Closing down the story
The government's publicity machine moved quickly to try and close down the Damian McBride affair. Problem was, it was too big to close, says Dougal Paver.
When the affair broke Downing Street's strategy was clear: get distance between itself and McBride. And it almost worked.
Their use of language was clever, implying that this was a "juvenile and inappropriate" ruse cooked up by two, well, "juvenile" members of the Labour team.
The Prime Minister intoned that "there was no place in politics" for this sort of stuff. None whatsoever.
His problem was all too clear. The juvenile staffers at play were (a) his chief lieutenant; and (b) one of the most senior Labour insiders. The chief protagonist, Damian McBride, is a paid civil servant but had acted in a blatantly political manner - a clear and serious breach of the civil service code of conduct.
So, not only was there no distance whatsoever between Number 10 and the affair, but there were also a serious operational breach at play - to say nothing of the plan itself, which even former Labour cabinet ministers have conceded as 'gutter politics'.
The government's plan for containing the crisis fell at the first hurdle on one of the central tennets of good communication: if you are making a claim - implied or direct - then it better stand up to close scrutiny. Number 10's view that 'it's nothing to do with us, gov, honest' raised eyebrows - and questions - all over the shop.
McBride's resignation was an appropriate step, although a scan through the comment sections on various newspaper web sites suggests public opinion expected a tougher line.
Yet again, of course, the whole affair showed that web 2.0 has fundamentally shifted power back to the citizenry. It was a citizen blog, Guido Fawkes, that broke the story. And yet again, we see government fail to get to grips with the implications for them of this new enfranchisement.
So, whilst many mourn the loss of local parish rags as a threat to democracy, their replacement with energetic, focused blogs such as Guido Fawkes suggests that there's life in democracy yet.
COMMENTS
Gordon Rae - Tue 14th Apr 2009
I agree. Democracy is alive and well, and Labour seem not to understand. They treat the web as a bike shed where you can go to say \'naughty things\', rather than a shift of power. But worse, they don\'t understand the electorate. If the Daily Mirror website - http://is.gd/saos - is anything to go by, Labour\'s grassroots support is imploding over the questionable characters that dominate the party.
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