Labour Poison
My jaw dropped while reading this nonsense by Damian McBride in the arch-Tory Mail on Sunday newspaper - no wonder Gordon Brown's former spin doctor was known as 'McPoison' during his years working at the heart of the last Labour Government.
Now my immediate reaction was that it beggars belief that the Labour Government achieved during 1997 to 2010 with people like McBride spraying their venom at senior figures who were supposed to be running the country and whatever you can say about the SNP which has been in government in Scotland since 2007, I have certainly never witnessed this kind of vile behaviour.
I don't know what it is about the Labour Party, but lots of people within its ranks seem genuinely to hate each other instead of regarding politics as means of resolving difficult issues without resorting to personal abuse and divisive attacks.
Anyway in the strange world that Damian McBride inhabits, Gordon Brown is 'master of the universe' instead of one of the worst Prime Ministers the UK has ever seen, while other more senior Labour figures are dismissed as political pygmies who all deserve to be sacked.
Little wonder then that with people like Damian McBride working in its 'engine room', that the Labour Government under Gordon Brown (2007 to 2010) developed a reverse 'Midas Touch' before being thrown out of office at the 2010 general election.
I do believe that if Gordon invited Damian to eat a rat sandwich, the former Labour spin doctor would happily do so - with no questions asked.
Dismissive Ed, serial loser Alexander... and how blood-and-guts Gordon came out of his shed to save them all (and the union)
By DAMIAN MCBRIDE - Mail on Sunday
- Gordon Brown said Labour needed its own anti-independence platform
- He said it was wrong to work alongside David Cameron and Nick Clegg
- He believed joining with the 'hated Tories' would alienate Labour's core
- Brown warned that 'Better Together' needed a positive message
Gordon Brown, pictured, is stubborn, impatient, quick-tempered and intolerant of failure
It is Hell to be on the sidelines.’ So wrote George Patton on D-Day, 1944; the greatest American general of his age, distraught to be left behind in England while the greatest invasion in history took place without him.
Gordon Brown has much in common with Patton: both stubborn, impatient, quick-tempered, and intolerant of failure. But also devoted family men; insatiable historians and master strategists, their every battle won in the planning.
Until a fortnight ago, Brown was experiencing his own year of hell on the sidelines. Scotland’s place in the Union was under threat, and he was not wanted in the fight.
Traipsing around his back garden in Kirkcaldy last summer, he would bark down his mobile phone about the mistakes being made.
The Labour Party must have its own campaign against independence, not join a platform with the hated Tories and discredited Liberal Democrats. Working with David Cameron and Nick Clegg would not just alienate uncommitted voters but Labour’s own core support.
The early polls, he warned, were totally misleading. At the outset, there were always more people firmly committed to the status quo than to independence; the race would tighten as more Scots made up their mind. He was right: voters who were undecided a year ago split 60:40 in favour of ‘Yes’.
Finally, Gordon warned, the ‘Better Together’ campaign must show how life would get better for Scottish people if they stayed in the Union, not just how it would get worse if they didn’t.
Every one of his warnings was resolutely ignored by Ed Miliband and Cameron, and their key advisers, Douglas Alexander and George Osborne.
For Cameron and Osborne, their long-standing hatred for Brown had turned into contempt. When they scuppered his bid to take over the IMF in 2011, Osborne taunted Brown publicly by saying he hadn’t ‘asked to be considered for the job’.
For Miliband and Alexander, having spent 20 years receiving instructions from Gordon, the reaction to his warnings was wearily dismissive. On occasion, their old mentor couldn’t even get them to answer his phone calls or emails.
So Gordon retired to his garden hut, not to sulk, but to write. If he couldn’t get his arguments heard in Westminster, he’d take them direct to the public in the form of a book, My Scotland, Our Britain, and a lecture tour.
Damian McBride, pictured was former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown's spin doctor
Gordon Brown roars into life on the eve of historic Scottish vote
The ‘No’ campaign carried on under Alistair Darling’s leadership. Forget General Patton, this was like putting the D-Day landings in the hands of Dad’s Army. Alistair is a safe pair of hands if that’s what you need, but when the battle heats up, he combines the strategic insight of Private Pike with the crisis management of Corporal Jones.
