Samizdata

You probably missed it, because how the hell can anyone keep up with this stuff? But, I just happened to chance upon a couple of comments (numbers 269 and 276) on this at Guido’s, both of which had, copied and pasted into them, this:

Downing Street in ‘meltdown’

PRWeek – David Singleton 15-Apr-09

Downing Street was this week in ‘meltdown’ as Gordon Brown’s inner circle attempted to limit the fallout from the Damian McBride scandal.

Well-placed sources told PRWeek there was mounting fear in the heart of Downing Street that fresh revelations about senior MPs could emerge over the next few weeks and months leading up to the general election.

Brown’s close lieutenants such as Ed Balls, Tom Watson and Ian Austin are all believed to be vulnerable. It is feared fresh stories could be revealed by the handful of journalists who were fed negative stories by the Brown camp – or as a result of further emails that were sent to Labour blogger Derek Draper being made public.

One Downing Street insider said there had been ‘endless conference calls and crisis meetings’ since the story of McBride’s plans to smear senior Tories broke on Saturday.

The source added: ‘This is a full on disaster for Gordon – Downing Street is in meltdown. But it is more of a problem for Brown’s inner circle than it is for the Government more broadly.

‘The great fear of Brownites is that all of their activities over many years are suddenly now at risk of spilling out. It is an open secret that Gordon’s operation has been carrying out character assassinations, leaking documents and briefing against ministers and so on, but nobody has ever caught them red handed – until now. Now they have been caught out, it becomes legitimate to talk about all the other occasions.

‘It is a bit like getting Al Capone on his tax returns; it is actually one relatively minor misdemeanour – by no means are those emails the worst thing that Brown’s operation has ever done.’

Another source with close links to Downing Street said the PM’s defence was looking increasingly fragile: ‘Brown has had to stake his defence on this being a rogue operation, a single aberration that nobody else knew anything about.

‘The worry is that someone will produce evidence that it went much wider than this handful of emails and it went much wider than McBride.’

Which they will, because it did.

In short, matters are developing exactly as I told you they would in this posting. Brown’s ludicrous claim not to believe in dirty tricks has turned this from a few dogs chasing a small smear of dirt (The Emails and who knew what about them and whether anyone had tried to spread the particular smears in them) into a thousand dogs swimming happily in a quarter of a century of liquified shit, and now, too late, Downing Street realises it. But, like I say, it’s too late.

These people are smart enough to realise the terminal mess they are now in. Good. Nobody is smart enough to extricate them from it. Good again.

Alice Miles in the Times:

The media are all chorusing now: we knew, we called him McNasty and McPoison, we had nothing to do with him, he sent us foul messages, we didn’t like him. But the point is, we did know. We may not have known the detail of the nasty smears about senior Conservatives that Mr McBride was dreaming up, but we knew about the smears against his own side. We knew what he was up to, and we knew that he was being paid more than £100,000 a year of public money to do it – and we did nothing to stop it.

Mr McBride used the system of anonymous briefings under which political journalism operates to spread dirt about Labour opponents of Mr Brown. Should journalists still be under a duty to protect their sources when those sources are abusing public money, or should we have been bolder in exposing it? Mr McBride did not poison the well on his own. There has long been a “dirty tricks” cabal around Mr Brown that any Westminster journalist or minister could name – Ian Austin, Tom Watson, Ed Balls, Mr McBride and, formerly, Charlie Whelan, who is now political officer of the Unite super-union (and working hard to place favoured candidates in winnable seats for the next election).

The poisoning was at its worst in the run-up to the leadership noncontest two years ago. Yesterday I spoke to somebody who balked at challenging Mr Brown then, because he couldn’t face the poisoners. “It’s the reason why Gordon came to office untested,” he said. “When I considered challenging him for the leadership, people warned me it would be a very unpleasant campaign; and it would have been an unpleasant campaign because Gordon’s people would have run it in an extremely vicious way.”

Which makes quite a change from:

Mr Brown is a good, decent man but …

See what I mean about the dead tree dog pack? These people just are not scared of Gordon Brown any more, or of his dogs. They are now more scared of him getting booted out before they have each stuck their knives in. I can’t see Brown lasting into next year now, I really can’t. I give him a month at the most.

UPDATE: Here‘s Guido. Summary: Now they tell us. Watch the film clip and note that the Cameron machine gets mentioned, not at all grovellingly.