Interesting post on Alastair Campbell’s blog, bemoaning McBride’s ineptitude not only in failing to realise that his e-mail exchange would be discovered:
In the modern age, with freedom of information, inquiries galore, a restive civil service looking over its shoulder, a media prepared to print first and ask questions later, you may as well assume that anything you write down will be made public at some point
but also in failing to understand that a personalised smear campaign was never likely to succeed:
[The Tories] are never happier than when talking about process and personality, as a means of avoiding policy and principle, so McBride has played right into their hands, even if Iain Dale is going over the top in trying to say it makes GB look like Nixon.
Campbell also acknowledges that Labour are not presently engaging successfully with modern, web-based campaigning techniques:
What the fall-out must not do is make Labour defensive about trying to do a better job of communicating via the web. A more open and engaged politics is essential if Labour are to have a chance of winning a fourth term.
From a Conservative standpoint, I can say that we would be more than happy to engage openly with Labour all the way through to whenever Gordon Brown calls the general election and equally content to debate both policy and principle. It’s the dirty tricks that we object to.
And we take nothing whatever for granted, even if Alastair Campbell himself is clearly despairing of a fourth Labour term.
It seems to me we have another example of agenda without ideas.