As the months passed, every one of Gordon’s warnings came true, but even he didn’t predict the self-interested shambles that the ‘No’ campaign would become.
After Scottish Labour’s poor showing in May’s European elections, Douglas Alexander decamped to Scotland to take charge.
With Gaza, Ukraine, and Iraq in flames, this was no time for Labour’s shadow foreign secretary and 2015 General Election coordinator to take a sabbatical.
But Douglas’s first and last priority in life is himself, and if Scotland was lost, so was his career.
Jim Murphy, shadow minister for international development, is cut from the same cloth. He has a gymnastic approach to politics, adopting any position that will impress the judges.
And this summer, he decided to position himself as Labour’s next leader in Scotland, braving SNP mobs by day, and schmoozing Labour members by night.
As for Alistair Darling, his first debate with Alex Salmond was a triumph, calmly repeating questions that the SNP leader refused to answer. Carried away by that first success, he naively tried to repeat it word for word against a better-prepared Salmond in a more hostile arena, and was eaten alive.
At this point, no one in the highest echelons of the Labour Party even knew who was in charge of the ‘No’ campaign.
Such was the vacuum that it was just two weeks before the vote until any serious attempt was made to get the country’s unions to support the ‘No’ campaign. Even then, a series of panicky phone calls from Miliband fell on deaf ears; Scotland’s biggest unions Unite and Unison stayed neutral.
As soon as Alex Salmond had managed to take the lead, the Labour Party picked up the phone for Gordon
And wherever there is a vacuum in politics, mistakes happen.
A hideously patronising TV advert was proposed featuring a fictional working mum deciding to vote ‘No’. Even the advert’s creators had severe doubts. But Douglas loved it, Alistair didn’t even look at it, and the resulting derision compounded the impact of the second debate.
Suddenly, a buoyant SNP wasn’t just narrowing the polls, it was threatening to take the lead. In panic, the ‘No’ campaign not only summoned every local Labour Party organiser in the country to spend the week in Scotland, but – equally desperately – they picked up the phone to Gordon.
Asked to take charge, he didn’t disappoint. The package of extra powers he announced for Holyrood may have looked hastily assembled, but Gordon had been working on them for months.
And if Cameron, Miliband and Clegg felt bounced in to the ‘vow’ they made to honour those extra powers and preserve the Barnett formula, they should have known that, like General Patton, Gordon has a habit of jumping ahead: usually by the time you’ve read his proposals, he’s already announced them.
Whether or not those announcements were necessary to clinch the referendum result, we may never know.
But this is for sure: they stopped the SNP’s momentum at the crucial moment, and they transformed the ‘No’ campaign from a divided, chaotic, leaderless shambles into a focused election machine.
They also paved the way for the brilliantly orchestrated, perfectly delivered speech that Gordon made on the day before the vote, telling undecided voters to think of their children before making such an irrevocable choice.
It may have differed in content and context to Patton’s famous address to the Third Army on the eve of D-Day, but for passion, inspiration and emotion, the two speeches bear fine comparison. When Labour staffers heard Gordon happily humming to himself on the morning of polling day, they knew the battle was won. His mood told not just of a fortnight’s work well done, but the crowning glory of 30 years in politics.
Where does Gordon go now? He would be an obvious candidate to take over Scottish Labour and run for First Minister in 2016, but I doubt he will see much attraction in a bitter fight with Jim Murphy.
Labour also needs someone to manage its 2015 Election campaign. Having presided over the near-disaster of the ‘No’ campaign, Douglas Alexander’s position is now untenable. Dating back to David Miliband’s leadership campaign, he is a serial loser, and Labour cannot give him a last chance with five more years of opposition at stake.
Would Ed Miliband ask Gordon to take over? Sadly, I doubt it. He has made too much of his break from New Labour to turn to one of its key architects, and his deputy Harriet Harman has still not apologised for publicly branding the former PM a ‘sexist’.
Instead, I fear that – like George Patton – Old ‘Blood and Guts’ Brown will remain one of those generals that no one ever knows what to do with. Until the next battle they fear they can’t win.
