That was Quick...

Sky is reporting that a decision about Damien Green will be released tomorrow at 11am...

Exclusive footage of Damian McBride leaving Downing St:

Couldn't resist this one, and no doubt the joke has already been made, but:

Hat-tip:

PlayPolitical

Back on the interwebby...

TB would like to say a big thank you to the wonderful people at Edinburgh University Computing Services who fixed his laptop for free. 

By far the most effcient techno-types he has ever come across!

Unite turns on Draper

Iain Dale is

reporting

that Unite are now flatly denying they have given money to LabourList. This is rather odd given the Wheelan connection, and the fact that this assumption has been doing the rounds, and had not been denied in the last few months that LabourList has existed.

An off the cuff comment from Draper's henchman and potential Judas, Tom Miller comes to mind. TB was chatting to Miller the other night and he said, "I'm not sure Derek has even received any payment yet."Could it be that Unite had promised the money and then, since this scandal broke, the promise has been very much revoked. Unite can get away with saying they haven't funded LabourList if no money has actually changed hands yet, regardless of whether they were planning to.

Meanwhile Draper himself has admitted he is

weighing up his options

and considering whether to quit. 

Blue screen of death....

Apologies for the lack of blogging today. Here's why...

Hopefully will get everything fixed soon.

Dave is pissed off...

TB has never seen David Cameron this angry, and justifiably so. This report has some of the footage, though the BBC has the

full interview

where he is visibly very angry:



It's all very well saying that these emails were never meant to see the light of day etc. But let us get one thing straight - the blog was created and the strategy to promote it was in place. Tory Bear can't help but think that if David Cameron's son hadn't died recently, would the full all out assault of Red-Rag have gone ahead?

It's not like the stories weren't written and ready to go.

He who wields the knife, might just wear the crown.

'Tis a common proof,
That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round,
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend. (2.1.22)

TB is hearing stirrings that the LabourList kiddies are upping the ante for a post-Draper world. The Labour grass-roots movement, which believe it or not, actually contains some pretty good blogs have

almost all

called for

Draper to go

... Draper isn't the only person to receive Unite subs to fight the tories online, and TB has seen evidence that suggests that the minions have already begun planning what they will do once Draper is finally given the axe.

Quite why he is still clinging on remains to be seen, but there has been some speculation that Draper is holding out in order to negotiate a severance package from LabourList, of which the financial and legal status remains very grey.

Rumours are also flying round Labour circles of a certain prominent figure online who, as no friend of Draper already, is trying to build up support from the grass-roots to take over at LabourList.

Well whatever cheeky monkey wants to come in from the outside is going to have a tough battle with Draper's padawan who are already making plans of what they would do to try keep the fledgling LabourList afloat. This will prove a hard task given just how associated it is to Draper and just how protective of it Draper is being.

Unite will have to increase their funding of the project if Draper goes, because TB doubts very much that the FlowVideo office will be quite so accommodating to LabourList after Dolly has been knifed.

4 days and counting...

TB has had a busy day so just sitting down to a computer now...

The truth about Gordon Brown has now been running at the top of the news agenda for nearly 100 hours now. Any campaign class or press training will tell you that you have 24 hours to kill a story before serious damage is caused. Well it seems that the Downing St press office is struggling without their attack dog-in-chief McBride. The story is still dominating the BBC and Sky and today's papers still have it on their front page.

Seems

Watson

is next in line for the chop.

Twitter banter.

TB promised a free Dan Han t-shirt (see ad below) for his 500th follower on Twitter.

Congratulations then to

Cllr Andrew McConnell

who started following TB today.

Drop TB an email Andrew and he'll sort out getting the prize over to you...

The Telegraph finally wakes up:

Guido stuck it to the Telegraph after they swallowed McBride's spin late on Friday night in a preemptive strike to try limit the damage of this weekend. Andrew Pierce and Rosa Prince have

seemed to realise

they have to stick it to No10 and woken up to what the real story is:

"The Telegraph have established that.."

"The Telegraph

read on a blog

" more like.

The knives are out for Dolly...

TB is amazed that Derek Draper hasn't flown back from hiding in the Caneries to rescue his career - or maybe he just knows it's over.

While the cat is away the mice come

out to play

:

Laurie Penny

has stuck the knife right into the heart of Labourlist. In the prominent headline post on the website she has called for Draper to "step-back" and let his minions- Alex Smith, Tom Miller etc take over the shop.

Draper has clearly taught his padawan the tricks of dark-arts trade well, and in return they have risen up against their master in a veiled attack. Prescott has called for him to go, as has LabourHome and now even his own website says he should back off. Keep up the good work guys.

So long farewell Dolly.

