‘Smeargate’, ‘the Damien McBride affair’, or whatever daft name it will be given, will have a fairly prominent place when the history books eventually come to be written about Gordon Brown’s time as PM.
In the same way that the Westland affair was significant for Thatcher because it combined two other crucial issues – the tension between the European and Atlanticist wings of the Conservative party, plus her disregard for cabinet government, Smeargate was so devastating not only for the content of the emails but because it drew into the open other, long-suspected, issues with Gordon Brown: most notably a dual personality that allows a vicious tribalism to sit alongside a genuine moral compass. Despite being warned repeatedly, he just couldn’t bring himself to get rid of McBride.
Those emails were disgusting. But something even more significant came out of this whole sorry episode. For surely this was the moment when new media outlets not only proved their importance vis-à-vis traditional sources, but in many ways surpassed them.
The way the right-wing blogs, most notably Guido Fawkes, used the speed that online publishing affords to stay on the offensive simply destroyed any attempts to limit the damage. Seeing them run rings around the Labour party was almost too painful to watch. Of crucial importance was their ability to cover not just the story itself, but the steps taken to try and manage it. The publication of dummy stories, the coded denials, the attempts by people to distance themselves from the key players in the affair – all of these helped to fuel the story, when their intention was to do the opposite. Labour’s media-management techniques, so vaunted in the 1990s, now look like the equivalent of a teacher trying to dance at the 6th form disco. They might have worked once, but now they’re dangerously outdated.
Ironically, it was precisely because the Labour high command had already caught on to the importance of online communication that Derek Draper was drafted in to begin with. But the one characteristic that all successful blogs share is the way they emerged organically. Our mistake, whether it’s with the decent Labourlist or the thoroughly indecent Red Rag, is to believe that these things can be artificially contrived from head office.
The lesson to learn is that, not only must online communication be taken seriously, but the days of top-down media management techniques have gone. They were a necessary antidote to the problems faced by the party under Neil Kinnock, but now they cause us more harm than good. What Labour really needs is a diffuse network of volunteers, both off and online, not only to get our message out but to shape that message too. Whether the party is really ready for this, however, remains to be seen.
Jonny Reynolds writes in a personal capacity