It may have happened last night, but Damian McBride’s interview on Newsnight was responsible for a lot of talk today, not least because it led Jeremy Paxman to say ‘McPrickface’ live on air. listen to ‘Damian McBride defends his memoirs on Newsnight’ on Audioboo
The first copies of Damian McBride’s book dropped in Brighton today, and the former spinner has been explaining not just his actions in government but why on earth he decided to write about them. Here are the highlights of his confessions: Nearly everything the former spin doctor has said so far suggests he is quite contrite about his actions. On Newsnight last night, McBride said of his ‘victims’: ‘I do feel ashamed, I do feel sorry to those individuals whose careers I affected and even more so to the sort of innocent bystanders who were caught in the way’ listen to ‘Damian McBride defends his memoirs on Newsnight’ on Audioboo
listen to ‘Ed Balls on Today: ‘This recovery is not working for working families’’ on Audioboo
Damian McBride broke cover and made his first broadcast appearance this evening on Newsnight, defending his upcoming memoirs. McBride said he is ‘sorry and ashamed’ for those he targeted while in government. Part one of his interview is above and the second half below:
Ed Miliband is not the only person who wanted Gordon Brown to sack Damian McBride. At an IPPR fringe event this evening, Douglas Alexander told The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland he urged the Prime Minister to sack McBride over media briefings that his sister Wendy should be sacked; briefings which McBride claimed came from Douglas: ‘I did urge Gordon to dismiss someone, it was Damian McBride. That might explain the way he has briefed against me then and writes about me now. ‘Listen, I was always a supporter of my sister. The politics that he represents is destructive, divisive and ultimately, deeply damaging to our politics and our cause. ‘That was
If you want to know just how much anger Damian McBride’s book has created in the Labour party—and particularly its Blairite wing, just watch Alastair Campbell’s interview with Andrew Neil on The Sunday Politics. Campbell doesn’t scream or shout but the anger in his voice as he discusses McBride’s antics is palpable. He did not sound like a man inclined to forgive and forget. This whole row is, obviously, a massive conference distraction. Those close to Ed Miliband had hoped that this year, the Labour leader would get a free run at conference now that his brother has quite politics. But as one of his colleagues said to me late
If you want to know why Damian McBride was such a feared figure in Whitehall, read the section in his memoirs about how he sowed division between Charles Clarke, then the Home Secretary, and Louise Casey, the anti-social behaviour tsar. McBride’s approach was far more cunning than straight negative briefings or leaks. Rather, he went through the government grid looking for announcements in this policy area and then briefed them out to the papers in a way that made it sound like it had come from either Clarke or Casey’s teams. The result was that both sides became convinced that the other was trying to take all the credit for what
Ever since the publication date of Damian McBride’s book was set for the week of the Labour autumn conference, it was clear that the party would find itself lugging a bit of the past around as it tries to talk about what it wants to do in the future. But perhaps it wasn’t clear quite what a festival of letting skeletons wander out of closets this week would be. There isn’t one particularly horrifying skeleton, but the effect both of McBride’s book, serialised in the Mail, and the cache of emails released by Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, former Number 10 strategic communications director, is to trawl up a row that had lain
‘Drug use; spousal abuse; secret alcoholism; extra-marital affairs. I estimate I did nothing with 95 per cent of the stories I was told. But, yes, some of them ended up on the front pages of Sunday newspapers.’ And with this starts the serialisation of what will be perhaps the most explosive book about British politics for ten years. Damian McBride’s memoirs look every bit as good as I had hoped. The Daily Mail serialisation today gives a taste of what should really be called ‘confessions of a political hit man’ – the methods and motives of Team Brown, perhaps most ruthless and effective bunch of character assassins that Westminster has ever
Damian McBride’s memoirs will naturally make uncomfortable reading for the Labour party, but the current occupants of Downing Street will also be feasting on his lesson in the dark arts, and wondering if there is anything they can take from it too. This sounds like an odd thing to say when so much condemnation for the poisoned operation of the Brownites (and, as Peter Oborne points out, the operation around Blair too) is flying about today. But the question of whether the current government needs its own Damian McBride is one that has occupied Tory MPs who like to think about these things for a while. In February, when McBride
MPs are debating that Cut With the Awkward Name, the Under-occupation of Social Housing: Housing Benefit Entitlement, also known by its opponents as the ‘bedroom tax’, this afternoon. I’ve already posted about some of the problems that this policy might throw up, however well-intentioned, but there’s also an important political point here. When I talk to Tory MPs about this cut, some of them accept that there are problems with specific cases, and with the number of smaller homes that are actually available for people to move into (interestingly, one housing association has reclassified its properties so tenants can avoid being eligible for the cut), but what exercises them more