Derek told such dreadful lies...

...it made one gasp and stretch one's eyes.

The noose is closing around Dolly. John Prescott has broken cover and

told him

to no uncertain terms to return from whence he came - back to the political wilderness, once again in disgrace. Will anyone from Unite join JP and call for Draper's head? Or will they continue with their tacit/financial support for the Night of the Wronged Wives*?



So long farewell Dolly.

*Hahaha

.

This is not an apology.

TB has been out of the loop for a few hours but don't for one second think Gordon has apologised. The BBC

is spinning

that writing to the Civil Service to criticise the rule book that Labour wrote is good enough. Why would someone not get fired already for smearing opponents, and seeing as McBride broke every Special Advisor rule, will the Labour Party be refunding the taxpayers the huge salary that McBride was paid? The personal letters to all those smeared is a start but why can Brown never just say sorry.

Why won't he go in front of the cameras?

TB will tell you why - because he knew exactly what was going on.

More smears and lies...

Donal Blaney has an interesting report about how two CF councillors are being smeared by their local Labour Party. Conservative Future executive member Plymouth

Cllr Steve Ricketts

and Essex

Cllr James Cottis

have been attacked in a dirty tricks campaign. Whether or not this is a coordinated national strategy from Labour, or whether it's just a strange coincidence one thing is clear-

Labour is rotten to the core.

Some questions for Unite:

BRILLO

: Who finances you?

DRAPER: We publish every year who finances us, different donations.

BRILLO: Who does?

DRAPER: Well, we haven't published it yet. But I can tell you we had some money from a trade union and we had some money from a few independent Labour people


Truly independent blogs don't need funding to be set up. You just got wordpress or blogger and set up a free account and weyhey you're off. Presumably no money has been spent by LabourList on PR as it

had it's launch held for free

at Labour HQ. Derek and Alex Smith the editors presumably are paid for all the "brilliant" work they do...

So why the need for so many donors?

What is this money being spent on?

As TB has already revealed this morning - it sure as hell ain't rent.

LabourList doesn't publicise the fact that it is actually run out of the offices of

FlowVideo

, a private company set up by Mr and Mrs Kate Garraway:

Funny that this isn’t mentioned on LabourList. Equally odd is why Draper would need funding from Unite the Union to set up the website and have somewhere to run it out of, when he already has an office that his company is already renting.

So then Derek, for the sake of the openness and transparency that you have now called for in the blogosphere, turning over a new leaf, and what not, what is the Unite money going on because it isn’t office costs? Why are you pretending that you have a “suite” when in reality it’s a post office box?

Why freely publicise the location of your actual office on one website and go to the effort of getting a mailbox and fake “suite” for another? Why the need to hide LabourList away?

Draper is the last person to be calling for a new open blogosphere given his track record and his refusals to be clear himself. Given that the taxpayer has funded one branch of these smear operations with McBride and that Union subs fund Draper, there is some explaining that needs to be done here. People have said that Draper can’t be fired because LabourList is his etc, this would be the case if it was really an independent project, but it’s not, Draper has Unite the Union to answer to as well as other anonymous private donors.

How happy are they with this weekend’s devastating revelations?

How happy is the average Unite worker with what Draper is doing with their hard earned money?

Unite subs are being used to fund disgusting gutter politics and they can't be happy about this. This weekend has proved who is pulling the strings of LabourList and some light has to be cast on who is funding this dancing to a merry tune? Wheelan, another disgraced attack dog who disappeared, only to resurface at Unite was CC'd into the smear emails, so is it the official line of the whole of the Unite the Union executive that they support this weekends fun and games?

· How much Unite member subs money has been given to LabourList?

· How much Unite member subs money is being spent on ‘rent’ in Piccadilly?

· On what terms is the Unite funding provided and on what timescale?

It was The Sun what done it...

The Sun

holds no punches

on Draper, Watson and more importantly Brown.

Nice weekend Gordon? TB bets that

this

was a fun affair:

Guido

reveals

this morning that Draper had lunch with Gordon at Chequers the same week he set up RedRag. Yep it's not looking good is it? Alan Johnson

hit the airwaves today

saying Brown didn't have to apologise for anything because he wasn't responsible.

What absolute bollocks - at starter level was it not Brown who employed McBride!?

Why the secrecy?

