The McBride Of Frownenstein
John Pienaar told us that Victoria Derbyshire was so hard Damien McBride would be quaking in his boots in an upcoming interview.
Derbyshire opened the interview with a quote from McBride:
‘It was just me being a cruel vindictive thoughtless bastard.’
…and then asked him where, on a scale of bastards, would he put himself.
However that was about as ‘hard’ as the interview got…McBride far from quaking in his boots walked all over Derbyshire and gave a good account of himself.
Whether anyone believes a word of it of course is a different thing altogether but he made everything very plausible…so much so that the BBC now ‘excuse’ his actions in news bulletins saying he was ‘in a battle’.
Janet Daley in the Telegraph says he also made mincemeat of Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight:
McBride gets the better of Paxman: is there a lesson here?
Plenty of opprobrium for serialising his book in the ‘Tory’ Daily Mail….both from Derbyshire and Labour critics……one saying Alastair Campbell didn’t take Mail’s money for his book….but of course he did take the BBC’s, who serialised his book and employed him on an almost permanent basis:
From Iain Dale (wrestler):
How the BBC Is Saying ‘Sorry’ to Alastair Campbell
Is this the BBC’s way of saying sorry?
john pienarr said something quite revealing today about his politacal leanings at the labour party conference,he said and i quote,if labour won the general election and introduced voting for 16 and 17 years olds most of them youngsters would vote for the labour party,how does he know that,that was a slip on his part and he quickly changed the topic when pressed on that opinion by some tory councillor,what i think john pienarr was trying to really say is that most 16 and 17 years old voters at college or universitys tend be be socalists or on the far left of politics.
Immediately after the Hutton Inquiry I thought Campbell would never be let near the BBC ever again, (a bit like Carol Thatcher).
How wrong could I be?
This is the BBC making it up to him, and to the Labour Party generally, for being so naughty over the dossiers.
One does acquire a view from whom they most like to associate with.
Not a good one frankly.
Derbyshire is utterly hopeless as a political interviewer.
She’s seems to have some sort of script for her interviews and is unable to cope with answers which mean she can’t stick to it.
It’s all very leaden and it is obvious she is just not up to the job.
VD simply allowed DM to make the most pathetic attempt to explain himself away I have ever heard, virtually uninterrupted and when she did ask him anything about what actually went on she accepted his every excuse at face value.
I was left with a choice of two options, either Brown, Balls, Sillybland and those around them either knew full well what DM was up to and were completely complicit in his activities or were so totally stupid they had no idea what was going on right under their noses despite the horrific stench of rotting decay which was being given off by DM’s activities.
One thing which did puzzle me, and really does need addressing, is the fact that DM would appear to have been a Civil Servant and as such should, by their own code, not get embroiled in the internal workings of any political party and was also a politically appointed Special Advisor and acting on behalf of the Labour Party and involving himself in purely Labour political party infighting.
If he was employed and acting as a Civil Servant then there was something horrifically wrong with how the Civil Service was being misused and if he was employed as a politically motivated Special Advisor he should have been made to leave the Civil Service prior to being given that position. If he was both a Civil Servant and also a politically motivated Special Advisor then that is a shocking abuse of the system and one which must never be allowed to happen again.
We either stick with the British System where the Whitehall Civil Service is totally independent of Party Politics and only advises any Government totally impartially or we go to the American System where, with each incoming Government the whole Civil Service is changed and everybody, down to the lowest level is replaced by party appointees of the incoming Government. It should be one or the other and not a murky ad hock mixture of both where the rules of where one system ends and the other begins ore an unholy mess and open to deception and fudge.