McPoison (20 September 2014)
A book by Gordon Brown's former attack dog and spin doctor - Damian McBride - is being serialised in the Daily Mail on the eve of the Labour Party conference.
I've never met the chap myself, but Damian seems like a nasty piece of work and strangely deluded if the following quote is anything to go by - in which Damian claims that his former boss was the 'greatest man I ever met'.
"The people passing on such information had varying motives.
Ambitious MPs or political advisers often wanted to destroy a rival without getting their hands dirty, while others were so outraged by a colleague’s behaviour that they just wanted to see him get his comeuppance.
As for me, in a roundabout way I was doing it to protect Gordon Brown.
Until I completely lost my way at the end, everything I did as Gordon’s spin doctor, I did out of devotion, out of loyalty and out of some degree of love for the greatest man I ever met."
Mad or what?
Mad or what?
But much more interesting that what Damian has to say about himself and the many smears he perpetrated on political friends and foes - is the following article by James Cusick in the Independent.
The funny thing is that these ghastly people were supposed to be helping to run the country and look after the economy - on huge public salaries - and at a time when they were busy plotting and planning against their enemies - ironically fellow members of the Labour Party, of course.
To my mind their behaviour was the political mirror image of irresponsible bankers and 'wide boys' in the city - who helped bring the financial system to its knees.
As Gordon Brown’s communications chief, he smeared and span with a savagery that eventually saw him drummed out of politics. Now he has written a tell-all memoir. James Cusick gets a preview
By JAMES CUSICK
Over the past few weeks Gordon Brown has telephoned some of his former aides and told them he’s now worried about “the book”. The assurances he’s been offered – that “everyone gets f***ed over except you, Sarah [Brown], Ed [Balls] and Damian himself of course” – haven’t been enough to calm the former prime minister down. The serialisation this weekend of Power Trip, the first insider account of life inside Brown’s Treasury and Downing Street courts, is expected to confirm his worst fear: that he made a mistake last year when he discussed with McBride, his former spin doctor, just who merited being attacked now that he was away from frontline politics.
Those who have known both men also expect the book to re-open old wounds, spark consequential revenge, and to engender retribution – according to a still-loyal Brownite – “worthy of Machiavelli and Don f***ing Corleone”.
One said: “Damian never carried out orders the way anyone expected. Remember the scene in Macbeth when the king privately orders the two henchmen to kill Banquo? One murderer says: ‘We shall, my lord, perform what you command us.’ Well, Damian didn’t need an order. He thought he knew best which enemies to take out.”
The comment rings true as you ask around. In 2007, soon after being appointed Labour leader, Brown appeared on the Andrew Marr programme to reveal that there would be no snap election later that year as everyone expected. Before the show, some had advised Brown to use a public meeting with “Free Burma” politicians to make the call-it-off formal. But that changed, and Marr was given the exclusive in a pre-record. The only trouble was that McBride had also decided to brief the Sunday papers of the decision. The secret hadn’t lasted until Marr’s morning broadcast and Brown ended up looking wounded, pathetic even.
In the immediate aftermath of the fiasco, McBride, operating on orders from Ed Balls, helped deliver the “culprits” who’d given the PM the “wrong advice”. Those then in Downing Street recall McBride discussing who to blame. “We’ll f*** over wee Dougie,” he’s alleged to have said. Douglas Alexander, along with Ed Miliband, were subsequently made to carry the can.
A year later, amid another crisis, the scenario repeated. According to more than one account, three people were in McBride’s office when one asked: “How we going to play this? I presume we’ll just blame wee Dougie again?”
Episodes like this are at the centre of Brown’s private worry: that Power Trip: A Decade of Policy, Plots and Spin, might be regarded as “Mad Dog” McBride continuing to carry out the orders of his sovereign, and deliver, by proxy, the attack on the Blairites and anyone that Brown has failed to target since he left Downing Street three years ago.
There’s also a strange panic among former Labour advisers in Brown’s government. One of the walking-worried told The Independent: “What if Damian praises us? That won’t go down well. None of us wants to be described positively in his f***ing book.”
