The McBride affair is a portent of the coming struggle for Labour’s soul

Richard Abbot

Excellent - in summary, New Labour are financially, emotionally, intellectually and now morally bankrupt. Taxi for Brown!

NW

Very good.

Today Brown was asked whether he took responsibility, he said: "I take full responsibility for what happens, and that's why the person who was responsible went immediately."
very funny

Hawkeye

A great article Fraser - and a great cover to go with it.

Ann Woodward

I just want to say how impressed I am with the extremely professional and informative reporting on the Spectator.
Whilst I am a small 'c'(working-class)conservative voter, I feel you are in the main extremely even-handed in your reporting unlike most of the tv news channels (I have given up watching BBC News). Quite frankly I don't know how they get away with it but thank goodness for the Spectator.
Best wishes

Ricky

Superb analysis. Absolutely spot on.

Nephilim

Nice and insightful, especially in the closing paragraph. Like you, I'm sure that the contaminated fallout has yet to settle...

Great article.

Greychatter

Excellent article. What goes around, comes around.
Brown must go, no other way back up for the Labour Party.

John Page

Superb in its sweep, taking in angles I haven't seen covered elsewhere. Hopefully one or more mass market outlets will take this piece up.

Ivy Eileen

I echo the plaudits already posted.

This article along with "Gordon is a Moron" shows the man for what he is .... and for what damage he has done to the body politic as well as the workaday lives of the people of this country.

One small quibble - "McBride — who was, to give him credit, an incomparable master of the dark arts". I appreciate you are wanting to be even-handed, but would anyone say this about Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot or Idi Amin ? (I exaggerate, but for illustrative purposes).

bottleneck

It's that stressed and strained Brown wife we should feel sorry for. She will not be ignorant of her appalling husband's nasty, vicious streak. What a terrible legacy he will leave for his children.

Leo McKinstry

Superb article, insightful and clear. One of the best summaries of the whole scandal. Fascinating about the bullying tactics of Unite.

jonnie of brixton-jonnieofbrixton.blogspot.com

so a couple of spin doctors start to smear the Tory party..that's,a couple of spin doctors start to smear the Tory party...um,er,what's the problem?..oh?mm..I see.....well. ok then...I am outraged at the thought of hardworking MP's having to suffer the outrage of someone with an e mail address telling lies,they should be horse whipped..anyone would think it happened under Lady Thatcher ,< is grumpy Bernard dead?>..at this rate we could have someone like Max Clifford telling the press what to print and when..its nothing like the days of Max Hastings,Bob Maxwell and Lord of Whatever Universe He Chooses To Rule, Rupert Muckdog,making up lies and destroying families in the pursuit of honesty..Three cheers for honest Dave Cameron and his merry band of pure MP's,striving to gain power and set HMS UK on the road to full recovery and its rightful place in believing it has the divine right to be an empire again and let every uncivilised person bow down to the power of the pen..which is held by a um,er,um..spin doctor..

CharlieRay15

@ bottleneck

Not to mention everybody else's!

Jug Ears

Booking Now
Guardian Hay Festival May 26th
Derek Draper talks to Benna Waites

Life Support
The psychotherapist makes life happier and better with his Survival Guide For The Modern
Soul. Waites is a consultant psychologist.

logdon

Bloody brilliant. At last a true encapsulated narrative of what British politics has sunk to. I see Wheelan is spinning this as Tory opportunism. Laugh? I almost wet them. Coming from that gaggle of surreal plotters is the definition of insane hubris. This lack of any true self awareness amongst Labour and it's lackeys has even reached the Guardian's CiF pages where the disconnect is plain for all to see. To alienate that bunch of committed lefties takes some doing. Keep it up Gordon. Your country needs you. To go!

Robin

Wow.

The truth was always out there but this article will nicely light the blue touch paper on the newlabour lie.

Well done. Let's hope the weekend press picks up on your theme and links this bunch of desperadoes with the unfolding economic disaster.

Shakassoc

'Mr Brown ... systematically recruited attack dogs and dispatched them to destroy some of the most able people in the Labour party, with exactly this sort of smear and innuendo.'

Cmon, Mr Brown. If it's not true, sue.

Moraymint

Great article Mr Nelson; please keep up the relentless pressure on this most sinister of Government machines.

What baffles (and angers) me, is how have the British people allowed this monster of a politician, antithesis of a statesman and all-round bad guy hold high-office for so long? Brown really has been a total disaster.

