Alice Miles in the Times:
The media are all chorusing now: we knew, we called him McNasty and McPoison, we had nothing to do with him, he sent us foul messages, we didn’t like him. But the point is, we did know. We may not have known the detail of the nasty smears about senior Conservatives that Mr McBride was dreaming up, but we knew about the smears against his own side. We knew what he was up to, and we knew that he was being paid more than £100,000 a year of public money to do it – and we did nothing to stop it.
Mr McBride used the system of anonymous briefings under which political journalism operates to spread dirt about Labour opponents of Mr Brown. Should journalists still be under a duty to protect their sources when those sources are abusing public money, or should we have been bolder in exposing it? Mr McBride did not poison the well on his own. There has long been a “dirty tricks” cabal around Mr Brown that any Westminster journalist or minister could name – Ian Austin, Tom Watson, Ed Balls, Mr McBride and, formerly, Charlie Whelan, who is now political officer of the Unite super-union (and working hard to place favoured candidates in winnable seats for the next election).
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.”
Which makes quite a change from:
See what I mean about the dead tree dog pack? These people just are not scared of Gordon Brown any more, or of his dogs. They are now more scared of him getting booted out before they have each stuck their knives in. I can’t see Brown lasting into next year now, I really can’t. I give him a month at the most.
UPDATE: Here‘s Guido. Summary: Now they tell us. Watch the film clip and note that the Cameron machine gets mentioned, not at all grovellingly.
Congrats Brian- your good sense vindicated once again!
A month is about what I concluded a couple of months back. I still think it’s feasible he’ll have to go to the country on June 4th. I thought that one or other or both of the G20 event or the budget due next week would be the fatal blow.
I just cannot see how Darling can present a budget without it either being so opaque to hide emerging problems (but which most independent agencies like the IFS have been talking about for months) or so open and therefore putting the real cost of the response to the credit crunch in the public eye.
I have even pondered whether in fact this might be one occasion (perhaps the first since Lloyd-George’s People’s Budget a hundred years ago the week after Darling’s budget) where the Finance Bill may not even get passed – though this time blocked by the Commons rather than the Lords as in 1909 – through a combination of Labour’s backbenchers demanding more help for the little people and less for the bankers and the opposition parties calling for the “return” of Prudence.
He’d still have a couple of weeks after the budget, to see how the debates on it were going, to decide to call a short General Election campaign for polling on the same day as the Euro and county elections.
There’s been a steady stream of relatively good news, about “green shoots”, market rallies and renewed activity in the housing market (all of which I rather suspect to be more like the pause in the falls in early 1930 rather than an actual bottom of the recession), and if he’s got half an eye on that, he may conclude too that now’s the only time to go to the polls before the downward slide resumes – and which would last till well after the last possible election date in 2010.
Someone told me last year a snap round the Euro elections would be least worst for Labour since UKIP would split some of the Tory vote (when people’s minds are on Europe). Not sure how true that is. But a closer match is probably best for us. It is not as if we are going to benefit from a large Tory majority so, for libertarians, best if they keep it close and, if possible, stagnant!
There are quite a few Tories of libertarian leanings, so long as they don’t get a thumping great majority so Cameron can ram anything he wants through, a slenderish Conservative victory would be ideal.
I and many others have long said that Gordon Brown’s moral compass was demagnetised years or even decades ago.
The same goes for all the pestilential Cabinet of his. Frank Field excepted.
In Book IV of “Gulliver’s Travels” the hapless mariner ends up in the land of Houyhnhnms and Yahoos. The Houyhnhnms are intelligent horses and the Yahoos are savage humans. Their society is described thus:
“He had heard, indeed, some curious Houyhnhnms observe, that in most herds there was a sort of ruling Yahoo (as among us there is generally some leading or principal stag in a park), who was always more deformed in body, and mischievous in disposition, than any of the rest; that this leader had usually a favourite as like himself as he could get, whose employment was to lick his master’s feet and posteriors, and drive the female Yahoos to his kennel; for which he was now and then rewarded with a piece of ass’s flesh. This favourite is hated by the whole herd, and therefore, to protect himself, keeps always near the person of his leader. He usually continues in office till a worse can be found; but the very moment he is discarded, his successor, at the head of all the Yahoos in that district, young and old, male and female, come in a body, and discharge their excrements upon him from head to foot.”
Swift was satirising the politics of his time, but his imagery seems perfectly suited to what is happening today.
It will be interesting to see the newspapers’ circulation figures when the dust has settled. I suspect this could be their Ratner moment, where the papers admit that their product is, in fact, rubbish.