http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/politics/edp_columnist_and_former_north_norfolk_conservative_candidate_iain_dale_s_conference_fracas_1_2800457
On this topic, there's a review of the book by Andrew Rawnsley in The Guardian, which savages McBride and Brown too:
Damian McBride's self-abasing book is just another of his dirty spins – but the real guilty party is Gordon Brown
This is a book you should judge by its title. "Power trip" says all that is warped about the author and his conception of politics. To him, it is an addiction and a game, Grand Theft Auto transplanted to Westminster. As the body count from his drive-by shootings piles up, right or wrong never comes into it. As for beliefs, they are always incidental to his only important cause – engorging the influence and notoriety of Damian McBride by making himself indispensable to Gordon Brown. It tells us something ghastly about his former boss – or, rather, confirms long-held suspicions – that McBride judged that the best way to bring happiness to his master was to engage in repeated character assassinations of Labour colleagues.
McBride isn't an idiot and, when sober, he has a sophisticated mind and can turn a phrase. So in both the book and the interviews he has given to promote it, he has acknowledged how destructive he was. He seems to think that if he calls himself a "nasty bastard" often enough we will somehow find that redeeming. Some commentators have fallen for it. "At least he's honest," they have said of his confessions to practising "the dark arts of political spin" – itself a dishonest euphemism that semi-glorifies what should be called lying and smearing. Damian, the sinner repentant? I am not buying it. What about penance? Forgiveness is not found by trousering a large cheque from a rightwing newspaper so that it can serialise your repellent activities to coincide with the Labour conference. Most disgusting of all is his attempt to gain our understanding for his amoral behaviour by insinuating that the fundamental fault lies not with him, but with the "cut-throat" world of politics into which he fell, "sucked in like a concubine at a Roman orgy". Thus he seeks to present himself as some sort of victim. Pass the sickbag. It is just another of his dirty spins to try to tar everyone else in politics with his shitty brush.
...
Yet here we have, from the hatchet man himself, plenty of evidence that Brown was the opposite of an innocent bystander. McBride describes one occasion when Brown instructs him to leak at a European summit. "Be careful – don't do it with any British guys." When one of McBride's schemes goes wrong, Brown asks: "Is all that business over with?" When Brown fears that a McBride leak will upset Buckingham Palace, he rings up at five in the morning screaming: "How can you do this to me? This is the Queen! THE QUEEN!" On yet another occasion when McBride has caused mayhem, Brown asks: "Why do you do this stuff?" Why? Because McBride believed that is what Brown wanted from him. After all, if Brown didn't want it, he would have sacked him.
It was Brown who created and presided over the brutish, treacherous, gangland culture in which his hitman operated. Even McBride laughs at his former capo's "comically irrational outbursts" and propensity to "unleash a tremendous volley of abuse, usually just a stream of unconnected swear words". Then there is Brown's default response to things going wrong – which is to blame someone else. "Blair!", roars Brown about a self-inflicted blunder. "Blair made me give him the figures. Why has he done this to me?"
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/26/power-trip-damian-mcbride-review
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