Gordon Brown is a walking ad hominem attack

I have just watched Gordon Brown's interview with Gary Gibbon on Channel 4 News with incredulity.

He claimed that he never done personal criticism of opponents. I audibly gasped.

Gordon Brown has built his career and climbed the greasy pole by using smear and innuendo against his opponents. It might not have been him directly but his accolytes have been at it for years, nay decades.

The Smeargate scandal exposed the dark heart of Brown's operation and although they (eventually) got rid of Damian McBride he is just a symptom of the problem. The problem is Brown himself.

I asked just after Smeargate whether Gordon Brown could even claim to legitimately be Prime Minister any more because others were starting to come out of the woodwork accusing Brown's henchman of having smeared them. I bet Stephen Byers, Alan Milburn, Frank Field and countless others would be able to explain how Brown's operations really work.

To hear him try to claim to be holier than thou in this way is abdolutely sickening.

Mandelson is very unconvincing on Smeargate

Just heard an interview with Peter Mandelson on Radio 4's "The World this Weekend" where he was attempting to draw a line under the Smeargate affair.

His main point seemed to be that it is ridiculous to blame Gordon Brown for the actions of his underlings and he is such a busy man that he cannot be expected to have made sure this sort of thing was not going on. Neil Kinnock made a similar point on Andy Marr this morning so this is clearly the line we are being asked to swallow. Mandelson also tried to big up Gordon Brown's now rather damaged moral compass.

I am afraid it won't wash. Here are a few reasons why off the top of my head:

1) Gordon Brown is famously a control freak and the idea that he had no control over very senior advisers like Damian McBride stretches credulity to breaking point. McBride would not have dared to do what he did without at least thinking he was doing his master's bidding. And why would he have thought that?
2) The implication seems to be that McBride was some sort of junior underling amongst many others. This is nonsense. He was one of the, if not the actual closest advisers to the PM.
3) Can you imagine the furore that Labour would have kicked up if the boot was on the other foot? Just imagine for a moment what would have happened if one of John Major's most senior advisers had been caught out trying to spread rumours about Tony Blair's sexual health, the psychological condition of Sarah Macaulay and lies about other senior Labour figures. Would Mandelson have come onto the radio to sympathise with Major's situation? Or would he have torn him a new one?

If this is the best Labour can do then they are in real trouble.

Where is Guido Fawkes?

At the time of writing, Guido's site has been down since first thing this morning.

This is an unfortunate day for him to be having site problems as he had tantalised yesterday evening us by posting that he would have more Smeargate revelations today. Hopefully he will be back up and running soon.

As an aside, I wonder if this problem could be linked with his recent switch from Blogger to Wordpress?

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.

Is Brown legitimately Prime Minister?

One of the consequences of the Smeargate saga is that politicians and journalists are now feeling emboldened to speak out about Gordon Brown's back-room operations.

Alice Miles has written a piece for The Times today in which she talks about the character assassination plots run by Brown's close advisers. Leaving aside the question of whether or not journalists are complicit in spreading this sort of poison (I think they are and Iain Dale has posted on this too), for me this raises an even more important question. Here is an excerpt from Miles' piece:

The poisoning was at its worst in the run-up to the leadership noncontest two years ago. Yesterday I spoke to somebody who balked at challenging Mr Brown then, because he couldn’t face the poisoners. “It’s the reason why Gordon came to office untested,” he said. “When I considered challenging him for the leadership, people warned me it would be a very unpleasant campaign; and it would have been an unpleasant campaign because Gordon’s people would have run it in an extremely vicious way.”

As he spoke, I remembered being told at the time by a number of journalists that one potential candidate was having a mental breakdown, and there was some embarrassing story involving him and a woman doing the rounds. The tales seemed obviously to have been invented by Mr Brown’s muck-spinners. In place of ideas, smears: that contest should have been conducted by open debate, not whispered poison. But Mr Brown was afraid of the debate.

Now this is all hedged through anonymous sources (ironically the exact problem that Miles is identifying in her piece) but it suggests to me that there is a serious question mark over Gordon Brown's legitimacy as Prime Minister of this country. He was not tested in a Labour Party leadership election. His spinners have said previously that this means he was elected "unopposed", i.e. by default in the absence of anybody challenging him. However, if the quotes in the above article are true, it is not because there was nobody who wanted to stand against him, but because potential rivals were afraid of what Brown's bully boys would do if they were to stand. It could be argued that they should have had more courage, and I do think this too, however if I was going to put myself in the firing line for unfounded smears against me and my family from such a powerful machine then I may well have thought twice too.

So, there is now a body of evidence assembling that Gordon Brown became leader without a contest because of his spin machine. If anybody had stood against him, you never know what could have happened. Funny things can happen during leadership campaigns. Look what happened to David Davis who was the clear front runner in the 2005 Conservative leadership election. I have no doubt that Brown feared this too which is why his machine crushed any chance of there being a challenger.

In the light of all this, can Gordon Brown claim any sort of legitimacy to be our Prime Minister?

Smeargate - Fallout

The more I see and read about Smeargate, the more I think that this could be the most damaging thing to happen to Gordon Brown since "The election that never was".

Close political observers know that Gordon Brown has over the years surrounded himself with characters such as Damian McBride to act as his attack dogs. There are plenty of politicians (mostly Labour ones) who have fallen victim to this sort of thing. It is one of the reasons that Brown was elected unopposed in 2007 - his operation had made sure over the years that there was nobody left with any credibility to stand against him.

The thing is, people are now starting to question how his back-room operates. There are various comment pieces and stories coming out about the behaviour of McBride over the years and it is becoming clear that his modus operandi has been to smear and attack by default. It is not credible for Gordon Brown to say that he knew nothing of what was going on. He has fostered the political climate in which McBride was able to operate. Indeed he owes his unopposed election to it.

I doubt we will ever know for sure if Brown knew exactly what was going on regarding Smeargate. Most commentators appear to be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on this. However, even if he did not know anything about it specifically, to a large extent this is irrelevant. If Brown had really wanted to clean up politics and make it spin free like he said when he became PM, he would have called McBride off. He didn't, and that speaks volumes to me about what goes on behind the closed doors of No 10.

Things could now get much worse for Brown. The spin has been to try and close this issue down as isolated and basically an adviser gone rogue as a one off. But the issue has not been closed down. It is still very high up the news agenda 4 days on from the original story. The more this goes on, the more politicians and journalists who have had first-hand experience of McBride and his tactics will feel emboldened to come forward and tell their stories. And the more this happens, the more hollow Downing Street's spin that this was a one off will sound.

I think that if this story is not away from the headlines by tomorrow at the latest then we will start to see real damage to the Prime Minister. He appears to finally be reaping what he has sown over the last 12 years.

Costigan has done an excellent piece on this today. There are also other pieces worth reading here, here and here.