Dolly is sadly hiding in the Canary Islands at the moment and thus unavailable to comment about this office based confusion. TB did manage to get through to Dolly loyalist

Tom Miller

, who passionately defended his boss to TB last night. Miller said that he “spends most of his week” in the LabourList office so is clearly a good person to speak to:

TB: Oh right so which office? The “office”on Beak St?
TM: Errrh no. A different one…
TB: Oh right, so who works at the Beak St office?
TM: Errrh nobody does.
TB: Oh yeah why not?
TM: Errrrrrrrrh... because that’s the postal address.
TB: I know. So where is the real LabourList office?
TM: I’m not telling you.
TB: Why not? Because it’s 38 Victoria Street?
TM: I’m just not telling you. We can play guessing games all night. It’s definitely not Labour premises.
TB: Ok so, is it a business or private residence?
TM: I’m not sure, I’d imagine it’s a business.
TB: Where in London is it?
TM: I'm not telling you.

Why the secrecy?

Why can't the post go to the real office?

TB is with you on this one Tom. He too would imagine that is probably is a business address...

A registered business address - no less prestigious than Beak Street.

Suite 35

BRILLO

: "The Labour List, you work out of the Labour Party headquarters"

DRAPER: "Of course we don't work out of the Labour Party headquarters. Come on, can we at least get the basic facts right."

BRILLO: "Where's your office?"

DRAPER: "Piccadilly"

LabourList "

Headquarters

" – Suite 35,

77 Beak Street

, Piccadilly:

Oh dear more lies. That building doesn’t look big enough to have two suites let along thirty five. Reckon it could hold a couple of hundred "suites" if they were say the size of a small box though. A post box perhaps. Why don't you tell us where your office really is Dolly? It might not be in Labour HQ, but TB reckons the

Unite

members might want to know what exactly the money they give LabourList through their subs is being spent on?

Because it sure as hell ain't rent... What other companies use the LabourList office Derek?

In Derek We Trust.

Brown must have known.

There's a headline TB never thought he would see on the BBC:

They are right though. Brown needs to come out and say that he didn't know about this in person. The fact he hasn't is only making what we all suspect just that little bit more likely to be true. Gordon Brown has built his career on destroying his enemies rather than standing up and fighting them at the ballot box. No one outside of his constituency, bar a few deluded students at Edinburgh University in 1972, have ever voted for this twisted master of the dark arts. Tom Watson may be vulnerable next, but lets not take our eye of the big picture. Brown may not have put it in writing, he may not have even directly referred to the RedRag blog, but to suggest that he didn't know what his closest and most trusted advisor was doing at the next desk, or at least have a vague idea of what was going on with Draper, is insulting and it will not wash.

The decision to allow Draper to come back would have come from the very top - let us not forget that Draper was a trusted Mandy/Blairite, so the decision to allow him to play such an important role would not have been taken lightly by the viciously tribal Brown and McBride. There is no doubt that Brown would have discussed general strategy with McBride and Watson concerning the internet. Maybe it was over a quiet whisky after a long day in No10, maybe anger one morning when reading a particularly heavy attack from Guido, either way something triggered No10 and the Labour high command to make a conscious decision to attack the right-wing blogosphere. Everyone knows that Brown is a control freak, the boss, the one that has the final say.

His desk is in the very middle of the nerve centre at No10 purely for this reason. Brown likes to know exactly what is going on around him and has his fingers in all the pies. He had to have known at least something about this. Like Nixon, he is now lying to the nation and that is what will be the final noose around his neck. The statements from No10 leave absolutely no wiggle room and the decision to put Byrne on the TV constantly for the last 24 hours was very foolish indeed. No wonder Watson is hiding. This lot are toast.

What did Brown know and when?

Quote of the day

Though both of these quotations are referring to different incidents involving the same characters they are both very apt for today:

"He has a fine intelligence, but sometimes I am afraid he misuses that intelligence. He gets above himself. But now he has been cut down to size and I think probably he will learn a very hard lesson from what has happened."

- Peter Mandelson

speaking about

Derek Draper in 1998

"Now, it’s not that you’re not apologising - like everyone else, I’ve long accepted that you’re pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things - it’s that you’re carrying on, wilfully worsening the situation...You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it’s nonsense."

-Daniel Hannan MEP speaking about Gordon Brown in March 2009

Talking of poison...

Not to let Dolly-gate II distract from other news completely, something else has caught Tory Bear's eye from the sunday papers. It seems that everybody's favourite Minister for Cohesion has some explaining to do. He has shamfully lambasted Britain's relationship with America and referred to it as "poisonous" in

today's Observer

.

Is that an official party line Mr Khan?

No longer the paper of Gentleman...

Guido gives the Telegraph two barrels... on a

Telegraph blog

:

Ouch!

They just can't help themselves...

