On Wednesday, Budget Box will compete with Inbox. As Alistair Darling holds up Gladstone's fabled case for the photographers, he will do so in an act of supplication: trust me, I'm the Chancellor. Yet he will make his speech to the Commons against the ignominious backdrop of "email-gate" and the disgraceful email traffic sent between Damian McBride and Derek Draper. Whatever headline-grabbing stunts Mr Darling artfully mingles in his Budget with statesmanlike strategies for medium-term economic recovery, he will address them to a nation that holds his Government in contempt.
How can you talk about "hard choices", when the hardest choice facing Downing Street recently has been which Shadow Cabinet member's spouse to smear? How can you accuse the Tories of being the "do-nothing" party, when the governing party's own definition of "doing something" is to tell lies about senior Conservatives' medical histories and sexual proclivities? Trust and dignity are two of the essential ingredients of successful governance, especially in times of crisis: the cost of the McBride Affair is that both are now in the gutter.
Of the many daft things said in the days since Mr McBride's departure from No 10, the daftest was Gordon Brown's instruction on Monday to the head of the Civil Service, Sir Gus O'Donnell, that "a more explicit assurance [be] included in the special advisers' Code of Conduct… that the preparation or dissemination of inappropriate material or personal attacks have no part to play in the job of being a special adviser", and that all special advisers should be obliged "to sign such an assurance and to recognise that if they are ever found to be preparing and disseminating inappropriate material they will automatically lose their jobs".
This scandal has nothing to do with the role of Cabinet special advisers in general, or naughty spin doctors of the sort lampooned in Armando Iannucci's eerily-timed new movie, In the Loop. It has to do – quite specifically – with the existence of a dirty tricks campaign at the very heart of No 10, in which Mr McBride, a senior member of HM Government, whose comfortable salary was paid for by the taxpayer, used a Downing Street email address to send his vile smears to Mr Draper.
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