The revelations over the weekend about Damian McBride’s pitiful smear campaign have probably delivered the fatal blow to Labour’s chances of winning the next election. The only possible excuse for writing such filth would be that it served the interests of the battle against the Tories. It has had the opposite effect. Most decent people would think twice about voting for a government that permitted such a culture to exist in Downing Street.
The poison expressed in McBride’s infantile stratagem has fed back into the bloodstream of the party he was supposed to be serving (let’s not pretend for a moment that he was acting as a civil servant in this.
But the real question is not why McBride did it, but why Gordon Brown allowed this individual to operate for so long at the heart of government. The episode raises serious questions about the Prime Minister’s judgement, especially as he had the chance to get rid of him quietly last year.
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