Is this the real winner from “Smear-gate”?
What are the dangers for the Tories?
Will Brown’s letter take the heat out of the crisis?
SkyNews …or will it just open up more questions? I don’t know whether Paul Staines (Guido) planned it like this but launching his story bang in the middle of a long bank holiday weekend has certainly helped it dominate now three full new cycles. During normal periods when the world is at work other stories are likely to emerge and it can be harder for something like “Smeargate” to maintain the traction. Well the latest development is from Number 10…
Has Gord’s world just got a bit more dangerous?
Will MPs be less intimidated by a McBride-less No.10? One thing that’s stood out during this sorry Easter weekend for Labour has been the number of party MPs who’ve been prepared to put their heads above the parapet and condemn the McBridge-Draper smear strategy. We saw it on PB with the forthright comments on one of the threads by Nick Palmer MP and there was a tough condemnation on the Tom Harris blog. Given that there’ve been so many within…
Is it now all down-hill for Labour in the media?
Guardian.co.uk Ex-Brown loyalist Jackie Ashley puts the knife in The daily press get their first chance this morning to mull over the McBride-Draper smear campaign and for me there is one column that stands out – not the least because it comes from someone who was once one of Brown’s most vociferous media cheer-leaders, Jackie Ashley. In her Monday Guardian column she describes the tactics that over the years that have characterised the Brown style. She writes of “the ideologically…
How much worse can it get for Labour?
BBC News Should Gordon apologise for the emails? In all likelihood, a year from today the election campaign will be underway, and a month after that this government may well have been ejected from office. Will the spring of 2009 be looked at as the time when the government’s demise finally became irrevocable and terminal? For all his grandstanding on the G20 stage, the poll bounce was modest, and Brown has subsequently been brought back down to earth by the…
Draper apologises…
LabourList Is this going to be enough to draw a line under the affair? “But Damian did write and send those emails, I did respond hastily and stupidly and now, thanks – it appears – to someone hacking into my private emails, they are in the public domain. Damian has paid a heavy price for writing them but I have to stress one important point: without the hacking they would never ever have seen the light of day. They were…
Guidogate: how much impact will it have?
Sky News In the middle of a political storm, it’s not always easy to keep a grasp of perspective – and there’s no doubt that over the last two days, there’s been a veritable political storm. The question is to what extent this is a Westminster Village story and to what extent does it go beyond that? As yet, the direct damage is limited: one advisor to Gordon Brown has resigned and serious questions hang over the future of a blogger…
LabourList has been removed
This might seem a pathetic small gesture but I am so outraged by the use that appeared to be planned for LabourList that I have removed the link to the site from PB’s blogroll. Others bloggers ought to do the same.