Key Brown aide resigns over sex smear scandal

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Photo / AP

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was engulfed in crisis yesterday after a key aide resigned over explosive leaked emails discussing how to attack senior Conservatives, including leader David Cameron and his wife Samantha with smears about their private lives.

Brown special adviser Damian McBride quit over his exchange with Labour blogger Derek Draper, in which the two discussed setting up a website to publish scurrilous allegations about opponents.

The idea was still being actively discussed until a fortnight ago, the Observer has learned.

Tom Watson, a Cabinet Office minister, was also facing questions after it emerged that McBride referred in one of the emails to Watson "looking at other stories for LabourList", Draper's website.

But Downing St sources insisted Watson had been discussing an entirely separate story about Labour Party staffing to be posted on Draper's conventional website, rather than being involved in the secret gossip project known as RedRag.

Brown moved rapidly to distance himself from the affair, saying there was "no place in politics for the dissemination or publication of material of this kind".

Downing St insisted that neither the Prime Minister "nor anybody else in Downing St" knew about the emails.

Senior Tories demanded a public apology and assurances that Watson was not involved in dirty tricks, while the shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling, accused Downing St of descending "into the gutter".

Charles Clarke, a former Labour Cabinet minister, said McBride had brought shame on the party.

Stories proposed by the two men in their emails include false rumours that David Cameron had an embarrassing medical condition, suggestions that shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne took drugs with a prostitute - an old allegation in the public domain which Osborne has flatly denied - and a final allegation involving a Tory backbencher Nadine Dorries and a fellow MP which the Observer understands is without foundation. Another supposed story involved a Tory MP allegedly getting publicity for a firm run by his partner. There is no evidence that any of the claims are true.

Dorries said yesterday that she had consulted a lawyer and was prepared to sue. "I am incensed. I wonder how Gordon Brown would feel if a Conservative Central Office employee sent emails with slanderous 100 per cent lies about Sarah Brown?"

When the existence of the emails emerged on Saturday, Downing St dismissed them as "juvenile and inappropriate", the result of two friends messing around with a subsequently abandoned idea for a blog rivalling that of Guido Fawkes, a blogger whose real name is Paul Staines. McBride said he was shocked and appalled that Staines had obtained the emails and handed them to newspapers, insisting that he and Draper had already decided "Derek should not take his online efforts down to the level of Guido Fawkes" and that their ideas would not be used.

Draper said McBride had paid a high price for an idea that never happened. But RedRag was set up in November, and while the leaked emails date from January, it is understood the plan was only placed on ice this month.

Draper suggested that his computer may have been hacked to get the emails. No breach of security at Downing St was found.

- OBSERVER