Brown should apologise for what his adviser and his lunch companion did

Alan Johnson is busy claiming that “Gordon Brown had nothing to do with this. You apologise for the things you are responsible for”. But the Prime Minister should apologise because McBride was his adviser and the smears arose out of a culture that Brown had either fostered or allowed to develop. As Trevor Kavanagh says in The Sun this morning:

“The PM likes to be seen as a bookish intellectual, a Son of the Manse devoted to “the right thing”.

In fact he spends more of his remorseless energy plotting against perceived enemies — Labour and Tory — than on making Britain great again.” One wonders whether Brown’s obsession against plotting is why Derek Draper, hardly a policy wonk, was invited—as Guido reminds us—to lunch at Chequers in November last year. 

The proof of whether Brown really does disapprove of what happened and really is sorry about it will be whether he forces his partisans to change the way they operate.