This posting will tell any Brits who care about it absolutely nothing, but perhaps our many American readers should be told about this. This being the downfall of one of Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s closest advisers. A certain Damian McBride has “resigned” because of some emails about smearing various Conservatives that he sent to another Labourite, the widely despised Derek Draper, who tries to blog for Labour.
Blogger Guido Fawkes is being credited with this outcome, not least by the guilty men themselves. They have spent much airtime today jabbering away on Sky News, the BBC, etc, about how “disgusted” they are that their emails have been read. Disgusted that they were caught was how it sounded. Guido’s numerous commenters are exulting. “Good on you Guido”, “we must mark the date in our diaries”, but “mission definitely not accomplished” until such time as this government beast or that government beast (a certain Tom Watson MP is apparently next in line for the chop), or the King Beast himself, are nailed to the Guido wall.
King Beast Brown, I mean. For there is indeed something very Nixonian about this, or at any rate it feels that way today. The thing to get is that Damien McBride is not like some College Republican ratfucking prankster. He is much higher up the greasy pole than that, far nearer to the H. R. Haldeman end of things, talking every day with the Big Beast himself.
By the way, the sneer quotes each side of “resigned” two paragraphs up are because when heavyweights in this government “resign”, all that happens is they change titles and move office. They keep their actual jobs and they get even huger pay-offs than otherwise, if only to stop them telling the truth to the media instead of the dribbling evasions they are pushing now.
The resigned one and his various defenders, including Draper, are asking us all to believe that their Downing Street computers were hacked into, and for all I know that may be true. But if that is so, what does it say about the wisdom of creating a Database State, given that these are the plonkers who will be in charge of it? As Guido has just pointed out, this was the week the government awarded itself the right to read all our emails.
Anyway, my basic point is: remember that big cheese TV guy in America who got caught making use of a forged letter that said something bad about someone, and remember how it was bloggers who blew the story to bits. And remember how people said during all that that this was blogging really making itself felt for the first time in real world politics. Well, that moment just happened here in little old Britain. Tomorrow, this will be all over the Sunday papers. Guido’s face and Guido’s blog – the actual blog, how it looks – is being flashed all over the TV news as I write this.
The most telling moment for me was when I dialed up Guido Fawkes, and instead merely got a big message saying: “Error establishing a database connection”. A lot of people, a lot more than usual, are tuning in to Guido just now, or trying to.
What a shame that the end result of this and other such dramas will merely be a Conservative government presided over by David Cameron. I still live in hope that such a government might be rather better than the present one, but I am not counting on it. Which makes me rejoice particularly at this, from Guido:
McPoison accuses Guido of having Tory backers – it just shows that they just don’t get it – this blog was started for free, with no committee behind it, no plan, on a whim. It is Guido’s plaything. The Tories are rightly wary of Guido and incidentally they have a PR problem tomorrow – the last thing they want are half truths mixed with smears getting out into the open uncontrollably.
The really important stuff will come when Guido gets stuck into the Conservatives for being too statist.
Yes Brian.
It is a victory for the blogosphere in general and for “Guido Fawkes” in particular.
Guido has struck a blow for “truth and justice” as the old films used to say.
He has expossed the fact that rather than really be a “concerned with saving the world economy, and not interested in petty politics” the machine of Gordon Brown is involved with lies and disinformation for political gain.
In the United States every day the Whitehouse Chief of Staff has a conference call with the head of the “Centre for American Progress” and other specialists in agitprop to decide how they will use their servants in the mainstream media to spread smears about anyown who opposes the policies of President Barack Obama.
Sadly America has yet to find its Guido Fawkes – Mike Druge has not be able to do what he has done.
Can somebody actually guide me to the texts of the e-mails, or are they not on the net as of yet?
Remember, Guido scalped Peter Hain last year who, as a cabinet minister, I reckon counts as a slightly bigger fish.
Brian this is a great posting keep at it, your thinking is needed.
Nick
The reason this has the feel to me of a first for the blogosphere is that the regular politicians are all yelling at Guido, and the big news people quoting Guido, the way they never did over the Peter Hain resignation, or not as I recall.
