Ed’s Media Stooge

Back in 2010 the Mail ran this report about the man who is still Miliband’s head spin doctor, Tom Baldwin.  Baldwin originally worked for the Times where he was in essence a Labour Party stooge placing stories damaging to the Tories and beneficial to Labour.

Considering Baldwin’s vital role in Labour’s election campaign and Miliband’s pious statements about the Telegraph and compromised journalism should the BBC be asking questions about this?…especially as he was the man who tried to stitch up John Humphrys and get him sacked or as the Mail puts it was ‘ central to a dirty tricks plot to smear Humphrys as anti-New Labour and so not fit to be a BBC interviewer.’

The day Alastair Campbell appeared to give ­evidence to the Hutton inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly, he was given a good-luck hug by his friend Tom Baldwin.

Baldwin was the Times journalist who named the weapons expert as the secret source behind the BBC’s claim that the Blair government had ‘sexed up’ a dossier about Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to justify going to war against Saddam Hussein.

Campbell was known to liaise with Baldwin in endless attempts to ­discredit the Labour government’s enemies, the results of which regularly ended up prominently in The Times — a paper once admired for its thundering independence.

‘Tom was a ruthless operator and obsessed by the power his friend Alastair wielded in Downing Street,’ says a ­colleague. ‘I think he envied him.’

Even so, who could have imagined, when the appalling era of mendacity that marked Campbell’s tenure in Downing Street finally ended, that a new one would start a few years later?

For now, enter Alastair Campbell Mark II — yes, his friend and collaborator Tom Baldwin, who this week was appointed by the faltering Labour leader Ed Miliband as his new director of strategy.

Like Campbell, Baldwin, 44, has a ferocious, emotional hatred of Tories.

No one doubted his abilities as a journalist, with ruthless energy when pursuing a story.

But as one  fellow political journalist puts it: ‘The common view in the Westminster Lobby was that he was a brilliant hack who let everyone down by allowing himself to be turned into a blatant propagandist.

‘His judgment was completely blinded by his hatred for the Tories and his fixation with Alastair Campbell, who used Tom as a stool pigeon to find out what other journalists were up to and as a cipher for stories he wanted to place.’

 

Yet another tale of a newspaper acting as a Labour government propagandist, the last being the Guardian…a lot more important than the Telegraph downplaying a commercial company’s activities.

Not important enough for the BBC to investigate Labour’s head spinner though….they are too busy concentrating solely on the Telegraph.