Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

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.

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