The Tories are having their day in the sun this bank holiday Monday as well they are entitled to after team Gordon Brown got themselves into another fine mess.
The headlines are serious and damning this morning as Labour tries to limit the damage caused by dumb and dumber, Damian McBride and Derek Draper.
The Guardian has “Gordon Brown told: smear tactics could cost Labour election“. It says Brown is to be told by senior Labour figures this week that he must clean up Downing Street if Labour is to have a chance of winning the next election as a “furious” David Cameron (he’s furious in all the papers, I can imagine him saying “we must make sure we get over quite how “furious” I am) demanded a personal apology from the prime minister. It has “one senior Labour figure” warning the party had suffered “reputational damage”. All true.
The Times has “Clean up your spin machine, Tories tell Gordon Brown” as the Tories accuse Brown of allowing “corruption and sleaze” at the heart of Downing Street. Fair enough.
Now Damian McBride has resigned Labour must part ways for good with Derek Draper. He drags the party down. He’s a consistent disaster area whose politics from the time he was a student through to working with Labour in opposition and government has always gravitated to the lowest common denominator. Labour should have learnt its lesson by now.
I blogged last July on Harry’s Place about Draper making his Labour comeback, at the time I said that bringing him back into the Labour fold or associating with him was a desperate move. This has proved to be more than correct.
The July 2008 post quoted Draper, in psychotherapist mode, saying that politics exerted a powerful pull on those with no self-worth: “For anyone with an underdeveloped sense of self-esteem, this is a lifeline… I suspect that what ultimately matters to my old comrades is not what they do for politics, as they claim, but what politics does for them”.
Touché. Labour must now call time on Draper and all his endeavours that are connected with the party. As it simply can not afford anymore mistakes like this.