Thoughts on politics and life from a liberal perspective

Saturday 18 April 2009

Is Labour now in meltdown?

There are two stories in tomorrow's papers that indicate that the Smeargate scandal is far from over.

Iain Dale has a post quoting a News of the World story that The Labour Party General Secretary Ray Collins and Gordon Brown's fixer Charlie Whelan were present at a meeting to set up the Reg Rag website which was planned to be the conduit for the smearing stories from the original scandal that Guido brokw last weekend.

Again, from Iain, and also Political Betting, the Sunday Times is reporting that Ed Balls was in charge of Downing Street's dirty tricks unit. This information has apparently come from an anonymous whistleblower.

And Guido has posted ominously (for the government) that he will have more information that he is labelling "Smeargate II" tomorrow.

I am starting to get the feeling that things are spiralling out of control for the government now. They have completely lost control of the agenda and are just firefighting. It must be devastating for a control freak such as Gordon Brown to find that extremely damaging headlines are being dripped slowly out like this and there is nothing he can do about it. However it is all his own fault as he created the culture in which these people operate.

Coupled with polls out tomorrow showing Tory leads of 17% and 19% respectively, tomorrow could be the worst day of Gordon Brown's political life.

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