McBride, Draper, and the dangers of political gossip

I used to work in politics, up until about a month ago when I was very glad to leave the stress and exhaustion behind. As an employee of a political party working in a constituency rather than in Westminster, in the great scheme of things I was a very small fish in a pond the size of the Atlantic. Yet even at one (slight) remove from the Westminster bubble I became aware of numerous stories that were doing the rounds which have subsequently come to the attention of the public in recent years.


Politics is full of gossip, at European, national, and local levels, and while those of us with a link hear a lot of the juicy details it is very easy to forget that people on the outside have no idea what is being spread. I well recall my surprise at discussions with family members when Charles Kennedy was ousted as LibDem leader due to his drinking problem - stories had been doing the rounds for years and I had it in my head it was one of those things that "everyone knew". That's part of the problem, I think.


Working in politics has an air of unreality about it, we end up sucked into the machine and think that everyone has the same interest in political-anorak detail and knowledge of juicy stories that we do. It also skews the way we look at news stories and issues. I knew the time had come to leave about a year before I actually did when my first thoughts on hearing about the death of a local politician was related to when the by election might be, who we could put up to stand and what our chances of winning were. I was instantly horrified at myself, but to my shame those genuinely were my first thoughts.


So yes, there is gossip in politics, some stories better founded than others, some juicier than others, and some more malicious than others. The events of the last few days, however, go far beyond that.


It all kicked off publicly with this post on order-order.com, the hugely successful blog written by Paul Staines under the name Guido Fawkes - "the only man to enter Parliament with honest intention. The intention being to blow it up with gunpowder..." However, the seeds were planted several months ago with the return of that obnoxious little shit Derek Draper to Labour politics. He launched himself onto the blogosphere in an attempt, funded by the Unite Union I understand, to produce a pro-Labour popular blog to counter the likes of Guido, Iain Dale and Conservative Home. His early activities were misguided in the extreme since he seems to have decided that the way to build up a profile and support in the blogosphere is to enter into blogwars with Guido and Dale - instead he found he became a figure of fun for many bloggers and no one took him seriously. And this weekend he should, hopefully, have learned not to take on someone like Guido.


Guido Fawkes had, for some time, been hinting at evidence in his possession linking Draper's activities with the heart of the Downing Street operation. Thursday's post was the sign that the shoe was about to drop. He had emails between Draper and Damian McBride, a man in a position of great importance in the Prime Minister's inner circle, which provided evidence of a deliberate, concerted plan to plant salacious stories and deliberate falsehoods about senior Conservative MPs, including David Cameron and George Osborne, as well as Conservative backbencher Nadine Dorres.


Naturally, Downing Street's rapid rebuttal unit swung into action the moment it became clear the full story was to appear in the Sunday Times and News of the World. Saturday's front page story in the Telegraph was extraordinary, especially when you consider that the paper says they were offered the emails and declined. I should point out that the article linked online is not 100% what appeared in the paper - the original article did not mention McBride by name, referring to him as an "unnamed adviser" and "one of Gordon Brown's senior officials". It chose to focus on how the emails were obtained, strongly implying that it was by illegal means, rather than the content and the clear evidence of a vicious smear campaign they contain.

Guido has made his view of the Telegraph's story clear, and on their own website too.


Downing Street desperately tried to play down the significance of the emails, a spokesman describing them as "juvenile and inappropriate". A statement released to the media on Thursday night and said by the Telegraph to come from "a source close to the Downing Street official and Mr Draper" read:

They were knocking round some ideas for a blog, but the whole thing never
got past first base.

To call it an orchestrated smear campaign is ridiculous. It was just
some ill-judged gossip between friends which was never meant to see the light of
day. They appear to be some ideas - laid out in embarrassing detail - for stories which could appear on a Left-wing version of the Guido Fawkes blog called Red Rag.

They're all stories that have been doing the rounds in Westminster for a while, written up in a scurrilous style.

By Saturday evening, McBride had resigned.


I spent a fair amount of time on Saturday evening going through the blogs and the newspaper websites to find out more. Obvious sources were Guido and Dale, but Political Betting also provided some interesting information, and much clicking of links was done. Note the above quote from the source "close to the Downing Street official and Mr Draper", paying special attention to the last sentence. It's trying to suggest this story was in the same league of Westminster gossip as the likes of Charles Kennedy's drinking habits, a line which failed the instant it was subject to scrutiny.


From the blogs last night I had a pretty good idea of what was in some of these emails, and was very interested to read the story in the Sunday Times which, along with the News of the World, opted to publish the story. The front page story says:

The unfounded smears suggested:

• "Putting the fear of God" into Osborne by spreading rumours that he took
  drugs and had sex with a prostitute.
• Spreading rumours about the mental health of Osborne's wife.
• Challenging Cameron to reveal details of an "embarrassing illness".
• Accusing a gay Tory MP of promoting his partner's business interests in the
  Commons.

Dale reproduced parts of the emails with cc line attached - Draper's reply to McBride's suggested stories was copied to Charlie Whelan and Andrew Dodgshon. Whelan had to resign as spin doctor for Gordon Brown in 1999 after leaking information about Mandelson's resignation over his home loan. He currently works part-time for Unite, who fund the LabourList blog run by Draper. Dodgshon is the Political Officer for Unite.

So, we have McBride (a Special Adviser and therefore paid by the taxpayer) providing Draper (who runs LabourList) with false stories written "as I'd write them for the site" for a potential blog to be called Red Rag; Draper deems these stories to be "Absolutely brilliant" and his reply is copied to Whelan and Dodgshon, who work for the union funding LabourList - it is unknown from what Iain Dale has reproduced whether they were copied on McBride's original email, but since he begins it with the word "Gents" there was clearly more than one recipient. McBride also wrote "obviously Andrew will want to adapt for his own house style, length, etc." which rather suggests that Dodgshon was not only a recipient of McBride's original, he was to be the one actually writing Red Rag. "ill-judged gossip between friends"? Sounds a bit more than that to me.

As for the claim that "the whole thing never got past first base", Dizzy seems to have located evidence to the contrary. I had a look earlier tonight and the site was still up, still minus content. I wonder how long it will remain. For a project that "never got past first base" there seems to have been an awful lot of work put into it, given the domain name was registered, a site designed and the holding page put up.

What I also found, in my trawl of the web, is that the stories printed by the Sunday Times may not even be the worst of them. I'm not going to write what the various bits of information I've encountered add up to but if this information is right then the stories Draper and McBride were concocting move from the "scurrilous" to the truly revolting. In one of his two (so far) apologies on LabourList, Draper sends particular apologies to "David and Samantha Cameron". Samantha Cameron was not mentioned in the emails referenced by the Sunday Times. Unless Draper intends to further spin this as a generalised apology for suggesting her husband has an embarrassing illness this might have been a mistake.

As I said, if you work, or indeed are involved as an activist, in politics you do tend to find it has an air of unreality at one remove from what those not involved are aware of or even acceptable. McBride has already discovered the danger of allowing it to take over; Draper has less credibility this week than he had before, not that he had much to begin with. This wasn't mere gossip, it was a concerted effort in lying and smearing. When even Alistair Campbell says of the emails "I was struck .. by their unpleasantness" then you know you have gone far too far.