Power Trip: The Epilogue

By Damian McBride

"Explosive" – Daily Telegraph
"Utterly gripping" – The Scotsman
"Racy, lucid and very well-informed" – Evening Standard
"Achingly vivid and horribly revealing" – BookTalk
"Devastatingly forthright" – Sunday Times
"Tremendous" – Sunday Times
***
From 1999 to 2009, Damian McBride worked at the heart of the Treasury and No. 10. He was a pivotal member of Gordon Brown's inner circle before a notorious scandal propelled him out of Downing Street and onto the front pages. When he released his memoir Power Trip in 2013, its frank depiction of the dirty work that props up British politics was greeted with shock, disgust and awe. Never before had the lid been blown off the Westminster system with such ferocity. Throughout the book, McBride made no effort to cleanse his reputation; instead, he sought relentlessly to expose the manipulation, plotting and skullduggery that lay at New Labour's core.
Ten years on, Power Trip remains the essential guide to understanding the murky underbelly of modern politics and how it can shape and corrupt those who inhabit it for too long. Now updated with a new foreword, this is the 10th anniversary edition of the most explosive political memoir of the past decade.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biteback Publishing
• Release date: Jul 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781849547826

Book preview

EPILOGUE

53

HACKING

This chapter was originally removed due to legal restrictions

As usual for a late Friday afternoon in my Treasury days, I was hard at work, sat in a pub in Waterloo making phone calls and meeting members of the Sunday lobby. A call came through from a senior tabloid journalist who’d never contacted me before.

‘Hi, Mr McBride, sorry to land this on you, but I’ve got something I need to put to you – have you got a minute? Fine. I’ve been speaking to a gentleman who claims his partner had an affair with Gordon Brown, and because they’ve just split up, he now feels ready to tell his story. So I just need to put all the details to you, and you can tell me if there’s anything you want to challenge.’

I interrupted, following one of my cardinal rules that if it sounds like a serious problem and you’re unprepared for it, you get off the phone as quickly as possible before anything can be formally put to you and before you can give any form of response.

‘Now hold on, if that’s what it is, I’m really not in a position to have this conversation now. I haven’t got a pad to take notes, I’m in the middle of another meeting, there’s lots of background noise. Can you do me a favour and send me an email with the main points, so I can just check this out, then we can have a proper conversation.’

‘I will do that, definitely,’ he said, ‘but can I just quickly give you the bare bones – it won’t take a minute.’ ‘Fine, but – just to be clear – I can’t hear you very well so you’re going to have to put all this to me properly later on, and I can’t respond to anything until you do that.’ ‘Great!’, he said cheerily.

What followed was a bizarre, rambling account of the journalist randomly meeting a guy, discussing their respective love lives, getting onto the subject of cheating partners, and eventually Gordon’s name coming up. I went from thinking the guy he’d met was a fantasist to thinking the journalist himself was making up the story as he went along. It was the oddest phone call I ever took in all the time I was doing the