Email smears - Labour reaction

Tom Harris, Labour MP for Glasgow East, has a blog and this is his take on the email smears perpetrated by McBride and Draper.

We screwed up, big time. We have no-one — absolutely no-one at all — to blame for this but ourselves. The damage the Labour Party and the government have sustained this last 24 hours has been entirely self-inflicted.

And the people behind this sordid little mess owe everyone named in these emails a very public apology.

He is a decent man.

What has been more depressing is the reaction of some other Labour commentators. In particular Kevin McGuire in the Mirror. He clearly doesn't see anything wrong in what McBride did, except in getting caught, and even tries to follow up on one of the vicious lies that McBride was peddling. He is either fundamentally amoral or so caught up in tribalism that ends always justify means. In any case his own readers' reactions in their comments should tell him just how badly he has got this wrong.

This is a very serious situation for the government, moral authority once lost cannot be regained. They should have fired McBride for cause, not let him resign with a self-serving letter. They should have apologised immediately and unreservedly. Anything else looks appalling, and the efforts of McGuire and his ilk only makes it worse.

[Correction: Tom Harris represents Glasgow South, not East. Sorry for the mistake.]