"Banter between Blokes"

 It’s a tough-guy quote that has been attributed to any number of alpha males, from Admiral of the Fleet John Arbuthnot Fisher of the Royal Navy to Benjamin Disraeli to John Wayne: “Never apologize, never explain.” Then again, sometimes you have to do both, especially if you’re in deep, deep trouble. Which is exactly where British Prime Minister Gordon Brown found himself over the long Easter weekend after one of his closest and longest-serving aides was caught planning a smear campaign against the PM’s political enemies. 

            “Smeargate,” as it is inevitably called, centers on Damian McBride, director of strategy and planning at 10 Downing Street. In an email exchange that leaked to the press, McBride – known as “McPoison” for his clinical dispatching of Brown antagonists over the years – proposed spreading scurrilous and unsubstantiated stories about Conservative Party leader David Cameron, his shadow chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne and a couple of lesser Tories. After the story broke last week, the 34-year-old McBride apologized for the “juvenile and inappropriate” slurs and resigned a day later, on Saturday. By Monday Brown had written personal letters of apology to McBride’s targets and was calling for new rules to govern the conduct of special advisers in government. 

            The episode says a lot about the bunker mentality of some of those in Brown’s inner circle, if not Brown himself. Polls show the Tories consistently racking up a double-digit lead over Labour in the polls ahead of a general election Brown must call sometime before June 3, 2010. Brown managed only a slight bump in his ratings after hosting the agreeable if not hugely successful G20 Summit two weeks ago. As Smeargate demonstrates, at least some members of the Brown squad are desperate to make up some lost ground. That even a single renegade aide – if that’s what McBride was – would resort to smear tactics is a reminder, in the view of some of Brown's critics, that his political apparatus is accustomed less to governance than to engaging in the strong-arm tactics it used to deploy against Prime Minister Tony Blair, the rival Brown spent so many years trying to outflank. 

When the story broke, and before the content of the emails was known to the public, McBride and his allies tried to dismiss the affair as “banter between blokes.” The other “blokes” involved were Derek Draper, who runs the party-sponsored website Labour List, and Charlie Whelan, a labor union executive who was Gordon Brown’s spokesman during the early Blair years when Brown was chancellor of the Exchequer  In his email, McBride characterized his smears as “a few ideas I have been working on for Red Rag,” a Labour-leaning website designed to counter several well-established Tory-leaning blogs. 

If the ideas were mere “banter,” Draper seemed to treat them more seriously than that: according to the London Sunday Times, he replied just 20 minutes after McBride sent his email. “Absolutely totally brilliant Damian,” he wrote. “I’ll think about timing and sort out the technology this week so we can go as soon as possible.” In his original email, McBride admitted his tall tales “are gossipy and mainly intended to destabilize the Tories.” In the end, of course, they mainly destabilized the man at whose right hand he had worked since the early 2000s – Gordon Brown.