Tory HQ feeds attacks on Unite to right wing press as Whelan says: I didn’t brief against Darling

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

Tory HQ has launched a co-ordinated attack on Charlie Whelan and Unite this week, and the right wing press are gobbling it up. In a page and a half long press release circulated yesterday by Conservative central office, and widely quoted in today’s Daily Mail, CCHQ’s Allan Hayden wrote:

“It’s revealed today that Unite, the union that has decided to strike against BA, inflicting misery on millions of travellers, is not only bankrolling Gordon Brown’s election campaign but its political director is now back at the centre of that campaign.”

Meanwhile, Iain Dale is calling on Whelan to remark on Nick Cohen’s blogpost for Standpoint, a right wing neo-con magazine. In the article, Cohen digs out an old attack, in which he claims Whelan criticsed Alistair Darling at a pub in September 2008.

Cohen says today in his blog that he wrote, at the time of the party:

“I was waiting with a crowd of guests at the Pillars of Hercules pub in Soho for the start of a party being thrown by Kevin Maguire, the Mirror’s amiable political editor, to celebrate his wife’s launch of a chick-lit novel. Political journalists and rom-com novelists are not the most promising mixture for a convivial evening, but we were all rubbing along until for no reason Charlie Whelan, Brown’s point man in the unions, turned to the journalists and started laying into the Chancellor of the Exchequer. As he was speaking in a public place and did not ask to go off the record, the etiquette of journalism allows me to say that I was astonished. Darling had been a loyal friend of Brown’s, but that did not stop Whelan from denigrating him.”

But Nick Cohen did not write this at the time of that party for the book launch, which was in September 2008 – he wrote it nine months after the event in May last year, just before the European elections in June.

To clarify the situation, Whelan tells me:

“I didn’t brief against the Chancellor and well known right wing hack Nick Cohen has totally misrepresented the truth. In September 2008 a number of old friends gathered for drinks in a pub following a book launch near by. Unsurprisingly given the launch was for Kevin Maguire’s wife’s book there were a number of hacks there and also unsurprisingly the hot topic of discussion was The Chancellors’s fly on the wall with Decca Aitkenhead for the Guardian magazine. A full nine months later one of the hacks, Nick Cohen wrote about the event accusing me of briefing against the Chancellor, though none of the other hacks recall this. The incident now reappears in the Rawnsley book with invented quotes added, and the venue for the book launch has now moved to the pub itself. The BBC today reported that ‘It was a matter of record’ that I had briefed against the Chancellor. They have now accepted it isn’t, have changed their story and have agreed not to repeat the claim.”