Tuesday, April 21, 2009 

Spinning and kicking while down.

One of the things that newspapers specialise in is kicking people when they're down, usually after they were the ones that were primarily responsible for building them up in the first place. A recent case in point was the sudden deflating of James Corden and Mathew Horne, having been ridiculously over praised for the middling Gavin and Stacey, who were little less than assaulted over their film, Lesbian Vampire Killers, their piss-poor eponymous BBC3 sketch show, and a charity appearance which was deemed to be little better.

More pertinently politics wise is the way that Damian McBride has been set about since the "smeargate" emails emerged of him batting about ideas for a blog in which Tories had their private and personal lives appraised for gossip value. The latest example is in today's Graun, where McBride is linked to an "infamous incident" back in 2004, so infamous that this self-confessed politics nerd has no recollection whatsoever of it. More astonishing than the fact that McBride was fingered as the person responsible for leaking details of the meeting to the Sunday Times is that a "secret investigation" was launched in which phone records and presumably security assets were used to find the culprit. It says more about Downing Street's paranoia and fury at the slightest criticism at the time than it does about how much of a "wrong 'un" McBride always was.

Peter Wilby pointed out yesterday that prior to the last two weeks McBride had hardly been mentioned in the papers, his existence and apparently his dark arts of no interest to anyone when both sides were profiting from his dripping of poison. In 2004 the Graun mentioned McBride but once - and that was in a City diary. Even last year, at the apparent height of McBride's operations, he was only mentioned in dispatches 34 times, and 5 of those were in the little read online lobby column by "Bill Blanko", the rest mainly coming from reports concerning the defenestration of Ruth Kelly. As spin doctors go, you can hardly get more visible than Alastair Campbell, while it seems you can hardly get less visible than McBride was. Only once he had fallen on his sword did we learn about his work in the shadows, mainly briefing Tory newspapers, the ones so outraged by the smears which would never have emerged and seemingly never have been used if someone hadn't hacked Derek Draper's email account, with venom about under performing ministers. Almost every whisper about plotting by various pretenders to Brown's throne seems to have originated with McBride - either that or he's just a handy receptacle to now blame.

There is something in the argument made by various bloggers that the journalistic lobby at Westminster, because it is complicit in the spinning, cannot be trusted to tell us the whole truth about what goes on there. At the same time, the idea that blogs can be trusted to do just that is equally spurious, if not more so. However much bloggers denounce the MSM, the two are inseparable because they cannot operate without each other. Guido had to sell the emails to Sunday newspapers because they would have not gained the same coverage that they would have on his site, however much he and Iain Dale boast about their visitor figures. Gossip is well suited to the web because it requires few resources: just a few indiscreet individuals. Genuine investigative journalism however, such as that which brought down Jonathan Aitken, or more recently exposed the rendition programme or the Saudi slush funds needs constant backing up and funding. Even when it comes to videos which expose the truth, such as the one showing Ian Tomlinson being pushed over by a police officer, it requires the reach of a paper like the Guardian for it to truly spread quickly: if it had simply been sent up to YouTube or a blog like the dozens of others of the G20 protests, it would have taken days for it to reach critical mass.

Perhaps the biggest reason for the pique and faux outrage which followed McBride's resignation then is that it wasn't a blast against the spin culture, which after all cannot operate without the media's connivance, even as they decry it, but rather because one of their finest sources for muck had been forced outside of the circle. The motto was and remains, "don't get fucking caught". That applies to journalists and spin doctors equally.

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4/21/2009 08:10:00 PM | | | links to this post

Tuesday, April 14, 2009 

Spin, smears and faux outrage.

"Let's go to work."

Having finally been reconnected to the joyous environment which is the internet this morning (turns out it was nothing whatsoever to do with the East London cable outage, so it could have been fixed early last week if it wasn't for Tiscali saying to me that it was), I've been following the McBride/Draper smear "scandal" with something approaching detachment, which all things considered is almost certainly the best policy. All the adjectives you can use to describe the emails sent between McBride and Draper which mysteriously found their way into the (dirty) hands of Paul Staines, something which itself is curiously not being remarked upon, couldn't really begin to do justice to what is one of those stories which energises Westminster and the lobby hacks, and now also the insular world of "popular" political blogging, and which everyone else is just mystified and turned off by.

Probably the most ludicrous notion inspired by this faux outrage is that Labour could lose the next election because of it, and that the party has suffered "reputational damage" thanks to emails exchanged between a civil servant and a spin doctor handed the most poisoned chalice in current British politics. Labour will lose the next election because in the words of Roy Hattersley, the party is neither new enough nor Labour enough. Its one remaining claim to power was its economic record, a record which has since been flushed into the gutter. The only surprise of the last few months has been that the Conservatives have not built a bigger opinion poll lead, which is almost certainly down to just two factors: that the Tories' policies, those which they have, are only likely to make things worse; and that David Cameron has not yet sealed the deal with the electorate to the extent which Tony Blair did.

