The Mail on Sunday and the wholly unsubstantiated smears

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

Yesterday, the Mail on Sunday ran a story that set out to trash the reputation of an award-winning journalist in order to save the face of gaffe-prone Tory health spokesman, Andrew Lansley.

As Mark Hanson writes for the Independent website, the Mail on Sunday’s article welds together Alastair Campbell, John Prescott and LabourHome blogger Alex Hilton and alleges some kind of mysterious web-based plot with the health trade journalist, Sally Gainsbury, who happens to be Hilton’s girlfriend.

From what I can tell there are no sourced facts and no direct quotes at all to support the assertion made in the Mail on Sunday. Either that is very lazy journalism, or it is because the reports are known to be false.

On his blog, Alastair Campbell says “the sinister view of this might be that the Tories hope to create a stink around a reporter who clearly has the measure of Lansley’s lack of grip on health policy”.

As a general election nears, I suspect there will be a lot more of this kind of unsubstantiated “journalism”. It will be up to us in the Labour blogosphere to spot this kind of mischief, check the true facts and dispel the myths where necessary.