newsjunction.co.uk

A brief advert from Iain Dale;

Next Friday from 9am until 4pm, and Sunday evening from 6pm until midnight I will be hosting, along with Hopi Sen, a live elections programme on PlayRadioUK. These would be very much akin to how we covered the local elections on 18 Doughty Street on local election night in 2007. Very rough and ready and using citizen journalists all round the country to provide information and updates on what is going on in their area. It will be a sort of PoliticalBetting.com on radio…

The BBC is not doing an election programme on the 5th and won’t be on air until 9pm on the Sunday, so it seems to me there is a lot of scope to do something very innovative.

I’m looking for correspondents to cover each of the County Council/Unitary elections and also for the Sunday, correspondents to cover each Euro region - preferably more than one. We have the facility to get people on air by phone, Skype, email, text and Twitter.

We’re not going to try to repeat the kind of election programme the mainstream broadcasters do - it will be very much live and loose, and totally reliant on citizen journalism and bloggers to make it work. We’ll be talking to leading politicians and pundits over the course of the programmes too, but the bulk of it will be devoted to people like you.

When I first wrote about this, I had a huge response from people offering to play a part, and I’ll be emailing you all over the weekend. But if there is anyone else who may be attending a count, or be able to act as a correspondent, do please email me or leave a comment and I will add you to our list.

And while I am at it, don’t forget to tune into my normal weekly show on Playradiouk tonight from 11pm to 1am. And even better, call in!

Today we see the extent of the unfounded and disgusting smears propagated by McBride and emailed to Draper and Tom Watson MP (along with Brown’s previous spin chief Charlie Whelan and Unite union press officer Andrew Dodgshon), as The Sunday Times and its ugly step-sister News Of The World publishes extracts. They really are the work of juvenile schoolboys passing notes around class behind the teacher’s back, and not very bright schoolboys at that!

All of the smears are of course unfounded - some are downright sick, others simply ludicrous, all hurtful and untrue - but I am concerned that some people actually believe them, in part at least. Today’s top search term for people arriving at this blog is “david cameron’s embarrassing illness” followed by the rather telling search of “what is david cameron’s embarrassing illness?” All typed it seems as a matter of fact!

With the public opinion of politicians so low, is there a risk people take the view - as one person I know has despite my attempts to change their view - that it’s “six to one, a half dozen to the other” and “an elaboration but there’s no smoke without fire”? In Harriet Harman’s Court of Public Opinion, everyone is guilty until proven innocent it seems. An apology from Downing Street is vital.

Where there's muck there's Mandelson?

So for one morning I don’t look at the newspapers - “hey, it’s an Easter Saturday,” I thought, “what can possibly happen on an Easter Saturday” - and it seems the Guido-Draper blog war goes nuclear.

Guido and Derek Draper - with his “independent” LabourList website - have been trading blows for some time, but suddenly it seems there’s far more to it.

The Telegraph reports that emails sent to Draper from an “unnamed” senior advisor to Gordon Brown, “which made a number of unfounded, innuendo-laden suggestions about the private lives of David Cameron, George Osborne and other Conservative MPs, came into the possession of Paul Staines, who writes the Guido Fawkes political blog.”

The paper attempts to make more of an issue of the security breach and Guido-Draper spat but in reality the unnamed advisor was Damien McBride - Brown’s chief political advisor, a “close friend” of Peter Mandelson and a taxpayer paid civil servant! The emails were to appear on Draper’s LabourList site to smear a wide range of Tory MPs and bloggers, including Iain Dale, Guido and Nadine Dorries. Also involved somewhere is Tom Watson MP, who was copied into all the emails from McBride (who has now resigned) and lists Mudslinging: The 25 Dirtiest Campaigns of All Time among the top books to have influenced him!

But with all of these three spinning the dark arts where is the Slime Minister himself, Peter Mandelson? It all just seems to have his DNA all over it. Was he involved? We know he is good friends with McBride. He somehow feels conspicuous by his absence to me.