Harriet Harman has launched a bitter attack on the former Prime Mentalist, using a speech hosted by John Bercow this evening to accuse Gordon of sexism:

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“Imagine my surprise when having won a hard-fought election to succeed John Prescott as deputy leader of the Labour Party, I discovered that I was not to succeed him as Deputy Prime Minister!” she is expected to say. If one of the men had won the deputy leadership would that have happened? Would they have put up with it? I doubt it. And imagine the consternation in my office when we discovered that my involvement in the London G20 summit was inclusion at the no10 dinner for the G20 leader’s wives.”

Harman’s broadside has invoked the wrath of Damian McBride, who hits back: “Have you no sense of decency, Harriet?” McBride blogs that Brown had other ways of discriminating against people other than their gender – “Gordon divides the world into only two categories: useless and not useless” – going on to snipe:

“Harriet seems to think she should have been invited to the leaders dinner instead, or perhaps to the meetings of the G20. To which I’d respectfully ask….erm, why? What on earth would Harriet have contributed to the meetings and dinner where Gordon, Obama, Sarkozy and Merkel were hammering out the global financial stimulus to bring the world out of recession? I mean seriously, what? But if she thinks she was excluded from those discussions because of her gender, Harriet needs to remind herself that Gordon’s key advisor throughout those meetings was Baroness Shriti Vadera. Why? Because she was the world expert on what needed to happen. With all due respect, Harriet was not.”

Ouch!

Safe to say Hattie didn’t take that too well. Here is her riposte on LBC just now:

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“Damian McBride, you’ll remember, was sacked from being in the employment of the government for denigrating women, and he’s doing it again right now. It’s why he got fired, he’s learnt no lessons, he’s doing it again. When we have to listen to Damian McBride’s views on women, we really are in trouble.”

Calm down, dears!