McBride is the Cambridge-educated Whitehall civil servant who headed the Treasury’s communications team before he was talent-spotted by Brown as a worthy successor to Charlie Whelan and Ian Austin, his former spin-doctors-in-chief. In 2005, when Austin became an MP, McBride became Brown’s special adviser, a role he took into Number 10 when Tony Blair finally left in 2007.
Brown’s failed premiership is now widely regarded as being psychologically dysfunctional at its core. Blairites, still angry at the coup that ousted Tony, point to McBride. “He’s a symptom; part of the fear that Gordon used to attack vulnerable enemies, or knife those regarded as disloyal. They thought it was all necessary macho-politics. It wasn’t. It was Sicilian thuggery.”
McBride’s transformation from a slim, healthy, witty civil servant to the overweight, aggressive, heavy-drinking henchman, routinely nicknamed McPoison (and far worse) by the end of his time at Brown’s side, is put down by some to his being forced into a role that he didn’t quite fit.
Others are less inclined to be apologetic. “McBride was f***ing good at his job. Lethal, focused, loyal. You want to sell Gordon Brown? You can’t. That’s why he was effective.”
Those claim to have read some of Power Trip claim it deliberately blurs the real chain of command, especially in Number 10. “Damian never took orders from Gordon. It was always through Ed [Balls]. And he knew Gordon would always back him.”
The backing, according to an account shown to The Independent, started early. Andrew Turnbull was head of the Civil Service in 2005 when Brown, then still in the Treasury, signalled he wanted McBride as his adviser. Turnbull claimed McBride couldn’t be trusted and said an investigation had shown him operating outside his role as a neutral civil servant, leaking details of a private matter between John Major and Norman Lamont. Turnbull wanted McBride fired.
A Brown associate at the time says Brown was livid and lost it. “Ian Austin’s replacement had been lined up. Then, suddenly, McBride was in the frame. The reason? Brown wasn’t going to have Turnbull telling him who he could and couldn’t hire.”
Brown’s loyalty was again tested in 2008 when Harriet Harman, then Labour’s deputy leader, claimed she was being briefed against by Number 10. Brown denied it. But in Manchester during Labour’s annual conference, Harman is said to have overheard (some claim she used a tape recorder) McBride on the phone, in his room, doing exactly what she suspected. She went back to Brown. Regardless of the evidence, he refused to censure his communications chief.
At another conference a year later, when it was suspected that the Scottish minister, David Cairns – the former Roman Catholic priest who died in 2011 – was going to resign after walking out of the conference during the leader’s speech, McBride took action.
A last-minute intervention had changed Cairns’ mind, and he had decided to stay. But McBride had already leaked the story to the press and thrown in a bit of spice. Cairns was gay, and the report noted he’d used Air Miles, run up on ministerial trips, to take his “same-sex partner” on holiday. Cairns, leaving liturgical language behind, called Number 10, shouting: “Where is your moral compass now, you bunch of bastards?”
Others offer similar accounts of McBride’s “hitman” operations. Ivan Lewis, the Bury MP who publicly warned in 2008 that Brown’s government was “out of touch”, found his private text messages to a female aide splashed across the papers.
Power Trip, which offers a one-sided account of Brown’s inner court, is nevertheless said to be clear on who is responsible for the former PM’s eventual downfall. And it isn’t Brown himself.
Another former aide says : “Stephen Carter [brought in from the private sector in 2008 as Brown’s chief of staff] gets hammered, even though McBride helped make his life in Number 10 pure hell. Spencer Livermore gets hammered because of the 2007 election f***-up. Alistair Darling gets hammered because Gordon couldn’t bear anyone but him running the Treasury. Douglas Alexander, Ed Miliband… everybody, every Blairite, they all get hammered.”
But what gets left out? For another insider this is going to be the best bit. “People will head for the index first and search for ‘China’. There was a time when McBride was with Brown in Beijing and was in the hotel bar for the whole night and entire morning. Wonder if that’ll get a mention?”
Kevin Toolis, whose play The Confessions of Gordon Brown is currently at London’s Trafalgar Theatre, said he talked to McBride as part of his play’s research. “As a fanatical member of Brown’s inner circle, working for ‘the boss’ was all-consuming for Damian. He had to fend off enemies and conspire with so-called press friends to further Brown’s premiership. And it all took its toll on his health.”
