Smeargate was a car crash waiting to happen

So much for cartoonist Slob's take on "Smeargate." Do I share his sense of nausea at the Adoration of the Guido that has followed the RedRag scandal and the defenestration of Damian McBride? Well, up to a point I guess.

Paul Staines is at least right in his analysis of the Lobby, although the initial diagnosis that it had become part of a client media was not Guido's, but Peter Oborne's, in his brilliant book The Triumph of the Political Class.

I myself watched it happening from close quarters and it became very obvious fairly early in my Lobby career on that you could not expect to receive help and favours from the New Labour machine if you also insisted on telling it like it was for the benefit of the readers who paid your salary.

I made my bed, and although those contemporaries of mine who took the Campbell spin subsequently saw all sorts of exciting career doors opening to them, I have never once regretted the road I took.

That said, there is a central hypocrisy at the heart of the Guido version of history that should not be overlooked. In my relatively limited personal dealings with Paul Staines, I have always found him to be an okay bloke - he even bought me a drink once - but when it comes to smear campaigns against rival politicians, his blog is the last word.

Back in 2007, Guido spent months attempting to convince his blog's many readers that Gordon Brown had been photographed on a rocking horse wearing a nappy, and to utilise the power of search engine optimisation and Google to spread this ridiculous tale across the entire internet. It even made it onto Wikipedia, and when I tried to remove it, some patsy came along and reverted my edit.

He also gave house-room to a sock puppet called "Stanislav" who suggested, in one particularly disgusting post, that the Prime Minister had been steadily driven mad by the strain of repressing his "homosexuality" over many years - part of a deadly serious attempt by the right to fix the idea of Gordon as a "weirdo" in the public's mind.

None of this in any way excuses the suggestion that David Cameron is suffering from some embarassing health complaint. But it does put it into perspective, and should serve as a corrective to those tempted to hail Guido as the new conscience of British public life.

Labour of course should have risen above all this. Instead, it set up LabourList, bringing in Derek Draper as editor despite the fact that his previous spell as a NuLab adviser had ended in embarrassing circumstances for the government. It was, in short, a car crash waiting to happen.

I disliked the idea of LabourList from the start. I was in fact invited to attend one of the breakfast sessions, and would have gone if I had been in London and at a loose end, but the whole thing seemed to me to be built on two false premises - firstly, the Dale Hypothesis that all left-wing blogs are basically crap, and secondly the Guido Hypothesis that smearing one's political opponents is a legitimate purpose of political blogging.

In other words, Labour thought they needed a Guido-style "attack blog" to take the fight to the Tories, and they concluded that none of the existing left-of-centre blogs was up to the job.

Had the party not got the first of these questions so catastrophically wrong, it would have realised that instead of trying to impose its command-and-control approach on the blogosphere, it would have been better off discreetly encouraging some of the excellent, well-established left-of-centre blogs that were already out there.

In short, instead of listening to Dolly Draper, they should have listened to Sunny Hundal. His post on Liberal Conspiracy is the best defence I have thus far read of the left-of-centre blogosphere and why Labour would have been better tapping into that rather than attempting to out-Fawkes the Tories.

Then again, New Labour has been ignoring its own natural supporters and trying to mimic the Conservatives ever since it was invented, so we should probably not be that surprised.

Meanwhile the issue of "spin" has once again become the issue that defines New Labour, the single word that I suspect will be associated with the Blair-Brown government long after everything else it did has been forgotten.

And those of us who thought Gordon would put a stop to all this nonsense have suffered another, perhaps terminal, disillusionment.

Are all politicians crooks?

Some would say a resounding yes to that question, especially in the wake of the latest MPs expenses scandal. But we wouldn't have known about it at all had it not been for another politician's pioneering legislation. Here's today's Journal column.

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A former Journal colleague of mine had a fairly straightforward view of politicians – one which, though I didn’t necessarily always share it, was at least admirable in its consistency.

It was, in essence, that they were all crooks, and that it was basically the role of the press to ensure the public were made aware of this indisputable fact of life.

It may surprise some readers to know that he and I had many a tussle over this question, my own default position being that, for all their faults, politicians are no more intrinsically good or evil than the rest of us.

Looking at the continuing controversy over MPs expenses, though, I do begin to wonder whether my old friend might have had a point.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown occupies the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of his view of the politician’s role. Like many of his generation and background, he has always believed he is in public life to “do good.”