The other only slightly less ludicrous factor is the amount of sheer hypocrisy being exhibited by all of those involved. You would require a stomach of iron constitution not to feel sick at Staines describing the emails between Draper and McBride as "obscene"; this is the blogger who has variously implied that Mark Oaten was a paedophile, that routinely referred to the prime minister as the "prime mentalist", suggesting that he suffered from high functioning Asperger's syndrome without a scintilla of evidence and who has unmoderated comment fields where the invective and insults would be unfit to print on toilet walls. Staines' propaganda and self-promotion is that he provides the stories which the newspapers and "mainstream" media won't touch, but he is in fact as parasitical of them as any other blogger. The reality is that they give him stories and he gives them stories, all while claiming that he's about to blow the mainstream away. The sort of gossip and smears which are evident in the Draper/McBride emails is Staines' meat and drink, and he uses the old fallacy of urging those skewered to sue if his claims are false, hence the still unsubstantiated claims from him that John Prescott had an affair with Rosie Winterton, which you would have thought might have came out by now if it had happened.

At its heart, there is a fundamental lack of honesty from all those involved. The material which Staines acquired is the kind of gossip which most engage in, however untrue much of it is. Only last October there was the "scandal" involving George Osborne, Peter Mandelson and yachts, where we learned that Mandelson had dripped "poison" about Gordon Brown into the ears of his supposed political enemies. Osborne's error was to blab to others what Mandelson had told him; his comeuppance came when Mandelson revealed that Osborne might have attempted to obtain a donation from his host. The golden rule of all this is don't get fucking caught. These are not new developments; the briefing and counter-briefing is as old as politics itself. What is relatively recent is the venom with which the briefings are given, and that does originate with New Labour, although even John Major had his moments, such as his "bastards" comments. Both Brown and Blair surrounded themselves with such ardent followers that they would do almost anything to attack the other, hence we had Brown being described as "psychologically flawed" and it being put about that he was gay, while Mandelson, the master of the "dark arts", was himself smeared on various occasions. This is still continuing today, such was the rift created, hence Stephen Byers and Alan Milburn not hiding their satisfaction at McBride having to resign.

Again, if it wasn't so vomit inducing the Conservative response to this would be hilarious. Their attempts to pin this directly to Gordon Brown are understandable, although still repugnant. Yes, he kept McBride around, knowing full well what he was capable of and indeed what he had done in the past, but that he would have personally authorised the smearing of his opponents is nonsense. If anything, the Tories' efforts to paint themselves as completely above such tactics is setting them up for a fall in the same way as Labour did. Cameron has more or less done everything but pronounce himself a "pretty straight kind of guy" and that he will be "purer than pure". Let's be clear: if the Tories genuinely wanted to put an end to the age of spin, the very thing they would not have done is emulate Labour in appointing a former tabloid journalist as their chief media strategist. Say what you like about Alastair Campbell whilst he was in Downing Street, at least he never had to resign because of his journalism, or found himself accused of leading the bullying of those under him as Andy Coulson has. The Tories also know that they don't need to engage in such smearing to such an extent as perhaps they and their opponents have in the past: they now know they can rely on the likes of Staines and other malignant bloggers to do that for them. That those that can't write a sentence without using the word "cunt" or similar have been so celebratory over this "scandal" ought to tell you something about the sort of discourse which politics has now sunk to, which blogging has in many cases only made worse.

The only thing that has been got right by all involved is that Labour simply doesn't understand the internet and doesn't understand why it's so unpopular online. The broad reason is that those in government are always in opposition when it comes to the internet, as those opposed have more that unites them than unites the supporters, but the other main reasons are that the internet provides alternative voices not represented elsewhere, hence why libertarian blogs are so popular, and that British right-wing bloggers have taken their cue from the originators in America, like the Drudge Report. The Red Rag site which Draper was looking to set-up was meant to be an attempt to beat Staines at his own game, something which it was never going to achieve, and which also fails to understand that you have to fight gossip and intrigue not with more of the same, but with content and argument, which as Sunny points out is where the left in America succeeded. Draper's LabourList was an honourable attempt to do something similar, but was doomed to failure because Draper himself was involved, far too associated with the past and inextricably linked with the party itself. LabourList was and is simply not critical enough, while ConservativeHome, nicknamed Continuity IDS because of its to the right of Cameron stance, gets it right. Mr Eugenides recognises this, praising Liberal Conspiracy because it is the best attempt so far by the left to get organised and push things forward in a similar way to the American left. Its success is also though because while Labour supporters or sympathisers are contributors, it is completely independent of any party.

The biggest mis-step of all though was that Draper and McBridge imagined that those identified needed smearing. Nadine Dorries, after all, is possibly the biggest joke in British politics, and she has lied and mislead people on so many occasions that no one needs to make things up about her to show just how disreputable she is. Likewise, the idea that the public themselves will be turned off by such tactics is ignorant: they themselves call politicians every name under the sun, often quite deservedly, and the contempt in which they are held only continues to grow. You feel like telling all those involved to stop protesting so much whilst also suggesting that they get over themselves. This will be remembered not as another great New Labour scandal but yet another example of the Westminster bubble getting excited with itself while everyone else is just bemused and alienated.

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4/14/2009 09:04:00 PM | | | links to this post

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