Toolis thinks that ultimately McBride was “deadly effective”. But despite the menace of his reputation, “he never had a strategic view of how to handle the press – because he wasn’t a journalist like Alastair Campbell”.
McBride eventually resigned after a well-documented scandal in 2009 surrounding emails linked to a Labour website, Red Rag, that had McBride’s fingerprints all over them. These included plans to create false rumours about key Tory politicians, such as regarding their sexuality and fake allegations about their families.
McBride’s book contains no epitaph on his career. But if he needs one, Macbeth Act 3, scene 1, is an option. As the king’s henchman says: “I am reckless what I do to spite the world.”
‘Power Trip: A decade of Policy, Plots and Spin’, is published by Biteback Publishing on 23 September
Over the past few weeks Gordon Brown has telephoned some of his former aides and told them he’s now worried about “the book”. The assurances he’s been offered – that “everyone gets f***ed over except you, Sarah [Brown], Ed [Balls] and Damian himself of course” – haven’t been enough to calm the former prime minister down. The serialisation this weekend of Power Trip, the first insider account of life inside Brown’s Treasury and Downing Street courts, is expected to confirm his worst fear: that he made a mistake last year when he discussed with McBride, his former spin doctor, just who merited being attacked now that he was away from frontline politics.
Those who have known both men also expect the book to re-open old wounds, spark consequential revenge, and to engender retribution – according to a still-loyal Brownite – “worthy of Machiavelli and Don f***ing Corleone”.
One said: “Damian never carried out orders the way anyone expected. Remember the scene in Macbeth when the king privately orders the two henchmen to kill Banquo? One murderer says: ‘We shall, my lord, perform what you command us.’ Well, Damian didn’t need an order. He thought he knew best which enemies to take out.”
The comment rings true as you ask around. In 2007, soon after being appointed Labour leader, Brown appeared on the Andrew Marr programme to reveal that there would be no snap election later that year as everyone expected. Before the show, some had advised Brown to use a public meeting with “Free Burma” politicians to make the call-it-off formal. But that changed, and Marr was given the exclusive in a pre-record. The only trouble was that McBride had also decided to brief the Sunday papers of the decision. The secret hadn’t lasted until Marr’s morning broadcast and Brown ended up looking wounded, pathetic even.
In the immediate aftermath of the fiasco, McBride, operating on orders from Ed Balls, helped deliver the “culprits” who’d given the PM the “wrong advice”. Those then in Downing Street recall McBride discussing who to blame. “We’ll f*** over wee Dougie,” he’s alleged to have said. Douglas Alexander, along with Ed Miliband, were subsequently made to carry the can.
A year later, amid another crisis, the scenario repeated. According to more than one account, three people were in McBride’s office when one asked: “How we going to play this? I presume we’ll just blame wee Dougie again?”
Episodes like this are at the centre of Brown’s private worry: that Power Trip: A Decade of Policy, Plots and Spin, might be regarded as “Mad Dog” McBride continuing to carry out the orders of his sovereign, and deliver, by proxy, the attack on the Blairites and anyone that Brown has failed to target since he left Downing Street three years ago.
There’s also a strange panic among former Labour advisers in Brown’s government. One of the walking-worried told The Independent: “What if Damian praises us? That won’t go down well. None of us wants to be described positively in his f***ing book.”
McBride is the Cambridge-educated Whitehall civil servant who headed the Treasury’s communications team before he was talent-spotted by Brown as a worthy successor to Charlie Whelan and Ian Austin, his former spin-doctors-in-chief. In 2005, when Austin became an MP, McBride became Brown’s special adviser, a role he took into Number 10 when Tony Blair finally left in 2007.
Brown’s failed premiership is now widely regarded as being psychologically dysfunctional at its core. Blairites, still angry at the coup that ousted Tony, point to McBride. “He’s a symptom; part of the fear that Gordon used to attack vulnerable enemies, or knife those regarded as disloyal. They thought it was all necessary macho-politics. It wasn’t. It was Sicilian thuggery.”
McBride’s transformation from a slim, healthy, witty civil servant to the overweight, aggressive, heavy-drinking henchman, routinely nicknamed McPoison (and far worse) by the end of his time at Brown’s side, is put down by some to his being forced into a role that he didn’t quite fit.
