Ops, the SoB!

Prime Minister Gordon Brown with his special adviser Damian McBride at the Labour Party conference 2007, in Bournemouth. Photograph: Martin Argles/Guardian

Key Brown aide quits over Labour sex smear scandal

Adviser resigns over leaked emails, MPs targeted in 'gutter' allegations
Gaby Hinsliff, political Editor

Source: The Observer, Sunday 12 April 2009



Gordon Brown was engulfed in crisis last night after a key aide resigned and the Tories threatened legal action over explosive leaked emails discussing how to attack senior Conservatives, including David Cameron and his wife, Samantha, with smears about their private lives.

Damian McBride, one of the prime minister's closest advisers, quit over his exchange with the Labour blogger Derek Draper, in which the two discussed setting up a website to publish scurrilous allegations about opponents. The idea was still being actively discussed until a fortnight ago, the Observer has learned.

Tom Watson, the Cabinet Office minister, was also facing questions after it emerged that McBride referred in one of the emails to Watson "looking at other stories for LabourList", Draper's website. However, Downing Street sources insisted Watson had been discussing an entirely separate story about Labour party staffing to be posted on Draper's conventional website, rather than being involved in the secret gossip project known as RedRag.

Brown yesterday moved rapidly to distance himself from the affair, saying there was "no place in politics for the dissemination or publication of material of this kind". Downing Street insisted that neither the prime minister "nor anybody else in Downing Street" knew about the emails.

Senior Tories last night demanded a public apology and assurances that Watson was not involved in dirty tricks, while the shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling, accused Downing Street of descending "into the gutter". Charles Clarke, the former Labour cabinet minister, said McBride had brought "shame" on the party.

Stories proposed by the two men in their emails include false rumours that David Cameron had an embarrassing medical condition, suggestions that George Osborne took drugs with a prostitute - an old allegation in the public domain which Osborne has flatly denied - and a final allegation involving the Tory backbencher Nadine Dorries and a fellow MP which the Observer understands is without foundation. Another supposed story involved a Tory MP allegedly getting publicity for a firm run by his partner. There is no evidence that any of the claims are true.

Dorries said yesterday that she had consulted a lawyer and was prepared to sue. "I am incensed. I wonder how Gordon Brown would feel if a Conservative Central Office employee sent emails with slanderous 100% lies about Sarah Brown?" she said.

When the existence of the emails emerged on Friday, Downing Street dismissed them as "juvenile and inappropriate", the result of two friends messing around with a subsequently abandoned idea for a gossipy blog rivalling that of Guido Fawkes, the Westminster blogger whose real name is Paul Staines.

In a statement last night, McBride said he was "shocked and appalled" that Staines had obtained the emails and handed them to newspapers, insisting that he and Draper had already decided that "Derek should not take his online efforts down to the level of Guido Fawkes" and that their ideas would not be used. Draper said yesterday McBride had paid a "high price" for an idea that never happened.

But RedRag was registered and set up last November, and while the leaked emails date from January, the Observer understands the plan was only placed on ice this month. McBride's emails even set out the format in which the stories could be written up, suggesting pictures to accompany them.

Senior Tories are particularly furious that Samantha Cameron and Frances Osborne, wives of the leader and shadow chancellor respectively, are believed to have been targeted. McBride confessed in the emails that most of the stories were "gossipy and intended to destabilised the Tories", according to the News of World, and admitted using "a bit of poetic licence".

The plan is understood to have been discussed with at least two other people including Brown's former spin doctor Charlie Whelan.

Draper suggested last night that his computer may have been hacked to get the emails. No breach of security at Downing Street was found