There’s a stake in your fat black heart/ And the villagers never liked you./ They are dancing and stamping on you./ They always knew it was you./ Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

Sylvia Plath, Daddy

Until now, it has never been clear what we are supposed to believe about the political phenomenon that is Gordon Brown.  Is he the architect of New Labour or the idealist who kept a leash on its worse excesses?  Is he the last powerful socialist in UK politics or an egotistical chancer who manipulates everything and everyone for his own aggrandisement?  Is he an intellectual or an idiot?  A brilliant politician or a terrible one?  A statesman, or an incompetent buffoon who has stumbled into politics despite being resolutely unsuited to it?  A straight guy or a liar?

Those who started with a relatively favourable impression of Brown during his days at No. 11 (how could we not with Blair in charge?) and swayed by his portrayal in Peter Morgan’s The Deal as the superior candidate cheated out of his rightful place at the top of UK politics by the smirking jester Blair, can be forgiven for cutting Brown a certain measure of slack.  Whether one admired his political nous (riding the boom wave to concentrate enormous power in his position as Chancellor without an ounce of the accountability due to the PM) or his apparent idealism (stealth policies to alleviate extreme poverty at a time when New Labour could not afford to publicise what it was doing) or both, one had a right to expect radicalism and results.  We have got neither.

The sharpening factionalism of the party – the Blair/Brown camps – could have been viewed as an unfortunate distraction exacerbated by the understandable frustration with Blair’s needless clinging on to power (though it is a truth universally acknowledged that a split party cannot govern) and noises about how the Brownites (the ‘Nutters’ of Iannucci’s The Thick of It) were the worst of the bunch could have been dismissed as Old Blairite propaganda.   Not any more.

Any sympathy, latitude or inner belief one might have been prepared to extend to the political phenomenon that is Gordon Brown has now vanished.  The McBride affair is shocking not because it is hard to imagine that such individuals or such practices exist in British politics, but that someone directly employed by, and extremely close to, the Prime Minister has been caught doing it.  Smearing opposition candidates is a brand of low politics which jostles for a place amongst all the other examples of low politics we have seen in the UK these past 30 years, at the bottom of the barrel .  For my money, it’s winning the fight to be right at the very bottom.

Take for example, that apotheosis of political wrongdoing – Watergate.  This was a juicy news story because the President, after a thriller plot straight out of John Le Carre, was eventually linked to a very illegal wiretap operation.  Next to the McBride affair, which predicates the use of falsehoods to damage an opponent’s standing, then gaining an advantage by unlawfully discovering your opponents next move begins to look like nothing more than canny politics.

For me, this business is far, far worse than Stephen Byers’ aides ‘burying bad news’ after 9/11, even though it provides a less juicy ‘moral outrage’ story for the tabs.  At the heart of it all for me, is that put simply, either Gordon Brown knew about it, or he knew about it.  One cannot sensibly contemplate any alternative scenario.  The only fair-minded and objective conclusion is that at best he sanctioned it and at worst he ordered it.  It will take a bulletproof argument delivered by Alan Dershowitz or the ghost of George Carman QC to sway me from that view.

The real fuel for my own outrage, though, was difficult to pin down until I read Frank Field’s piece in the Guardian on Tuesday.  It isn’t that Gordon Brown is scum.   Although, he quite palpably and demonstrably is.  It’s that there is now no inch of doubt left that the government of the last 12 years stands for nothing.

Harold Wilson asserted that the Labour party was a moral crusade or it was nothing. The McBride affair has left Labour members looking at nothing. That is the reality check that McBride has wrought on the party.