Others are less inclined to be apologetic. “McBride was f***ing good at his job. Lethal, focused, loyal. You want to sell Gordon Brown? You can’t. That’s why he was effective.”
Those claim to have read some of Power Trip claim it deliberately blurs the real chain of command, especially in Number 10. “Damian never took orders from Gordon. It was always through Ed [Balls]. And he knew Gordon would always back him.”
The backing, according to an account shown to The Independent, started early. Andrew Turnbull was head of the Civil Service in 2005 when Brown, then still in the Treasury, signalled he wanted McBride as his adviser. Turnbull claimed McBride couldn’t be trusted and said an investigation had shown him operating outside his role as a neutral civil servant, leaking details of a private matter between John Major and Norman Lamont. Turnbull wanted McBride fired.
A Brown associate at the time says Brown was livid and lost it. “Ian Austin’s replacement had been lined up. Then, suddenly, McBride was in the frame. The reason? Brown wasn’t going to have Turnbull telling him who he could and couldn’t hire.”
Brown’s loyalty was again tested in 2008 when Harriet Harman, then Labour’s deputy leader, claimed she was being briefed against by Number 10. Brown denied it. But in Manchester during Labour’s annual conference, Harman is said to have overheard (some claim she used a tape recorder) McBride on the phone, in his room, doing exactly what she suspected. She went back to Brown. Regardless of the evidence, he refused to censure his communications chief.
At another conference a year later, when it was suspected that the Scottish minister, David Cairns – the former Roman Catholic priest who died in 2011 – was going to resign after walking out of the conference during the leader’s speech, McBride took action.
A last-minute intervention had changed Cairns’ mind, and he had decided to stay. But McBride had already leaked the story to the press and thrown in a bit of spice. Cairns was gay, and the report noted he’d used Air Miles, run up on ministerial trips, to take his “same-sex partner” on holiday. Cairns, leaving liturgical language behind, called Number 10, shouting: “Where is your moral compass now, you bunch of bastards?”
Others offer similar accounts of McBride’s “hitman” operations. Ivan Lewis, the Bury MP who publicly warned in 2008 that Brown’s government was “out of touch”, found his private text messages to a female aide splashed across the papers.
Power Trip, which offers a one-sided account of Brown’s inner court, is nevertheless said to be clear on who is responsible for the former PM’s eventual downfall. And it isn’t Brown himself.
Another former aide says : “Stephen Carter [brought in from the private sector in 2008 as Brown’s chief of staff] gets hammered, even though McBride helped make his life in Number 10 pure hell. Spencer Livermore gets hammered because of the 2007 election f***-up. Alistair Darling gets hammered because Gordon couldn’t bear anyone but him running the Treasury. Douglas Alexander, Ed Miliband… everybody, every Blairite, they all get hammered.”
But what gets left out? For another insider this is going to be the best bit. “People will head for the index first and search for ‘China’. There was a time when McBride was with Brown in Beijing and was in the hotel bar for the whole night and entire morning. Wonder if that’ll get a mention?”
Kevin Toolis, whose play The Confessions of Gordon Brown is currently at London’s Trafalgar Theatre, said he talked to McBride as part of his play’s research. “As a fanatical member of Brown’s inner circle, working for ‘the boss’ was all-consuming for Damian. He had to fend off enemies and conspire with so-called press friends to further Brown’s premiership. And it all took its toll on his health.”
Toolis thinks that ultimately McBride was “deadly effective”. But despite the menace of his reputation, “he never had a strategic view of how to handle the press – because he wasn’t a journalist like Alastair Campbell”.
McBride eventually resigned after a well-documented scandal in 2009 surrounding emails linked to a Labour website, Red Rag, that had McBride’s fingerprints all over them. These included plans to create false rumours about key Tory politicians, such as regarding their sexuality and fake allegations about their families.
McBride’s book contains no epitaph on his career. But if he needs one, Macbeth Act 3, scene 1, is an option. As the king’s henchman says: “I am reckless what I do to spite the world.”
‘Power Trip: A decade of Policy, Plots and Spin’, is published by Biteback Publishing on 23 September
