Zombie Labour
I think Adam Boulton in the Sunday Times has the pick of the opinion pieces on the Damian McBride affair - and its significance or otherwise for the Labour Party.
What puzzles me is why Ed Miliband and the Labour Party would want to employ someone like Patrick Hennessy - especially if this chap was so willing to help Damian McBride with his dirty work and smears.
Alistair Campbell - Labour's former press spokesperson - has suggested that Damian McBride should be charged with a criminal offence for leaking official Government documents using Gordon Brown's computer and email address.
A serious charge if true - which it appears to be since Damian McBride admits to doing just that in his book, Power Trip - so let's see if the Labour leadership refer this particular matter to the Metropolitan Police.
Zombies stir to drag Ed back to his dark side
By Adam Boulton
The future, not the past, is the mantra for Ed Miliband’s “cost of living” conference. He wants to explain to the nation why whatever economic recovery there may be is not benefiting ordinary people and to promise that a future Labour government will make sure it does.
Instead, the clammy hands of corpses that were sent to sleep with the fishes are bobbing up to the surface and are threatening to pull the fresh-faced Labour team back to its murky past.
The revenge of the zombies comes less from the fictional Confessions of Gordon Brown, Kevin Toolis’s pathos-driven comedy that is travelling to Brighton — but was banned from advertising in party literature — than from the real-life confessions of Damian McBride, Brown’s old aide, in his memoir Power Trip.
Given the timing of its publication, some might wonder whether McBride has entirely forsworn the dark arts in his quest for expiation, but the money is going to charity and “as my old parish priest used to tell me when I went to confession, you can’t expect forgiveness unless you speak your sins out loud”.
Manifold sins are admitted. These consist principally of “briefing against” (a euphemism for “trying to destroy the careers of”) people blocking Brown’s path to the top.
The victims were mostly Labour cabinet ministers from Tony Blair down. Like a true Jesuit, McBride takes no blame for making them face the consequences of the peccadillos that he passed on to the press. When he finally quit government it was because he had been caught manufacturing outright lies about prominent Conservative politicians in cahoots with Derek Draper, a disgraced new Labour braggart.
Miliband is insisting this was in the past — another country — and besides the Grinch is dead to politics. (Brown has spoken in parliament rarely this year.) But Ed was also a capo in the court of King Brown, sharing with McBride the coffee-making duties. McBride knifed people and Miliband is still most famous for knifing his own brother — with the active support of Brown, we now know from the book.
More pertinently, Miliband shares some traits of behaviour that suggest he may have inherited more from Brown, his one-time mentor, than an endorsement.
I never had much to do with McBride, because for me the great mystery of modern politics was why so many felt that Brown was entitled to take over the premiership without a fight. Once McBride realised I was not one of his, there was not much point in us talking. The commonplace duty of a press officer to brief non-partisan journalists never seemed to cross his mind.
Was the behaviour of the Brown gang more deplorable than that of Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson or Bernard Ingham? Unquestionably it was, in my experience. Those three gentlemen all placed a higher premium on the distinction between truth and falsehood and what they did was done in pursuit of policy goals.
What is so shocking about the thuggish Brownite operation was the sheer brute nullity of it, not to make the case for a policy on health or education or the economy, not even to win an election, but just to get Brown the top job. When he got to No 10 he didn’t know what to do with it, except preside. A prime minister needs to inspire, to lead, to set a course.
The few plaudits that Brown won were for reacting to events such as the Glasgow airport bomb, the summer floods and even saving the world (economy). Miliband, his protégé, is in danger of slipping into a similar reactive mode.
A contrarian analysis argued last week that “Ed Miliband is proving himself to be a brave and adroit leader” because of his responses to phone hacking, Labour’s trade union links and Syrian chemical weapons.
Leaving aside the great uncertainty of what exactly has been achieved in each case, or that Miliband’s initiatives followed where others in his party had already led, the point surely is that these “big and important things” were just, well, responses.
Unlike Blair or David Cameron in opposition, Miliband is still a long way from making his own weather or his own luck.
On Tuesday let us hope the Labour leader does not deliver one of what McBride calls his “occasionally tortured, overacademic speeches” in which one cannot help hearing the voice of his Marxist professor father, “especially when he talks about recasting the capitalist model and reshaping society through the empowerment of ordinary people”.
I understand that Miliband will accuse Cameron of presiding over the worst slump in the cost of living since the 19th century and will promise to rectify a structural fault in the economy that prevents ordinary people from benefiting from an upturn. He will also say there is something wrong in our society, unlike in Germany and Scandinavia, because working people’s voices are not heard while the wealthy prosper.
At the lower end of politics, Miliband has just hired an Old Etonian from The Sunday Telegraph to be his deputy press secretary. This man compensates for his poshness with a gratingly blokeish fanaticism for “footie”, and Chelsea FC in particular.
Patrick “Paddy” Hennessy had many fans in the press gallery. I am not one of them. Once, he approached me with the suggestion that the televised election debates would have to be postponed because they would coincide with some important football match. I happened to be in a position to deny this categorically — both the alleged date and the postponement. The story still appeared.
It’s hardly a surprise that Hennessy was the journalist closest to McBride in the Brown years. But such kinship is no qualification for sweeping away the bad old days.
