- .Damian McBride helped drive Gordon Brown's rivals out of Cabinet
- .Spin doctor says he discredited opponents by tipping off newspapers
- .The book will hugely embarrass Ed Miliband and Ed Balls
- .Mr McBride forced to resign as Mr Brown’s special adviser in 2009
- .Linked to a plot to smear Tory MPs via an anti-Conservative gossip website
Toxic: Damian McBride (right) confesses to helping Gordon Brown drive his leading rivals out of the Cabinet by using the dark arts of media manipulation
The toxic culture of spin, smears and feuding at the heart of New Labour is laid bare today in an explosive political memoir.
Damian McBride confesses to helping Gordon Brown drive his leading rivals out of the Cabinet by using the dark arts of media manipulation.
In the disturbingly candid book, serialised in the Daily Mail, the spin doctor says he routinely discredited opponents by tipping off newspapers about ‘drug use, spousal abuse, alcoholism and extra-marital affairs’.
Coming from a figure so central to Mr Brown’s political operation, the book will hugely embarrass Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, the former prime minister’s two closest allies.
The pair were in constant contact with Mr McBride, raising urgent questions over what they knew of his brutal tactics.
The memoir will send shockwaves through the Labour party ahead of next week’s annual conference.
The key revelations it contains include:
- Mr McBride helped destroy Home Secretary Charles Clarke by fabricating a briefing war between him and a key adviser to Tony Blair;
- Another obstacle to Mr Brown, John Reid, quit the same Cabinet post after Mr McBride leaked details of his alleged ‘drinking, fighting and carousing’;
- Allegations about another minister, Ivan Lewis, pestering a female aide were leaked to punish him for criticising Mr Brown’s tax policies;
- Mr McBride confesses to logging in to Mr Brown’s office email and leaking details of restricted or confidential documents to discredit opponents;
- Mr Brown developed an elaborate ‘political intelligence operation’ with ‘moles’ on the teams of rival ministers;
- Shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander knifed his own sister Wendy, the Scottish Labour leader, urging her dismissal over a minor donations controversy;
- As his premiership faltered, Mr Brown desperately tried to recruit celebrity advisers including Simon Cowell, Lorraine Kelly, Fiona Phillips and Lord Sugar.
Mr McBride was forced to resign as Mr Brown’s special adviser in 2009 after he was linked to a plot to smear Tory MPs via an anti-Conservative gossip website. The emails included fabricated slurs about the politicians’ health and private lives.
His book Power Trip, which will be published next week, tells the inside story of his own downfall, which plunged Mr Brown’s Downing Street into scandal and chaos from which it never recovered.
It gives the inside track of the years of bitter infighting between Mr Brown and Tony Blair, the spinning and plotting that ended the careers of senior ministers and the banking collapse that came close to plunging Britain into anarchy.
Many of the key figures in his story are still leading lights in Westminster, which he brands ‘the binge drinking capital of Britain’.
Mr McBride confesses that he was ‘sucked in like a concubine at a Roman orgy’ to the ‘dark’ world of politics, which he says encourages ‘vanity, duplicity, greed, hypocrisy and cruelty’.
Spin: Gordon Brown attending the Labour Party Conference in Manchester in 2009 with Damian McBride (left)
‘Some people will undoubtedly wonder why – if Gordon knew I was guilty of misbehaviour – he never either formally reined me in or had me moved on,’ he writes.
‘And my answer to that is simply that there was something unspoken between us ... the unspoken word was from me to him, and said: “Don’t question my methods”.’
He gives extraordinary accounts of his role in trashing both Mr Clarke and John, now Lord, Reid, as they emerged as rivals to Mr Brown in the bitter battle to succeed Mr Blair.
McBride gives an extraordinary account of his role in trashing both Mr Clarke and Lord John Reid as they emerged as rivals to Mr Brown
In 2005, when Mr Clarke was Home Secretary and a threat to Mr Brown’s succession, Mr McBride manufactured what looked like a briefing war between him and Mr Blair’s anti-social behaviour ‘czar’ Louise Casey.
Newspapers were duped into thinking the pair were bitter rivals over home affairs policy – and the apparent feud contributed to Mr Blair sacking Mr Clarke in 2006.
Mr McBride later told journalists Mr Blair had been in tears as he dismissed him.
He also confesses to helping to destroy Lord Reid, who was the one remaining ‘obstacle’ when Mr Brown finally had the chance to run for the leadership.
Mr McBride says he started to leak from a ‘black book’ of stories he had gathered about Lord Reid’s alleged escapades in the 1980s and 1990s, when he and Mr Brown were both in the Commons.
Mr McBride does not disclose details of the dangerous gossip he had assembled but one story published at the time included lurid allegations of ‘drink-fuelled indecent proposals’ he allegedly made to one of Mr Brown’s closest allies, Dawn Primarolo, now deputy Speaker of the Commons.
Lord Reid was alleged to have asked Miss Primarolo to go to bed with him during a parliamentary trip to Berlin in the late 1980s and later told her at a bar in the Commons: ‘I want sex with you.’
Married Miss Primarolo was said to have been outraged and told him to stop pestering her.
Circulation of the story was said to have been key to his decision to pull out of the Labour leadership contest and announce his resignation from the Cabinet.
‘No sooner had the first call been made following the first story I’d given out, than Reid announced he would be resigning,’ McBride says.
A friend of Lord Reid later told Mr McBride he could ‘call off the dogs now’.
The book will hugely embarrass Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, the former prime minister’s two closest allies
The book goes on to reveal that while he remained publicly neutral in the Labour leadership contest that followed his defeat in the 2010 election, Mr Brown privately backed Ed Miliband.
He was determined to prevent David Miliband, an arch-Blairite, winning the race and taking the party down routes he had resisted for a decade.
Despite his closeness to Mr Balls, another candidate, he decided to back Ed – and intervened late in the contest when he feared David might win. Mr McBride says Mr Brown marked out Ed Miliband as ‘the one to watch’ in 2007.
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