This lady, who has just been linked to by Guido, confirms that feeling: http://janemerrick.independentminds.livejournal.com/7629.html
What’s on the Downing Street computers is ultimately our property. (Well, not mine, since I’m an American.)
Of course, these are generally the same people who had no problem with the idea of hacking into Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account.
Strictly speaking, Guido is wrong, the government hasn’t awarded itself the right to read all our emails, it has just made it easier for hundreds of official bodies to see who we email (phone, text) and when, something they’ve been able authorise themselves (I am not making this up) to do for several years.
The order requiring ISPs to keep all the relevant details for inspection has taken itself nearly 4 years to launder through the EU. (Not with universal popularity: two member states went so far as to go to the European Court to try and get the directive overturned.) It isn’t a sudden whim.
In this case, however, it would be very embarrassing for HMG for outsiders to know exactly who McBride has been emailing and when. It would illuminate the relationships nicely. Which is of course why the authorities want to do it to all us
private individualsterrorist suspects.Brian is right, the political class and the mainstream media never credited Guido with the downfall of Peter Hain. Now, however, there’s no doubt that Guido and Guido alone was responsible for McBride’s downfall. And suddenly a lot of people in the political class are very, very afraid. This of course, is a good thing.
If I were Paul Staines however, I might be a bit worried myself. He’s made a lot of very powerful enemies, and there will be people gunning for him now who previously would have ignored him, not just the ludicrous Draper.
And referring to Paul Marks’ comments above, Matt Drudge is not a blogger much less a Guido analogue. However he did break the Monica Lewinsky story when the mainstream media wouldn’t touch it, so he’s had his moments.
The final point in this post is particularly important. The Tories had better realise that Guido and other bloggers like him are libertarians, not water-carrying Tories.
One thing I have noticed about the Tea Party protests in the US, a process encouraged by the internet, is that the protesters have been keen to keep some distance between them and the Republicans. The trouble with the pond-lifes who compose NuLabour is that they think everything that hits them is a Tory Plot. What is so effective about Guido is precisely that he owes the Tories nothing at all. That is precisely the point.
Keep it up! For quite a hile now I have been saying “when exactly was it that I moved to communist Russia of the 1970s?”
Johnathan, I said somewhere else in my comment box travels, can’t remember where, that one significant thing that is positive is that libertarianism is becoming recognised in the wider world. For instance, Cameron actually declaring “we are not libertarians”. I think this is quite significant. We are all doing our bit at what marxists call “consciousness raising”, thanks to the internet. Every time a mainstream politician denies libertarianism, it’s a little advert for us, bringing the term to people who didn’t even know it existed.
We also need to shift our guns from Labour. They’re almost certainly toast in the next election, and the Tories are going to be in power, and it’s them we’ll be arguing against as they take their turn to extend the state further into our lives. While it’s nice cheering the good ship New Labour as it sinks, we need to already start gunning for the tories with all our might, with the emphasis on shaming them into caution regarding infringement of civil- and particularly personal- liberties.
I am convinced that if you picked a telephone directory at random, opened it wherever, closed your eyes and put a pin in, the resulting name would probably be a better Prime Minister than Brown (If Freakonomics are to be believed there would be a 93% probability of their being honest- a main requirement). So of course Cameron would be a better prime minister. The question remains of course how much better.
And don’t write Brown off yet- after all a 10% Tory lead would give something close to a hung parliament- and the Liberals have previous for allying with Labour.
There is no expectation more certain to be disappointed than that which says “nobody can be worse than this”.
As Mick Flanders once said: “Nil combustibus pro fumo.“
“big cheese TV guy in America who got caught making use of a forged letter that said something bad about someone”
Dan Rather.
Maybe April 11 will be remembered as Guido Fawkes Day.
This mention of “some College Republican ratfucking prankster,” is that merely hypothetical (College Republicans I’ve known are disappointingly timid) or do you have personal knowledge of one or more of these CR pranksters that exist in the wild?
If it’s the latter, please share!
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645292