By David Ferguson

Internet bloggers are a recurrent theme in western comment on the Chinese media. Western audiences are regularly regaled with tales of how enterprising Chinese bloggers have confounded Beijing's "authoritarian regime". The British mainstream media will therefore wake up on Monday morning and find itself somewhat flummoxed – its own government has just been pole-axed by a blow from a lone internet blogger, Paul Staines, who posts under the pseudonym "Guido Fawkes" on his website http://www.order-order.com/.

"Guido Fawkes" was the name of a famous figure from British History who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605, and politics is Paul Staines' field. He is not a professional journalist, but his ability to dig out the dirt on politicians from both sides of the "left-right" divide has not only left the said politicians seething with rage, but has also left his rivals in the mainstream media grinding their teeth with envy and frustration. This is particularly the case among the political media – the so-called "lobby" journalists – who depend for their access to major stories on an intimate and amicable relationship with senior political advisors and spinners, and are therefore vulnerable to exploitation and manipulation by the same people when there is a particular line that they need the media to peddle.

Staines has been particularly effective in producing stories on politicians' greed and their exploitation of a feeble and poorly-supervised expenses system. There has been plenty of material in this field – the most recent scandal involves Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, one of the most senior members of the Government, and a bizarre arrangement by which she claims that a room she occupies in her sister's flat in London is her "principal residence", while her family home in the country where her husband and children live is her "secondary residence". This has allowed her to claim around ₤150,000 in expenses for a host of everyday items for her "second" home, including the hire of pornographic videos for her husband and a bath-plug valued at 88p.

Staines has directed his fire at politicians from all parties, but as the party in government it is Labor that has borne the brunt. So it was that at the start of 2009 two of the Party's key communications figures, Damien McBride and Derek Draper, decided to set up a website with the specific aim of targeting the Conservatives, and intended at the same time to "get Guido".

Damien McBride has been one of Gordon Brown's closest allies for many years. His latest post was as Special Advisor to the Prime Minister on strategic planning – a civil service post. As a Special Advisor he was exempt for the normal rules that require strict political impartiality from civil servants – he was allowed to operate in a politically partisan way, but only under strict conditions.

Derek Draper has a somewhat chequered career. He owed early preferment in Labor Party communications circles to a close friendship with Peter Mandelson, but he was forced out soon after the Party came to power in 1997 after he was caught on video boasting to an undercover Observer journalist about how he could arrange access to senior politicians through his contacts. He disappeared off the political scene and reinvented himself as a psychological counselor, but in 2008 he returned to the Party's fold at the same time as Peter Mandelson, setting up a Labor-supporting, union-funded bogsite called Labor List.

In January, McBride and Draper discussed in detail the creation of a new blog, to be titled Red Rag, which would peddle anonymous gossip about leading Conservative politicians. With staggering ineptitude, they exchanged a series of emails in which McBride set out a series of stories, which Draper described as "absolutely totally brilliant", and the two discussed how the stories should be scheduled and presented.

In fact, the stories were an extraordinary concoction of lies. David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party, was to be accused of suffering from a sexually-transmitted disease. A rumor was to be spread about photographs of George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, with a prostitute with whom he had allegedly shared drugs and had sex. Nadine Dorries, an attractive female Conservative MP, was to be accused of having had a one-night stand with a fellow MP which had come to the attention of the Party leadership, and led to her being disciplined. The Cameron story was particularly sick as Mr and Mrs Cameron had a severely disabled son, and the story might even have led to ill-informed speculation that his ailment had been caused by Mr Cameron's affliction.

Unfortunately for McBride and Draper, their emails fell into the hands of "Guido Fawkes". How this happened, Guido has not yet revealed – did he hack their email system, or was he fed the information by an insider? He trailed the story in the British media last week, and on Sunday it featured prominently in The Sunday Times.

Draper made a feeble pre-emptive attempt to defend his exchanges with McBride as "just a joke". He also claimed that the two had abandoned plans to launch the site and use the stories. This may be true, but there are at least two other possibilities. One is that they were waiting for the launch of the next election campaign, when the stories would have had maximum impact. The other is that the Camerons' son sadly died in February, and even McBride and Draper would have realized that it was not an appropriate time to be leaking false gossip about sexual diseases.

Senior Labor figures reacted with fury at the damage that McBride and Draper have done to the Party's reputation. Gordon Brown himself said: "There is no place in politics for the dissemination or publication of material of this kind." McBride was gone – sacked or resigned – before the newspaper stories had even been published, in what must have been a heavy blow to the Prime Minister.

Nadine Dorries is demanding a public apology from the Mr Brown himself, on the basis that it was one of his most senior advisors who was the guilty party. This has left him facing one of the trickiest predicaments of his political career – damned if he apologizes, and damned if he doesn't.

It appears that there is still a good deal of mileage left in the story. Brown and his effective second-in-command Peter Mandelson are already inextricably woven into the scandal by the involvement of Brown's Special Advisor and Mandelson's bosom friend. But rumors are flying that there is more to come out than has yet been released, and that a Cabinet Minster, Tom Watson – ironically the Minister for "Transformational Government" was also involved.

But as much as anything else it is the crassness and the appalling judgment displayed by the key figures in the affair that is likely to remain in the mind of the electorate. McBride's puerile assaults on the senior Conservative figures involved would have shamed an adolescent schoolboy scrawling on a toilet wall – how could Brown have brought such a person into the most intimate corridors of power? And Draper's feeble attempts to defend, justify, or excuse himself as he toured the radio and television studios over the weekend – "I wasn't lying on purpose…" is a quote from his interview on Channel 4 Television – were embarrassing. How could Peter Mandelson have thought it appropriate to give this inarticulate, ham-fisted nonentity access to the most sensitive of Labor's secrets?

Only three weeks ago one of Gordon Brown's closest confidants, Scottish Office Minister Jack Murphy, made a mysterious visit to China. Although its ostensible purpose was to "promote Scotland", his visit involved no public or media events at all. It is to be hoped that he was not here to talk to the Chinese about the decorum, statesmanship, and high principles inherent in Britain's two-party democracy.

(China.org.cn April 13, 2009)