While Guido does have a detailed picture of the discussions held at Labour HQ, the attendees at the two Red Rag meetings held at Unite HQ are less loquacious. Look at the people at that meeting; Andrew Dodghson, Charlie Whelan, Damian McBride, Derek Draper were all copied in on the shocking smear emails as proposed by McBride. These are not people through whom the milk of human kindness runs. Charlie Whelan is not a bleeding heart known for his charity towards Tories, Damian McBride is the poisonous destroyer of Brown’s internal and external enemies. Derek Draper thinks it “absolutely brilliant” to attack the wives and lovers of Tories. Kevin Maguire is not merely a partisan journalist, he is an integral part of Brown’s spin and smear operation. Even after the existence of the smear emails was revealed, Maguire was still peddling innuendo from them about “Cameron’s alleged embarrassing complaint of a highly personal nature”.
Maguire has been touring the broadcast studios claiming that at the Unite meetings they just watched a few YouTube videos and discussed Obama’s online campaign strategy – the email invitation however says it was a meeting to discuss the Red Rag attack site. Do you believe Maguire or the written evidence?
Maguire’s claims are laughably implausible. Here we have a gang of the most vicious Labour propagandists with a visceral tribal hatred of their opponents, yet Maguire would have you believe they were merely singing “Kumbaya” around the Unite boardroom table. The meeting took place some five weeks before the infamous emails were circulated to four of the six attendees at the meeting. We know from Draper’s “absolutely brilliant” reply that they were almost ready to go live with the smear and spin site.
No email has come to light cancelling the project. We only have Derek’s word for it that they were going to abandon the idea for the site. The fact that the site was still online when the existence of the emails came out strongly suggests the project was not cancelled.
The explanations don’t make sense, if they were going to do something legitimate, why keep it secret from all the Labour bloggers at those Draper organised breakfasts? If they really wanted to try out new video ideas, wouldn’t Maguire’s own Mirror blog be the perfect place to do it? The only explanation that makes sense is that they wanted to keep it away from the loose tongued Labour bloggers.
When you have people like Draper, McBride and Whelan plotting in secret it can only mean they were up to no good. Maguire is bullshitting. He says it was innocent, the written evidence suggests otherwise. There is nothing innocent about Whelan, Draper and McBride…