In this regard, we need to ask as many questions of our Parliamentarians as we do of The Brown Terror. It seems to me that for the past decade or so, the Executive has simply not been held to account: that's the really scary thing.

PS I wrote to my MP about the grim state we're in recently; got his (good) reply today; asked my permission to write to the PM, raising concerns on my behalf. Let's keep up the pressure guys. We owe it to the good, if at times apathetic, people of this country.

Stephen Green

It all goes back to the incident in the Manse woodshed.
What did happen there all those years ago? Whatever it was had a profound effect on Brown's character. One day we will be told the facts and all will be revealed. Whatever it was the wounds were deep and lasting.

Ann

"This is a moment of deadly, perhaps terminal, peril for the Labour government"

Do you not get it? Labour is already toast for a decade.

Ann

"Quite frankly I don't know how they get away with it"

Ann - they get away with it because the average Brit doesn't engage her or his brain, and believes BBC lies. Or doesn't, but couldn't get a monkey's.
The price of freedom etc.
Go have a look at the Biased BBC blog.

my.telegraph.co.uk/minusthree

Excellent article. To paraphrase Churchill, never before have such vile people been found to be so loathsome by so many.

Kilgore Trout

Great article. Has there ever been a more blatant,cumbersome, repugnant, sitting duck in British political history?

Ann - As I'm sure you're well aware the BBC reports to the average viewer's level. What the BBC reports is edemic to a society that is polarised more by Jade Goody.

jon livesey

Hey, "corrupt and useless?" Isn't that just terribly, terribly uncharitable?

Isn't Mr Brown the guy who ran several successive Labour election campaigns and never had any idea where any of the dodgy contributions came from?

Didn't he sit right next door to Tony Blair for ten years without gaining the slightest awareness that titles were being auctioned off to the highest bidder?

Didn't he sit in on funding meetings but remain perfectly unaware of Formula One hi-jinks?

I mean to say, "corrupt and useless" may be going a bit far. How about "Deaf, dumb and blind?"

Minnie Ovens

What soul?
It's the heart of darkness.

lauriemacdonell-sanchez

Socialists & Communists have successfully encroached on Western civilization using the highly effective techniques of Marx & Engels. No surprise. The Bill-&-Hillary regime's incessant spin-doctor feeds to a willing national press kept it in power during 2 meretricious, toxic terms. The Obama cabal used these strategies to come to power, The indispensable collusion of a crassly partisan US press guaranteed Obama's rise to power by consistently trashing the Republican candidates & undeservedly glorifying & covering up for Obama. This is the press that suppressed information on the massive voter fraud that further facilitated Obama's election. Previously, the Left's success in falsely attributing to Republicans the voter fraud perpetrated by the able cadres of the Democrat-Richard Daly machine during the elections that brought Bush 2 to the White House for 2 terms, was a far-sighted strategy that gave fruit during the 2008 elections. It guaranteed that an exposee of the unprecedented level of voter fraud in '08 could be easily spiked by the vitiated US press by representing it as counter-productive to a punch-drunk US electorate. Will this latest assault on the American way of life succeed in silencing legitimate protest & reach its ultimate goal of finishing off America once & for all? Success or failure depends on the American man & woman in the street, both those who did not choose Mr. Obama as well as those who now realize they were duped into squandering their votes on the wrong candidate, because they believed the US press's siren song that Obama is not a Leftist. But his blitz-like & autocratic imposition of an obviously Socialist agenda is a wake-up call for all. The best indictment of any society that ceases to learn from its own mistakes & ignores history is the Roman saying that refers to a nasty canine habit.

Marek

The code that you write about of not responding to attacks to safeguard the party from divisions is reminiscent of the "show trials" in the USSR in the 1930's.

Stalin charged loyal party supporters with treacherous crimes and they were prepared to "confess" for the good of the party. In this way Stalin consolidated his power until it became absolute.

Of course Stalin always professed to be acting for the greater good. The parallels make me feel queasy.

"Mr Bean is a good friend of mine. I can assure you that Gordon Brown is no Mr Bean".

Peter Gompertz

Great piece Fraser full of truths, the most self evident being on Page 1, in your own words, "it is worth remembering that the same tiny group of people lies".

Christian Borchsenius

MORAL COMPASS - I see no contradiction in Mr Brown's claim to be guided by a 'moral compass'; a compass does not work on the top of the world, and neither does it work - in the PMs case - at the pinnacle of politics.