led the prime minister. McBride - Brown's man, Brown's prop, Brown's prosthetic reach - has been caught out trading in smears of the nastiest kind. These are sexual smears, tittle-tattle about alleged depression, juvenile pranks, kinky behaviour. Ring any bells? A decade ago Brown was at the receiving end of not so dissimilar smears. Surely the horrible irony strikes him?
But the truth is this stuff has become useless anyway. People aren't daft. Even his greatest supporters know that Brown has run a kind of dual premiership, partly high-minded and principled and partly vicious and tribal. Had this proposed website gone live with McBride's "brilliant" material, the world would have shrugged, muttered "pathetic" and thought no worse of Cameron, Osborne or the other targets. People know smears, and in general dislike smearers more than the smeared.
It's too late for the prime minister to shrug off McBride with expressions of surprise and horror, as if he'd been walking around with a portly vulture on his shoulder for years without noticing. McBride was as inner circle as it gets. If the prime minister didn't know what he was up to, he should have done.
Why do they do it? I can only suppose the rest of us underestimate the loneliness and insecurity of life at the top, and the near irresistible lure of having your own personal hitman, bodyguard, assassin and confidant. It must feel like security when it's really the opposite.
None of that adds up to an excuse. "The Tories do it." Yes, they do. (And here's a safe prediction: two years into a Cameron administration, there will be a Tory version of McBride, at much the same game.) But it's a sordid game, which is almost always discovered in the end, and which weakens every leader and every administration that plays it. This is a dreadful day for No 10; and they worked hard to see it dawn.
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