McBride Gone

It seems that Damien McBride has resigned. It would have gone something like this. Story broke yesterday, no.10 tries to get control by giving the Telegraph the exclusive in exchange for relatively sympathetic write-up supported by talking heads on the news today. The hope would have been that this would have defused the Sunday newspapers from taking too hard a line and maybe they could ride out the weekend news-cycle. Calls will have been going out to editors to ask how they were going to play it, and trying to talk it down with offers of other juicy stories if this could be relegated to a single column article on page 13. That McBride has gone means that it didn't work. The better people in the Labour party are rebelling, with Labourhome and Charles Clarke calling for McBride to go and my guess is that the newspapers weren't playing ball either. So he's gone. Now no.10 will hope that it stops here, that they can portray McBride as a lone maverick, rather than Gordon Brown's head of strategy executing an agreed, well, strategy. They may succeed, but if there is much more to this, and if it comes out, then it could go very badly for Gordon Brown.