Damian McBride and today’s Downing Street spin operation

Damian McBride’s memoirs will naturally make uncomfortable reading for the Labour party, but the current occupants of Downing Street will also be feasting on his lesson in the dark arts, and wondering if there is anything they can take from it too. This sounds like an odd thing to say when so much condemnation for the poisoned operation of the Brownites (and, as Peter Oborne points out, the operation around Blair too) is flying about today. But the question of whether the current government needs its own Damian McBride is one that has occupied Tory MPs who like to think about these things for a while. In February, when McBride appeared before the Public Administration Select Committee, he was asked by Robert Halfon whether he thought the current operation needed someone like him:

Halfon: Just putting the negative stuff to one side that affected you in your last years, do you think Downing Street needs a Damian McBride?

McBride: It depends what, I don’t want to talk about myself in the third person, but it depends what kind of Damian McBride, what year I was working in.