Damian McBride says Labour’s policies are a “great, steaming pile of fudge”

Just when you thought he’d mostly disappeared from the political scene, Damian McBride, Gordon Brown’s former special advisor who was forced to resign in disgrace over emails he’d sent smearing senior Conservatives, has piped up again. This time, he’s hit out against the Labour leaderships’ current strategy, calling their policies a “great, steaming pile of fudge”.

McBride’s latest intervention comes from the new epilogue to his memoirs Power Trip, originally released during the Labour Party Conference last year, extracts of which are being published in the Daily Mail.

As well as criticising Labour’s policy proposals, McBride has launched an attack on Ed Miliband, accusing him of being a blend of  ‘the worst of Tony Blair’s “me against the world” isolation with the worst of Gordon Brown’s “they’re out to get me” paranoia.’ His advice to Miliband who recently gave a speech confronting his perceived ‘image problem’? Two figures on the political right. McBride said Miliband should present himself as a “Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage-style outsider, the opposite of the carefully-manicured modern politician designed by a committee of PR advisers.”

But it seems no-one escapes McBride’s criticism, he goes on to criticise Labour’s overall strategy explaining,

“If Labour currently has central, underlying messages that it is trying to communicate to the electorate about itself, its policies, and its leader, the best you could say at present is that it’s not quite coming across. If the message is ‘We’re not the Tories or the Lib Dems, and you hate them’, that may work up to a point, but it won’t do much for those people who would happily express their antipathy by voting for Ukip or just staying at home, let alone those who hate Labour as well. Even the ‘cost of living’ argument – for which read ‘Those Tory toffs haven’t got a clue what your life’s like’ – relies on the electorate accepting that Labour has some better appreciation of those realities.”

Following Miliband’s speech last Friday and speeches from the shadow cabinet over the summer – where they’ll further outline their policies – it looks like the Labour leadership don’t need McBride’s advice after all. Sorry Damian, maybe next time…