Paperback Writer

Damian McBride, Gordon Brown's former spin doctor, has drawn attention to a paperback version of his 'Power Trip' book with a description of the Labour Party as a "great, steaming pile of fudge".

The original hardback version of Power Trip was serialised in The Mail and the paper has leapt upon McBride's assessment of the current Labour leadership with gusto, which is hardly surprising with a general election only months away.  

'No clear idea' and a 'steaming pile of fudge': Ed Miliband under extraordinary attack from Gordon Brown's key aide who warns Labour election plan is 'totally dysfunctional'

• Labour leader failing to communicate with voters, Damian McBride claims
• Former spin doctor says Mr Miliband has no persuasive policies
• Also attacked Labour's refusal to apologise for its record in office 
• Today's attack comes in updated version of McBride's tell-all memoirs
• He was spin doctor for Gordon Brown but quit over a plot to smear Tories 

By JAMES CHAPMAN - The Mail

Ed Miliband’s ‘totally dysfunctional’ leadership tonight comes under extraordinary attack from former Labour spin doctor Damian McBride.

In an updated version of his sensational tell-all memoirs, Mr McBride warns Labour has ‘no clear idea’ of who it is trying to appeal to and a ‘great, steaming pile of fudge’ instead of key policies.

He says Mr Miliband, with whom he worked for years in the Treasury, has ‘managed to blend the worst of Tony Blair’s “me against the world” isolation with the worst of Gordon Brown’s “they’re out to get me” paranoia.’



Savaged: Labour leader Ed Miliband, left, has come under extraordinary attack from former Labour spin doctor Damian McBride, right, whom he accuses of having no idea who his targets are, or policies to tempt them

In an apparent swipe at Ed Balls, another former ally, he says Labour has yet to persuade voters that ‘we’ve learnt our lesson’ by admitting where ‘the last government screwed up’.

The shadow Chancellor has resisted all advice to concede Labour’s mistakes during its 13 years in power.

Mr McBride concludes: ‘Labour currently has no clear idea who its target audience is, no positive messages to communicate to anyone about why they should vote for the party, no policies which will persuade them, and is being run in a totally dysfunctional way.’

His latest explosive intervention will infuriate his former colleagues, who are this week seeking to shut down leadership speculation by launching a ‘summer offensive’ highlighting the differences between Labour and Conservative policies.

Over the weekend, Mr Miliband launched an attempt to turn his ‘weird’ public image on its head, insisting he was not interested in a politics should not be ‘an ugly person’s showbiz contest’.

Bringing home the bacon: The Labour leader tried to confront his inability to match his camera-friendly rivals, which culminated in the above image of him struggling to eat a bacon sandwich

He made a high-risk speech last week in which he tried to confront his apparent inability to match David Cameron’s camera-friendly manner and poise – saying he hoped voters would look beyond ‘photo opportunity’ politics.

Opinion polls suggest that Mr Miliband is a drag on his party’s fortunes and is way behind Mr Cameron on most ratings of leadership.

Mr McBride, in the paperback edition of Power Trip, his account of his years working for Gordon Brown and eventual downfall, published this week and serialised in the Daily Mail, insists he believes Mr Miliband will go on to win next year’s election.

But having pulled his punches in his references to Mr Miliband and Mr Balls in the original version of the book, in the latest chapters he is unsparing about what he sees as their mistakes at the top the Labour Party.

He says Mr Miliband’s policy measures, such as a promised energy price freeze and rent controls, are ‘populist enough but rarely stand up to scrutiny’. Mr Balls’s, meanwhile, are so wonkish they ‘go entirely unnoticed in the pub’.

‘If Labour currently has central, underlying messages that it is trying to communicate to the electorate about itself, its policies, and its leader, the best you could say at present is that it’s not quite coming across,’ Mr McBride writes.



Learned their lesson? Mr McBride said that shadow chancellor Ed Balls has yet to persuade voters that Labour has learned from the past

Resistance: Miliband and Balls, pictured above, have staunchly resisted calls to apologise for Labour's legacy

‘If the message is ‘We’re not the Tories or the Lib Dems, and you hate them’, that may work

up to a point, but it won’t do much for those people who would happily express their antipathy by voting for UKIP or just staying at home, let alone those who hate Labour as well.

'Even the ‘cost of living’ argument – for which read "Those Tory toffs haven’t got a clue what your life’s like" – relies on the electorate accepting that Labour has some better appreciation of those realities.’

Mr McBride says Mr Miliband and Mr Balls ‘badly need to develop and stick to some underlying messages’ that will make people positively want to back Labour next year.

‘The starting point is a simple one: "We’ve learnt our lesson". From George Bush to [disgraced RBS boss] Fred Goodwin, admit where the last government screwed up, and explain why next time will be different,’ he urges.

‘That will also give Labour the licence to talk about the many good achievements of its time in office, and to point out that it’s the Tories who are now blindly repeating the mistakes of the past, especially on the economy.’

He warns Mr Miliband that he is still surrounded by many of the same advisers who attempted to address Mr Brown’s ‘image problem’ during his troubled stint as prime minister.

Grin and bear it: After his attempt to turn attention away from his 'image problem', Mr Miliband was confronted with cartoons comparing him to Wallace, of Wallace and Gromit fame, by the BBC's Andrew Marr, left

They continually advised Mr Brown to counter the negative perceptions of his character by showing a ‘softer side’, Mr McBride says.

‘Ed’s advisers will tell him to be pictured doing the everyday things that normal people do to show he’s not ‘weird’; they’ll arrange opportunities for him to look all serious and statesmanlike to counter the perception that he’s not Prime Minister material; and conversely, they’ll urge him to crack jokes with Graham Norton or shed tears with Piers Morgan so that we can all begin to see the ‘real Ed’,’ he writes.

‘This will all be a colossal mistake. Not just because it leads to bad photos with bacon sandwiches, but because the blatant artifice of the whole effort risks throwing away the most important commodity any successful modern politician must possess: authenticity.’

Mr McBride advises Mr Miliband to present himself as ‘a Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage-style outsider, the opposite of the carefully-manicured modern politician designed by a committee of PR advisers’.

'Blatant artifice': Mr McBride warned Mr Miliband against taking image advice from Gordon Brown's old team

He also urges the Labour leader to ‘start involving, consulting and using the whole of his team – not just his small circle of like-minded advisers and trusted shadow ministers, but all of his shadow Cabinet, all his most talented backbenchers, and all of the variously talented staff employed by the Labour party, 99 per cent of whom could currently be forgiven for asking themselves: ‘Should we all go home?’’

Mr McBride’s book dominated last year’s Labour party conference, lifting the lid on a toxic culture of spin and feuding at the heart of New Labour.

He was forced to resign as Mr Brown’s special adviser in 2009 after he was linked to a plot to smear Tory MPs via an anti-Conservative gossip website. The emails included fabricated slurs about the politicians’ health and private lives.