SpinnersandFakers

Those that live by the spin will also die by the spin. Everything stinks about the latest scandal in which one of the most senior aides to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Special Adviser Damien McBride, resigned Saturday after he circulated untrue and scurrilous rumors about leaders of Britain’s Conservative Party, including David Cameron.

There are two things very wrong about this story. First, the accusations made against the Conservative leaders are outright lies and should not have been fabricated or disseminated, particularly on government time from within the seat of government.

10 Downing Street is not the place for Labour party spin, especially, and this is the second major strand of guilt, when McBride was a Civil Servant, paid for by the public purse, he is not a Labour party employee.

McBride had to resign after a newspaper published a summary of emails he sent to prominent political blogger Derek Draper, a supporter of the ruling Labour party. No doubt it was the Prime Minister who required McBride’s sacrificial removal.

McBride is to Brown what Alastair Campbell was to previous Prime Minister Tony Blair, another spin-doctor. Like we need another bloody spin-doctor. McBride is the very closest of Brown’s political allies, an attack dog who is at the epicenter of Britain’s ruling Labour party elite. He is also a long term intimate friend of the Prime Minister and might well survive in some mutated form in the Labour party’s murky political backwaters.

Is it only me that remembers how Gordon Brown made speeches that under his leadership the days of political spin would be over? Another lie.

Draper said the emails, sent in January, were intended to provide fodder for a gossip website called "The Red Rag" which would attack members of the opposition Conservative party. But in a post to his blog, Labour List, he noted that the website never got off the ground and that the personal attacks were never published.

"In truth these (rumors) were a bit juvenile and inappropriate, and some were in bad taste, though I have to admit some were also brilliant and rather funny," Draper wrote. "As anyone involved in politics knows, though, people come up with lots of daft plans that don't make it off the drawing board."

He did not go into detail about what the stories were and in an interview perversely still tried to defend and justified McBride’s actions with an attack on the media that is publishing them. Draper’s contention being that the perpetrator, McBride, wasn’t really going to pursue these false and childish stories, forgetting that his friend, McBride, had totally fabricated them in the first place. Such warped logic tells you everything about the paranoia and craziness now surrounding the British Prime Minister. 10 Downing Street is beginning to look like the Nixon White House after Watergate.

The Daily Telegraph newspaper said the emails made "innuendo-laden suggestions" about the private lives of Conservative party leaders - but also did not go into any detail.

Brown said in a statement released by his office that there was "no place in politics for the dissemination or publication of material of this kind," without discussing what it said or recognizing that Brown, being the boss behind McBride, shares a great deal of responsibility for the actions of those he hires.

Today the media published the emails – some of them complete with the lurid allegations in them. Like Watergate this small scandal reinforces my view that the people charged with the government of our great democracies are themselves seized by pettiness and stupidity lent to them by their total isolation from reality, otherwise how could they be this stupid.