It is a given that David Cameron’s “fury” over the McBride/Draper email smears is synthetic. But Sunny Hundal, at Liberal Conspiracy, is off the mark when he says:
A lot of newspapers have focused on how New Labour has always been about spin and briefings and backstabbings. Perhaps.
No, not "perhaps". While it is true that New Labour has been about more than toxic manipulation of the media – e.g., investing in the NHS and state schools (good), warmongering (bad) – very nasty rumour making and malicious briefings have characterised their project since the 1980s, to my own personal knowledge. Being in the party was no defence against their malice, indeed it seemed that they regarded it as provocation if you were a critic within or even just a colleague in government who found himself or herself out of favour. Among others, the novelist Ken Follett and his MP wife Barbara found themselves briefed against (as I understand it), but Follett hit back fiercely with an article in the Observer in July 2000, condemning briefings against Mo Mowlem and Tessa Jowell. He wrote that Tony Blair risked being remembered “as the Prime Minister who made malicious gossip an everyday tool of modern British government. I’m talking about ‘briefing’, the practice of vilifying your colleagues in off-the-record briefings conversations with journalists.”
While editing Labour's monthly magazine, New Socialist, I suffered from a constant series of nasty leaks and briefings portraying me as a hard left running dog of the trotskyists (while the trots did their bit from their own angle). But that was as nothing to the enraged reaction of the New Labour establishment when the board of the New Statesman abandoned the approved choice, David (now Lord) Lipsey for the editorship and chose me, prompting a campaign to reverse the decision. I know for a fact that Phillip Whitehead, the loyalist chair, was given a false list of charges against me which he had the decency to put to me. Journalists from The Times and Sunday Times rang to prepare damaging stories and were surprised to find themselves talking to a man with a sense of proportion and humour. The ST man said that I wasn’t at all like the foaming mad leftie he had been led to expect and that he wouldn’t write anything (he could not, he explained, write a positive piece though the woman from The Times did).
Earlier, Robin Cook had offered me a job as his political adviser. “But what would Neil Kinnock make of that?” I asked. “To tell you the truth, Stuart, it would be a pleasure to see his face when I tell him”, he replied. But he then went on to say that he anticipated a bad press, as the party managers briefed against both him and John Prescott and did their best to curtail their media exposure.
Later I became a friend of Greg Palast, the very able American journalist whose ‘sting’ operation exposed Derek Draper’s dubious role as a lobbyist and raised unanswered questions about the conduct of Roger Liddle as a government adviser. Greg came in for a furious barrage of counter information and a nasty sting in the New Labour response.
Of course, as Sunny Hundal also wrote, the Conservatives are not immune from similar dark activities, citing their reliance on the strategic and ideological guidance from the US Republicans and, more tellingly, pointing out that they were the original masters of the smear technique – which I take to be a reference to the work of Bernard Ingham for Mrs Thatcher. But odious though his work was, it was never on the same toxic scale as New Labour’s practice, for which both Blair and Brown are ultimately responsible.
