We were governed by people who were mentally ill!

On 28 September 2013, Rod Liddle said this in The Spectator:

“There is a little vignette in the first volume of Alastair Campbell’s diaries that makes it abundantly clear that, at the time, we were being governed by people who were mentally ill. It is yet another furious, bitter, gut-churning row involving Campbell, Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson and concludes with Mandelson stamping his little feet and screaming: ‘I am sick of being rubbished and undermined! I hate it! And I want out.’ 

The cause of this dispute was not whether or not Labour should nationalise the top 200 companies and secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry. Don’t be silly. It was about whether Blair should wear a suit and tie to deliver a speech or if, instead, he should put on a nice pair of cords…

It is impossible to read this sort of thing without coming to the conclusion that the most senior elements of New Labour were mad as hatters... seriously damaged, deeply troubled people. If you read on through those diaries, this view is amply confirmed: these awful, awful people who are perpetually wracked with a paranoid fury, drunk or constipated or hunched over the toilet bowl with their fingers down their throats or visited by the Black Dog of depression, or ulcerated or prostate on some sofa to banish the clamorous headaches. And of course continually lying to one another when they weren’t lying to the rest of us, continually stitching each other up, dissolving in a vat of their own bile.

There have been plenty of diaries emanating from the rule of New Labour (and its hilariously incompetent vestigial tail presided over by the maddest of them all, Gordon Brown) by various unelected and now dispossessed political munchkins, most of them expressing a commercially expedient contrition along with the grotesque outrages, the infractions of democracy, the utter contempt not just for the electorate but also for most of their elected MPs.

The latest comes from a saturnine pudding-faced thug called Damian McBride… This oaf’s revelations are being serialised in a morning newspaper, all the usual toxic leaks designed to destroy his comrades’ careers, and the usual emetic hands-up-guv-I-shuddna-dunnit faux apology. McBride, who was finally kicked out of his job for inventing filth about various high-profile Conservative politicians is not really apologetic, of course. Far from it; he simply wishes to sell his book… 

McBride is no more sorry than is Alastair Campbell; like Alastair, he just wishes to trouser as much dosh as is humanly possible from his tawdry revelations. I suppose the political correspondents will tell you that the source of that paranoid fury on both sides, Blair and Brown, was the deal or no deal which took place between the two at the Granita restaurant… 

My guess is that long before that dinner each was, as the Americans put it, crazier that a shithouse rat. A megalomaniac on one side, a paranoiac devoid of even the most primitive vestiges of human sociability on the other… And on both sides the loathing, of their own colleagues, of the press, of the electorate.”