TB would have thought that only an absolute bloody idiot would defend the actions of Damian McBride and his puppet Dolly. Various lefties have gone on the rampage and are moaning about hypocrisy etc blah blah, but at the end of the day no tory bloggers are paid civil servants blogging on taxpayers computers and on taxpayers time. Dolly's excuse that this stuff was never printed and therefore he is exonerated is pathetic. If he was running a truly independent website he would have either outed McBride - calling him to order for his disgusting behaviour, or at least put in a private complaint that this is not acceptable behaviour from the Fuhrer-Bunker. Likewise with Tom Watson. Seeing as neither of them did this and Draper in fact referred to the smears as "brilliant" is proof enough that they have to go.

However back to the original point. Only a complete idiot would defend the actions, but it takes a special type of blindly loyal, guttersnipe fool to continue to push the smears and lies originally made up by McBride...

So step forward please

Kevin Maguire

...

"And just what is the truth of Cameron's alleged embarrassing complaint of a highly personal nature? I, like the drinkers in the Steamboat, Alum and Riverside, would like to know."

Take a bow - the guy's son has just died and you are attempting to smear him for doing what every 19 year old student does, or at least should do - getting an STD test. Scumbag.

Some important questions...

From: CARSWELL, Douglas
Sent: Sun 12/04/2009 10:32
To: WATSON, Tom
Subject: You and Damian McBride

Dear Mr Watson,

As you know, your Downing Street colleague, Damian McBride, has resigned following revelations about his alleged involvement in attempts to smear political opponents by disseminating apparently fabricated stories via the internet.

In Mr McBride's own words, he wrote up “some of the stories doing the rounds in Westminster." When did you first become aware of your close colleague, Mr McBride’s, efforts to write up these “stories”?

It has been alleged that you were copied in on some email exchanges relating to some of the “stories” Mr McBride had been preparing. To what extent might you have colluded in the preparation of these “stories”? Did you at any time seek to discourage your colleague, Mr McBride, with whom you worked closely in Downing Street, from preparing such fabricated smear stories for dissemination via the internet?

You are, of course, a government minister, with responsibilities for the Civil Service. Can you please confirm that you received certain emails relating to Mr McBride’s preparation of these “stories” as a government minister, on government equipment and in government time?

Finally, can you please confirm when it was that you first became aware of the Red Rag project, and confirm the extent of your involvement in it?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Warm regards,

Douglas Carswell MP

House of Commons

TB won't be doing his usual Sunday paper round-up but instead focusing on the only story that is going to matter for the next 72 hours:

The Sunday Times is first out of the blocks with some damning stuff:

• Draper has hung himself with one word - "Brilliant"

• The Sunday Times leader is brutal for Brown and t'Labour Party.

• Some teasing details.

• TalkSport: This is possibly the hardest thing that TB has even written - he agrees fully with pretty much everything George Galloway says in
  this interview
  with Derek Draper.

• The Daily Mail weighs in and takes the fight to the very top. Are you going to say sorry Mr Brown?

• Even the Guardian is pretty harsh, despite going with the juvenile spin it concedes that yesterday was "a clear victory for the blogosphere over the political establishment."

• The Guardian also gives TB's video a nod:

"Draper also forgot that online, video counts for a thousand words: Tory bloggers took appropriate revenge yesterday by posting a YouTube video of him denying in a television interview previous allegations that Downing Street had helped orchestrate his arguments."

In case you happened to miss said video:



And there it is...

The News of the World clearly let the rest of the papers get their first editions distributed and saved the explosive stuff until the wee hours:

Reeead allll about it.

Lies Lies Lies.

Dolly just put in a car crash performance on Channel Four News. Live on the line from Lanzegrotty he said he won't quit and that other people were CC'd into the emails and that he "honestly" couldn't remember if Tom Watson was "accidentally" CC'd and that he wasn't "lying on purpose" it was just that he didn't have access to a computer to check his email. Another lie because how else did he write

this

.

The argument Labour are going with is that this was a personal chat between mates. Utter twaddle as it was done on taxpayer time, from taxpayer computers with the consent of Ministers and spinners. Stephen Pound embarrassed himself on SkyNews by saying that his generation don't get the Internet and then proceeding to make all sorts of virginal references to Brown and co. Highly odd.

Ah this true popcorn stuff and TB can't help but laugh at the idiot guests on the Sky paper review last night that dismissed this as a non-story and said it was completely inconsequential. Spot on Lads. The News of the World is sending out press releases and

cranking up the tension

for midnight:

Time for a few more Peroni's before that though!

Cheers Damian.

TB is celebrating the demise of McBride in the

only appropriate way

- with a nice

cold Peroni

:

Over to you Dolly.

McBride Owned.

1 down, 3 or so to go...

Congratulations are in order to one

Guido Fawkes Esq.

Hain, now McBride, Dolly later.. who next?