The smears that backfired

So what was Damian McBride planning in those emails? I can give you a glimpse of what the News of the World* has tomorrow - it's an outline of the various dirty tricks discussed by McBride and Derek Draper, and it was far more developed than what has so far been claimed. The smears - and they are just that or, as the NOTW calls them, "false malicious stories" - include:

“

1) That David Cameron has some embarrassing illness.

2) A smear about Frances Osborne, wife of the shadow Chancellor

3) That a certain Tory MP used his position to get publicity for a lover’s business

4) That Cameron has been accommodating Osama bin Laden in his basement.

Okay, I made the last one up. But the first three are genuine - that is, genuine figments of McBride's imagination. Just how they discussed using these stories will be in the paper tomorrow.

*Yours truly is, of course, a columnist with the News of the World. But I took this Easter off (always an invitation for political stories to break) and the Archbishop of York is kindly standing in for me.