Today Guido Fawkes claimed another scalp assisted by the mainstream media, even if Mr McBride did reign in advance last night to try to limit the damage. I’ve not really got anything much to add to the excellent commentary that can be found elsewhere.
Being horribly meta and doing the whole blogger talking about blogger thing which is terribly dull here’s a bit of a round up. It’s great to see Tom Harris talking a lot of sense:
“We screwed up, big time. We have no-one — absolutely no-one at all — to blame for this but ourselves.”
Sadly he seems to be a lone voice from that area of politics, with others such as Tim Cheetham bemoaning the fact that this story of interest (apparently) only to “the political in-crowd” has driven more important news, that wasn’t being reported much anyway, from the headlines. With the added compulsory moan of how easy it is for people not working in politics to just moan and bitch without offering ideas of how to fix things (which oddly I thought was what we paid the politicians to work out, as we can’t actually do anything), but it seems it’s our fault that we don’t have decent politicians as we’re not following the agenda he’d prefer. Hopi Sen at least admits that it “looks bad for Labour” but again we should all be more interested in other stuff – Look there’s a wooki! Hopi then moves on to attacking the messenger failing to see that the standards a private individual such as Guido can be expected to be held to are different to those that a senior Civil Servant such as Mr McBride are held to. If nothing else as has been observed elsewhere we don’t pay for Guido, we did pay for McBride and the systems used to send the emails in question, hence it’s reasonable to have a lot more interest in the latter than the former.
Mr Draper has been alleging that someone’s emails must have been “hacked” for this sorry mess to have been found out, which as Dizzy observes is amusing given this week the Government is requiring all ISPs to record the envelope of every email we send and are on record of wanting to log everything. This of course is unlikely to be the end of it, as if ntohing else Douglas Carswell MP is asking Tom Watson (Labour MP & colleague of Mr McBride) what he knew. Of course as Anna Raccoon reminds us we were told that:
“In future, under a Gordon Brown regime, we need to have no spin, no briefing, no secrets and respect for parliament”
So that went well then.
There’s is a rather good/amusing analysis of Mr McBrides resignation on the Ranting Penguin and a better summary of events than this by Devils kitchen.
To end on a cheerer note for a sunday Iain Dale has the now compulsory downfall video, and as both Samizdata and Gaby Hinsliff observe today may well be the day when UK politics sees blogging make itself really felt and we all have the ability to create a blog and write about what matters to us and potentially to make a difference. Finally LegIron has a somewhat cheering review of the general unravelling of things.
Footnote: Contrary to what several people linked to above the Government still don’t have the right to read our emails (much less the ability if you’re careful), they just get to see the envelopes.
Update Far more thorough list of saturdays coverage of this story over at Iain Dale
