It tears my creative little heart out to tag the lazy old appendage of “gate” onto any sort of scandal, but as that’s what everyone else is calling it, why struggle for originality?!
Update: Just seen this – hilarious!
Update 2: Squirmingly embarrassing damage control spin from Derek Draper – as for the comments…sickbag please!
Not much to comment on really that hasn’t already been said, but a few things I couldn’t help but notice. The Labour bloggers and spinmeisters drafted in to “play this down” just didn’t help the cause one little bit. A couple of tactics I saw and heard repeatedly throughout the day were:
“Paul Staines [aka Guido Fawkes] sold this on for a tidy sum” – er, no, he made it clear several times that he didn’t sell the story.
Another “excuse” was that this was “tittle-tattle – a couple of friends pranking about” or (my favourite, this one) “ a few silly ideas”.
To me, there’s a whole world of difference between “a few silly ideas” and a concerted and organized tax-payer funded smear-campaign to lie about inoccent people, or worse still, the wives of your political opponents.
Remember, Damian McBride wasn’t a naive blogger, he was about as close to Gordon Brown as spin doctors get. And the campaign wasn’t even based on facts – the whole point that stinks so badly is that these were totally unfounded allegations based on nothing but the sick, twisted and enfeebled mins of McBride and his chum Derek Draper. Oh, and a website, the red rag, was purchased several months ago. And this was all paid for by the taxpayer. Oh, and there was a timeline of releases, including who should say what and when for maximum damage. But hey, nothing more than a few silly ideas, right?
NuLabour just don’t get it – if the very best you can do is an ad-hominem attack on your opponents, you’ve lost the argument already.
Remember when the Conservative EuroMP Dan Hannan got more views than all of Gordon Browns official videos put together? The best The Guardian could do was call him a toff.
Remember when Labour lauched an attack on Conservative candidate Andrew Timpson? They called him a toff. He won.
And remember another Labour spin doctor, Jo Moore? While thousands were perishing in the inferno on september 11, 2001, she wrote that it would be “a very good day to bury bad news“.
Anyway, a rather untidy collection of links, in case the whole story passed anyone by…
Guido Fawke’s blog
No 10 official quits over e-mails
Blears attacks political bloggers
No 10 ’smear’ messages published
http://theredrag.co.uk/
http://derekdrapersblog.blogspot.com/
http://www.labourlist.org/derek-draper-emails
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7994000/7994609.stm
http://plato-says.blogspot.com/
http://liberalbureaucracy.blogspot.com/
