Guido Fawkes to Damian McBride: Who's spinning now?

When Gordon Brown eventually became aware that his Downing Street was about to be engulfed in the Smeargate scandal, he called Damian McBride to try to get to the bottom of the story. The latter recounts the conversation verbatim in Power Trip, his tell-all book dedicated ‘to Gordon, the greatest man I ever met’. Brown says: ‘OK, Damian, I need your word that you will tell me the truth. If the years we’ve worked together mean anything, I need your absolute word.’ ‘Yep, of course,’ McBride replies solemnly, ‘I give you my word, I promise I’ll tell the truth.’ ‘Right,’ says Brown, ‘firstly, is there anyone else in No. 10 or in the government or in the Labour party who is involved in these emails or this website? Anyone with any involvement at any level?’ ‘No. Absolutely, definitely not,’ swears McBride, before saying vaguely that there was one meeting with party people where the idea of starting a website was mentioned. That meeting was with Ray Collins, the then general secretary of the Labour party, at the party paymaster Unite’s Westminster HQ where they were trying to get funding support for the planned website. So, in reality, the true answer was ‘Yes.’

McBride’s recurring theme is that his method was to deploy ‘lying without lying’, and here is a prime example of that. The prime minister he serves, the man he tells us he admires more than any other, pleads with him for the truth and McBride reassures him in absolute terms before adding a disingenuous qualifier which means the opposite. Those of us who have not spent a decade plotting and spinning can see this for what it must surely be — a lie.