Stephen Byers: A man with a short memory?

By David Higgerson on Apr 15, 09 11:22 AM

PERHAPS the funniest ironies are the ones involving people who don't realise they are being ironic at all.

Yesterday was supposed to be all about Gordon Brown trying to move on from the McBride "scandal" with handwritten letters being sent to the Tories who were apparently to be smeared in the near future.

But it seems a giant penny dropped in the Blairite camp, which still doesn't seem to have got its head around the fact that no matter how badly Brown performs, people would still rather see him in charge than a return to the cultured fakery of the Blair era.

Perhaps Stephen Byers and Alan Milburn are smarting a bit from not getting a Mandelson-style recall to Government, or maybe they just believe that if you can't have a Blair Labour governemnt in power, no other form of Labour government should be allowed to function either.

Either way, Byers and Milburn couldn't resist the opportunity to stick the knife into Brown. Milburn, who bizarrely gave up his government job to spend more time with his family yet strangely always seems to have the time to pop up when things like this happen, called for an end to "vicious" briefings and "morally unacceptable" tactics.

This, to me, came across as particularly ironic from a man who was at the heart of a Blair government which thrived on diversion tactics and berating enemies in the most vicious of manners - the case of Dr David Kelly being described as a "Walter Mitty" character by Blair spin-doctor-in-chief Alastair Campbell being the most obvious case in point.

Byers, meanwhile, fell into the "me too" camp by rushing forward with a full-page opinion piece in the London Evening Standard in which he described being the victim of "hostile and aggressive" briefings against him.

He went on to suggest that Number 10 had failed to understand the level of public disgust about the proposed smear campaign. Really? Has Gordon Brown mis-judged the public mood on this one? Or has he done as much as most voters want anyway: sacking the man responsible and writing to those who would have been slurred to express regret?

That side, it's very rich for Byers to accuse the Government of misjudging the mood of the public on issue like this. He is, after all, the minister who was in charge of the transport department on September 11, 2001 - the day that thousands dies in the 9/11 terror attacks. You may recall Jo Moore, his spin doctor at the time, responded to the attacks by suggesting it was a good day to "bury" bad news.

That was on September 11, 2001. By February 2002, Byers - who had managed to distance himself from such blatant spinning in a way he is now trying to prevent Brown from doing over the McBride emails - was still in charge at Transport, and Jo Moore had once again suggested that it would be suitable to push out bad news on the day of Princess Margaret's funeral.

Compare Brown's actions - ensuring McBride quit within days of the full content of the emails coming to light and promising it had no place in his Government - with those of Byers, who failed to act when the email came to light and presided over a department which failed to ensure such action was never considered suitable again, and Byers's criticism this week is exposed for exactly what it is - shallow, amnesiac poppycock.

Put another way - McBride wanted to slur opposition politicians who, while understandly upset at what was going on, knew when they entered politics that it was a dirty game. Brown made sure he went. Byers, on the other hand, allowed a spin doctor to carry on working after she effectively sought to make political gain out of the deaths of several thousand people on day which was a turning point in recent history.

Which do you think is worse?

At best, he was being ironic. But when he wrote that he couldn't suppress a smile when he heard about McBride quitting, I suspect it wasn't a smile at the thought of making some ironic mischief of his own.