In his case, it’s probably genuine. Mr Brown has been called many, many things in the course of his long career – but no-one has ever accused him of having his snout in the trough.

This week we saw Gordon at his do-gooding best, trying to fix the world’s economic problems with the help of his fellow G20 leaders and their trillion-dollar rescue package.

Mr Brown is one of those rare people who still believes in the power of politics to change the world. If he is right in this instance, he may yet confound the sceptics and win that unprecedented fourth term in power for Labour.

But whatever the long-term political impact or otherwise of this week’s G20 summit, the Prime Minister certainly could have done without the distraction of the latest expenses scandal.

When I saw last Sunday’s newspaper headline about Jacqui Smith claiming back the cost of adult movies, my first thought was that it’s either going to cost the Home Secretary her job, or alternatively leave the paper’s editor facing a large legal bill.

To date, it has done neither, but it has certainly focused minds on the need for reform of the system like never before.

The three main party leaders have all now agreed to speed-up an inquiry into MPs expenses by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, but some fear the recent spate of revelations has already reduced Parliament to a laughing stock.

Should Mr Brown have sacked Ms Smith? The temptation must have been very great, but as it happens, I think he has done the right thing by not giving in to it.

To have dismissed the first female Home Secretary in our history on the basis of her husband’s taste for adult movies would have had the Labour sisterhood truly up in arms – with some justification.

Rather than make a martyr of her by acting precipitously – as Tony Blair once did with Peter Mandelson - he has left her in place in the expectation that events will run their course.

I suspect Ms Smith will make it easy for him and fall on her own sword. She has a wafer-thin majority in Redditch, and barring a major electoral turnaround, her career in frontline politics is almost certainly drawing to a close.

But the issue of course goes far wider than the fate of one individual Cabinet minister. It is not so much a problem for Mr Brown’s government as for the entire political class.

I cannot improve on the analysis provided by a pro-Labour blogger, Shamik Das, on the Labour loyalist website Labourlist.co.uk this week.

“It isn’t just the perceived financial impropriety that appals taxpayers as the fact that many MPs simply do not believe what they are doing to be wrong. So out of touch with their constituents are they, that they actually believe the taxpayer should pick up the tab for bath plugs or pay-per-view films,” he wrote.

“While the vast majority of MPs undoubtedly go into politics for the right reasons, it is the alarming ease with which they forget where they’ve come from and how their constituents live that is the most depressing aspect of this sorry affair.”

One who certainly seems to have forgotten where he came from is Speaker Michael Martin, who showed once more this week that he is less the custodian of the dignity of Parliament than a shop-steward for greedy MPs.

Displaying his unerring ability to shoot the messenger, he told the Commons he was “deeply disappointed” that 1.3m expense receipts from MPs which had been handed to a private contractor had now been leaked to the media.

You might have thought that the holder of his office would be more “deeply disappointed” by the behaviour of the MPs who have tarnished the reputation of the House over which he presides, but no.

Mr Martin is more concerned about catching whistleblowers – always in my experience a sign that an institution has lost touch with the people it is supposed to be serving.

One final point to make about all this, though, is that it demonstrates the impact that has been made by that initially much-derided creature, the Freedom of Information Act.

When the former South Shields MP and public services minister Dr David Clark first produced this piece of legislation in 1997, it was rubbished even by Cabinet colleagues, yet it has become a vital weapon in the hands of those seeking to uphold the public’s right to know.

It may be making life difficult for the political class – but in terms of exposing wrongs that need addressing, FoI has already had a hugely positive effect on our political culture.

Even my cynical ex-colleague might have conceded that Dr Clark was a politician who did some good.

Global Village People

Byers tells it like it is

The North Tyneside MP's comments on Gordon Brown's economic policies this week may have been deeply unhelpful, but his analysis is spot on. Here's today's Journal column.

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At the start of the year, I wrote that Gordon Brown’s chances of political survival up to the next general election would ultimately depend on whether his economic rescue package showed any signs of working.

There will be those who claim the fabled “green shoots of recovery” are already appearing – in the London housing market for instance.

But it will take more than a few satisfied estate agents to convince the rest of us that the economic downturn is bottoming out and that the good times are just around the corner again.

