The McBride affair is a portent of the coming struggle for Labour’s soul

One can only imagine what went through Alistair Darling’s mind last weekend, as the scale of the McBride affair became evident. In his Budget next Wednesday, the Chancellor faces a political mission which was already next to impossible before the email story broke. Now his task has become downright laughable in its scale. To produce a budget with the economy in freefall is hard enough. But to do so with the government disintegrating all around you is scarcely worth attempting. In theory, Damian McBride’s resignation was simply the departure of a spin doctor, already relegated to a ‘back-room’ role. But nobody with the slightest knowledge of the Brown court believes that for a second. This is a moment of deadly, perhaps terminal, peril for the Labour government.

The emails that Mr McBride composed — lurid smears against Tories and their families — are devastating precisely because they are not, as Number 10 disingenuously claims, the isolated ravings of a lone special adviser.