‘The election that never was’ is one of the most important events, or non-events, in recent British political history; if it had gone ahead, David Cameron might never have become Prime Minister and there might not have been a coalition at all. Equally, Gordon Brown could have seen Labour’s majority slashed and had to quit long before the financial crisis hit. The story of what happened that day has been told several times. But I don’t think I’ve read a more gripping account than Damian McBride’s. McBride did disgrace himself but he can sure as hell write. If you like the political game, you really sure read it. (There’s also
What could possibly go wrong when you lock 10,000 political hacks and flacks in a hotel for 96 hours and let lobbyists pick up the tab? Well that’s party conference for you, and there have been some excellent tales of drunken debauchery over the last few years. The most riotous parties are the ones upstairs in the private suites of the main conference hotel. Representing the Tory side, Lord Strathclyde fills his bathtub with ice and champagne and opens his doors every year. Rumour has it that he always deserves a magnum for later. Last year, one Tory MP went so far as to punch a colleague. Other MPs had to drag one of them away. It was all denials
Yesterday, in his statement to the Commons, David Cameron responded to a question from Labour MP Helen Goodman about Andy Coulson by saying: ‘He was vetted. He had a basic level of vetting. He was not able to see the most secret documents in the Government. I can write to the hon. Lady if she wants the full details of that vetting. It was all done in the proper way. He was subject to the special advisers’ code of conduct. As someone shouted from behind me, he obeyed that code, unlike Damian McBride.’ The story has developed since then. Channel Four have been told by unidentified sources that Coulson’s lack
The penance of Damian McBride continues. After being ejected from No10, and disowned by his mentor Ed Balls, I can reveal that our antihero now has a new job – head of media at the Catholic overseas aid charity CAFOD. He will be doubtless be brilliantly effective at briefing against its enemies (in CAFOD’s case, hunger and the devil). I imagine the pay is several leagues below what he’d get from cashing in on his notoriety and publishing a hit man’s confessions. The weird thing is that McBride could have done so well, had he steered clear of Balls. He was a Treasury
John Rentoul has already pulled the best passage from this preview of a forthcoming radio series on Gordon Brown. But I reckon that the testimony of Spencer Livermore, the former strategy chief in No.10, deserves a spot in the Westminster scrapbook: “Mr Livermore, who was Downing Street’s director of political strategy, regrets not warning about the downside of scrapping the election when Team Brown got cold feet as polling in marginal seats suggested only a slim Labour majority. ‘I don’t think it’s possible. Does anyone?’ the Prime Minister told his inner circle at the crucial meeting. The mood was ‘very, very sombre’, according to Mr Livermore. Ed Miliband told Mr
John Rentoul, who knows a successful Labour leader when he sees one, is having palpitations about David Miliband’s latest hustings speech. Everyone seems to be in fact. I’ve taken a look, following the Berkeleian principle that if everyone thinks something is important it invariably is. It’s a good speech. At last, one of the Labour leadership contenders has attacked Gordon Brown. Under Gordon Brown, Miliband argues, Labour’s failings, spin and high-handedness intensified. An expression about Sherlock and excrement comes to mind, but the first stage in a party’s renewal is to admit defeat, acknowledge failure and offer contrition. David Miliband has begun that process, which can only serve him well.
Ed Balls has been on the phone to Mehdi Hasan of the New Statesman. ‘Nothing to do with me Guv,’ is his response to the Independent’s story about briefings against Andy Burnham. Balls has gone to great lengths to re-invent himself. Ever since the Damian McBride scandal, the former Education Secretary has tried to banish the bully-boy reputation he built as Gordon Brown’s protégé. Masks barely obscure the face; but, to be fair to Balls, his opponents benefit from recalling his unpalatable past. During the New Statesman’s leadership debate, Ed Miliband said: “It’s just like being back in the Treasury, Ed!” So it’s plausible that the anti-Burnham briefings may have
I have just watched the last images of the election campaign on the Ten O’Clock News on the BBC. David Cameron was surrounded by some seriously off-putting party apparatchiks (why not choose some of the perfectly presentable and normal-looking young people for CCHQ rather than these awful gargoyles?), meanwhile Gordon Brown was struggling to fill a room and Nick Clegg was being mobbed. I remember a Labour spin doctor (OK it was Damian McBride) telling me that he knew Gordon could never win a beauty contest against David Cameron. He didn’t seem to have twigged that modern elections are beauty contests – that is one of the reasons Tony Blair
On the afternoon of 4 June 2009, John Hutton, then Secretary of State for Defence, told the House of Commons: ‘Every one of our servicemen and women has the right to know that we are doing everything possible to ensure that every pound of investment in our equipment programme goes towards the front line and is not wasted in inefficient or weak processes of acquisition. That is why I asked Bernard Gray in December last year to conduct a detailed examination of progress in implementing the MOD’s acquisition change programme, as I hope right hon. and hon. Members will recall. I have to be satisfied that the current programme of