After all, there remains considerable doubt even among some of Mr Brown’s natural allies as to whether his remedies for the country’s economic ills are the right ones.

Mr Brown would like to believe there is a broad national and international consensus for the “fiscal stimulus” measures he has been advocating, and which he continues to claim are being copied the world over.

Unfortunately for him, this is very far from being the case as events this week have only served to emphasise.

If it was just the Tories who doubted the efficacy of his proposed solutions, Mr Brown would have less cause to worry – but some of the opposition has been coming from people who might have been expected to show him more support.

Most notably, it has come from the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, and his former Labour cabinet colleague , North Tyneside MP Stephen Byers.

Mr Byers may normally be a mild-mannered sort of chap, but his comments ahead of the Prime Minister’s world tour this week to drum up support for his measures ahead of next week’s G20 Summit could not have been more wounding.

He claimed the proposed summit agenda was too ambitious and also called for the withdrawal of the 2.5pc pre-Christmas cut in VAT, the centrepiece of Brown's domestic economic stimulus.

“The 2.5pc cut in VAT may appear modest but it comes at significant cost. On its own figures, it will cost the Treasury £8.6bn between April and the end of the year,” he wrote.

He suggested this money would have been better spent on raising personal income tax allowances in the Budget by £1,520, taking around £1.7m low-paid workers out of tax altogether.

More damaging still was Mr Byers’ claim that Mr Brown’s attempts to get international agreement on an economic rescue package at the G20 Summit will fail, with serious political consequences for Labour.

He said the next month would prove "make or break time" for the Prime Minister, with the outcome of both the Summit and the Budget likely to be decisive to his chances of re-election.

Although this will have been regarded in Downing Street as deeply unhelpful, Mr Byers is correct in his analysis of the government’s position.

It shows that the supposedly “settled will” of the Labour Party, that Mr Brown should lead the party into next election come what may, is not necessarily as settled as all that.

It was perhaps unlucky for the Prime Minister that Mr Byers’ intervention came on the same day Bank governor Mr King went public with his doubts about the Brown strategy.

He told the Treasury Select Committee that the government should not unveil any further fiscal stimulus in the Budget because the public finances are already in such dire straits.

The Tories couldn’t believe their luck. Shadow chancellor George Osborne, said: "Not only has a former Labour cabinet minister attacked the ineffective VAT cut, but the governor of the Bank of England has said Britain cannot afford a further fiscal stimulus.”

“It leaves Gordon Brown's political plans for the G20 and the Budget in tatters. It is the Prime Minister who is now isolated at home and abroad."

For all Mr Osborne’s bullishness, the Tories have been having troubles of their own this week, with Shadow Business Secretary Ken Clarke taking a sledgehammer to the party’s flagship policy of raising the inheritance tax threshold to £1m.

His comment that this was an “aspiration rather than a promise” was followed by furious backpedalling on his part, but the damage in the eyes of the voters has probably already been done.

I suspect Mr Clarke was just telling it as it is, as is his wont. It does, after all, stand to reason that an incoming Tory government faced with a huge black hole in the public finances is going to be in the mood to cut taxes straightaway.

But inheritance tax remains a totemic issue for the Tories – not least because Mr Osborne’s autumn 2007 pledge to cut it dealt Mr Brown and Labour a blow from which they have never really recovered.

The debate over inheritance tax is just one more illustration of just how much the world has changed since then.

Mr Osborne’s dramatic move provoked Chancellor Alistair Darling to effectively double the threshold for the tax in his October 2007 pre-Budget report, but the truth is neither party would have made such pledges had they known what was around the corner for the economy.

Sure, any tax cut constitutes a “fiscal stimulus” of sorts, but like the cut in VAT, slashing inheritance tax is not going to make a real and substantial difference to the spending power of large numbers of people.

Meanwhile the wait for the “green shoots” goes on. And slowly but surely, time is running out for Mr Brown.

Fiscal stimulation

Celebrating life together

A few years ago I project-managed the launch of the memorials website Lasting Tribute. Since those relatively small beginnings the site has gone from strength to strength under the leadership of Elaine Pritchard and this week its tribute to Jade Goody received 36,000 page views in a single day, with 340 people leaving messages of condolence.

Here's something a few LT folk put together last week to illustrate, in a fairly light-hearted way, the purpose behind the site. Eagle-eyed readers will spot a guest appearance from yours truly.