McBride’s book is as important an account of what new Labour was really like as Campbell’s diaries. He does not spare himself as he confesses how he was seduced into Brown’s dark world, “sucked in like a concubine at a Roman orgy”.
McBride tells us more than we might like to know about where Miliband came from. Both in substance and in style the Labour leader will need to work hard this week if he is to exorcise more unwelcome revenants on the conference stage than you will find aboard the ghost train on Brighton pier.
@adamboultonsky
Instead, the clammy hands of corpses that were sent to sleep with the fishes are bobbing up to the surface and are threatening to pull the fresh-faced Labour team back to its murky past.
The revenge of the zombies comes less from the fictional Confessions of Gordon Brown, Kevin Toolis’s pathos-driven comedy that is travelling to Brighton — but was banned from advertising in party literature — than from the real-life confessions of Damian McBride, Brown’s old aide, in his memoir Power Trip.
Given the timing of its publication, some might wonder whether McBride has entirely forsworn the dark arts in his quest for expiation, but the money is going to charity and “as my old parish priest used to tell me when I went to confession, you can’t expect forgiveness unless you speak your sins out loud”.
Manifold sins are admitted. These consist principally of “briefing against” (a euphemism for “trying to destroy the careers of”) people blocking Brown’s path to the top.
The victims were mostly Labour cabinet ministers from Tony Blair down. Like a true Jesuit, McBride takes no blame for making them face the consequences of the peccadillos that he passed on to the press. When he finally quit government it was because he had been caught manufacturing outright lies about prominent Conservative politicians in cahoots with Derek Draper, a disgraced new Labour braggart.
Miliband is insisting this was in the past — another country — and besides the Grinch is dead to politics. (Brown has spoken in parliament rarely this year.) But Ed was also a capo in the court of King Brown, sharing with McBride the coffee-making duties. McBride knifed people and Miliband is still most famous for knifing his own brother — with the active support of Brown, we now know from the book.
More pertinently, Miliband shares some traits of behaviour that suggest he may have inherited more from Brown, his one-time mentor, than an endorsement.
I never had much to do with McBride, because for me the great mystery of modern politics was why so many felt that Brown was entitled to take over the premiership without a fight. Once McBride realised I was not one of his, there was not much point in us talking. The commonplace duty of a press officer to brief non-partisan journalists never seemed to cross his mind.
Was the behaviour of the Brown gang more deplorable than that of Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson or Bernard Ingham? Unquestionably it was, in my experience. Those three gentlemen all placed a higher premium on the distinction between truth and falsehood and what they did was done in pursuit of policy goals.
What is so shocking about the thuggish Brownite operation was the sheer brute nullity of it, not to make the case for a policy on health or education or the economy, not even to win an election, but just to get Brown the top job. When he got to No 10 he didn’t know what to do with it, except preside. A prime minister needs to inspire, to lead, to set a course.
The few plaudits that Brown won were for reacting to events such as the Glasgow airport bomb, the summer floods and even saving the world (economy). Miliband, his protégé, is in danger of slipping into a similar reactive mode.
A contrarian analysis argued last week that “Ed Miliband is proving himself to be a brave and adroit leader” because of his responses to phone hacking, Labour’s trade union links and Syrian chemical weapons.
Leaving aside the great uncertainty of what exactly has been achieved in each case, or that Miliband’s initiatives followed where others in his party had already led, the point surely is that these “big and important things” were just, well, responses.
Unlike Blair or David Cameron in opposition, Miliband is still a long way from making his own weather or his own luck.
On Tuesday let us hope the Labour leader does not deliver one of what McBride calls his “occasionally tortured, overacademic speeches” in which one cannot help hearing the voice of his Marxist professor father, “especially when he talks about recasting the capitalist model and reshaping society through the empowerment of ordinary people”.
I understand that Miliband will accuse Cameron of presiding over the worst slump in the cost of living since the 19th century and will promise to rectify a structural fault in the economy that prevents ordinary people from benefiting from an upturn. He will also say there is something wrong in our society, unlike in Germany and Scandinavia, because working people’s voices are not heard while the wealthy prosper.
At the lower end of politics, Miliband has just hired an Old Etonian from The Sunday Telegraph to be his deputy press secretary. This man compensates for his poshness with a gratingly blokeish fanaticism for “footie”, and Chelsea FC in particular.
Patrick “Paddy” Hennessy had many fans in the press gallery. I am not one of them. Once, he approached me with the suggestion that the televised election debates would have to be postponed because they would coincide with some important football match. I happened to be in a position to deny this categorically — both the alleged date and the postponement. The story still appeared.
It’s hardly a surprise that Hennessy was the journalist closest to McBride in the Brown years. But such kinship is no qualification for sweeping away the bad old days.
McBride’s book is as important an account of what new Labour was really like as Campbell’s diaries. He does not spare himself as he confesses how he was seduced into Brown’s dark world, “sucked in like a concubine at a Roman orgy”.
McBride tells us more than we might like to know about where Miliband came from. Both in substance and in style the Labour leader will need to work hard this week if he is to exorcise more unwelcome revenants on the conference stage than you will find aboard the ghost train on Brighton pier.
@adamboultonsky
