Labour feuds, smears laid bare in book by spin doctor

London Evening Standard/London

Damian McBride confesses to helping Gordon Brown drive his leading rivals out of the Cabinet by using the dark arts of media manipulation.

In the disturbingly candid book, serialised in the Daily Mail, the spin doctor says he routinely discredited opponents by tipping off newspapers about ‘drug use, spousal abuse, alcoholism and extra-marital affairs’.

Coming from a figure so central to Brown’s political operation, the book will hugely embarrass Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, the former prime minister’s two closest allies.

The pair were in constant contact with McBride, raising urgent questions over what they knew of his brutal tactics.

The memoir will send shockwaves through the Labour party ahead of next week’s annual conference.

Key revelations include:

l McBride helped destroy Home Secretary Charles Clarke by fabricating a briefing war between him and a key Blair adviser;

l Another obstacle to Brown, John Reid quit the same Cabinet post after McBride leaked details of his alleged ‘drinking, fighting and carousing’;

l Allegations about another minister, Ivan Lewis, pestering a female aide were leaked to punish him for criticising Brown’s tax policies;

l McBride confesses to logging in to Brown’s office e-mail and leaking details of restricted or confidential documents to discredit opponents;

l Brown developed an elaborate ‘political intelligence operation’ with ‘moles’ on the teams of rival ministers;

l Shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander knifed his own sister Wendy, the Scottish Labour leader, urging her dismissal over a minor donations controversy;

l As his premiership faltered, Brown desperately tried to recruit celebrity advisers including Simon Cowell, Lorraine Kelly, Fiona Phillips and Lord Sugar.

McBride was forced to resign as Brown’s special adviser in 2009 after he was linked to a plot to smear Tory MPs via an anti-Conservative gossip website.

The e-mails included fabricated slurs about the politicians’ health and private lives.

His book Power Trip, which will be published next week, tells the inside story of his own downfall, which plunged Brown’s Downing Street into scandal and chaos from which it never recovered. It gives the inside track of the years of bitter infighting between Brown and Tony Blair, the spinning and plotting that ended the careers of senior ministers and the banking collapse that came close to plunging Britain into anarchy.

Many of the key figures in his story are still leading lights in Westminster, which he brands ‘the binge drinking capital of Britain’.

McBride confesses that he was ‘sucked in’ to the ‘dark’ world of politics, which he says encourages vanity, duplicity, greed, hypocrisy and cruelty.

“Some people will undoubtedly wonder why – if Gordon knew I was guilty of misbehaviour – he never either formally reined me in or had me moved on,” he writes. “And my answer to that is simply that there was something unspoken between us ... the unspoken word was from me to him, and said: “Don’t question my methods”.’

He gives extraordinary accounts of his role in trashing both Clarke and John, now Lord, Reid, as they emerged as rivals to Brown in the bitter battle to succeed Blair. In 2005, when Clarke was home secretary and a threat to Brown’s succession, McBride manufactured what looked like a briefing war between him and Blair’s anti-social behaviour ‘czar’ Louise Casey. Newspapers were duped into thinking the pair were bitter rivals over home affairs policy – and the apparent feud contributed to Blair sacking Clarke in 2006.

McBride later told journalists Blair had been in tears as he dismissed him. He also confesses to helping to destroy Lord Reid, who was the one remaining ‘obstacle’ when Brown finally had the chance to run for the leadership. McBride says he started to leak from a ‘black book’ of stories he had gathered about Lord Reid’s alleged escapades in the 1980s and 1990s, when he and Brown were both in the Commons.