Damian McBride

Damian Mcbride, the one on the left

The life of the energy producers had been tranquil until Ed Miliband bared his teeth at the Labour party conference. They did business upon the back of barmy green energy policies that Miliband's party, spinners and MPs alike, had endorsed. But before that moment we had all been agog at the sight of Damian McBride basking in the limelight. It has suited the MSM and McBride's publisher to paint him as a bad boy. But he is not. He is a faithful servant and there is more to him than you might think.

If we go back to the dawn of Nulabour the three central characters were: Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson. In time a pattern emerged with each of those three being associated with their sidekick-cum-spinner. Blair and Alastair Campbell merged to become the double act of the world's most deluded smarmy git and his Northern thug. It's hard to say that McBride is wicked but pretend that Campbell was not working the same trade, because he was then and is now.

The BBC finding that Blair is now beyond their reach uses Campbell as a stop-gap; a sort of cheap-and-cheerful elder statesman who can deliver the 'I was there' history lesson and rent a quote without blushing. Mandelson's sidekick was Benjamin Wegg-Prosser and, like Blair and Campbell, they too followed the money and still work together.

Son of the Manse and his thug
There is always a steady stream of criticism directed towards the MSM, not all is deserved. In the past we have praised Fraser Nelson for his work, but his recent article on Damian McBride was terrible. As a spin doctor McBride will always be measured alongside Alistair Campbell, awkward that. For Campbell was a different sort of person doing a different job. The term spin doctor covers just about anything the person using the term would like it to mean. The job of media manipulation goes back at least to Bernard Ingham who helped Margaret Thatcher get her message across. Or at least that is how these things are explained. However, once you start manipulating, stopping is a hard thing to do and it's not just the message that gets distorted. Never once since the days of Ingham/Thatcher (or perhaps the other way around) has anyone in government worked out, then set out for all to see, why these spinners and their craft are needed; that insults the general public.