Martin Bright

James has predicted that there will be a good news element to the Budget that no one has yet predicted. I do hope there is good news, but I also hope it isn't presented with a last-minute flourish. The 10 pence tax fiasco should be warning enough on this front.  Judged on his set-piece performances so far, however, Alistair Darling is not a rabbit-out-of-the hat kind of guy. I am delighted that the indications so far suggest  he is concentrating on the employment situation and that he has fended off some of the pressure from next door. I fear Matthew is right when he says that there are signs of the Prime Minister's footprints on the pre-briefings: the phrase "invest to grow" is pure old-fashioned New Labour in this sense.

Just to clarify. I didn't intend to suggest in my last post that Damian McBride's smear tactics would have been excusable if they had worked. Sorry if I gave that impression. I was simply trying to explain the thinking behind the operation. The smears were unacceptable in any circumsatnces The Prime Minister's belated apology suggests that he now knows how toxic this has become. He is right to be angry because McBride has put his government at the mercy of a maverick right-wing libertarian blogger. Quite why he and the people around him became quite so fixated on Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes), is completely beyond me.  But they were genuinely obsessed, that much is clear. And if Staines has further emails to drip feed he will be able to torment the government for some time yet.

The revelations over the weekend about Damian McBride's pitiful smear campaign have probably delivered the fatal blow to Labour's chances of winning the next election. The only possible excuse for writing such filth would be that it served the interests of the battle against the Tories. It has had the opposite effect. Most decent people would think twice about voting for a government that permitted such a culture to exist in Downing Street. The poison expressed in McBride's infantile stratagem has fed back into the bloodstream of the party  he was supposed to be serving (let's not pretend for a moment that he was acting as a civil servant in this.

It's Easter Sunday and I have better things to do than think about sleazy emails. I'm unlikely to be able to post again about this again today, but I have much to say on the subject and Iain Dale in the Mail on Sunday has already quoted my previous comments about the thuggish company the Prime Minister sometimes chooses to keep. This is very serious for the Prime Minister, especially now Charlie Whelan's name has been associated with the emails. The Tories have asked Gordon Brown to apologise and he probably should. I have always marvelled at the latitude Brown gave to his lieutenants. This has allowed him to distance himself, if necessary, from their activities.

The tawdry tale of Damian McBride's "juvenile and inappropriate" emails about Conservative politicians is pretty grim as it is. But it is just possible to imagine how the situation might be worse. What if someone even closer to McBride were on the circulation list, for example? Someone like Charlie Whelan, for example. That would be truly dreadful. And what if the emails were circulated even further, dragging in others, like Whelan, with close links  to the unions who will fund Labour's next election campaign. Now that is so awful it is almost beyond imagination. Gordon Brown's loyalty has always been his best and worst quality. There are many within the Labour Party who feel McBride should have been shown the door long before his latest indiscretion.

Stephen Glover had an interesting take on the row between NIck Cohen and Sunder Katwala, head honcho at the Fabian Society, in his Independent column this week. Just to recap, Nick accused Sunder of being part of the left-wing consensus which failed to recognise the seriousness of the threat of extremist Islam. Sunder then gathered a group of writers and activists together to sign a letter to the Observer suggesting that Nick "needs to find another column to write", a strangely ambiguous turn of phrase.

I always get it in the neck here when I quote Polly Toynbee. But maybe I will get away with quoting her quoting Professor Danny Blanchflower, who, like me, is warning against losing a generation to the recession. Here's the relevant passage from Polly's column in today's Guardian: "The man now on a mission to persuade Nos 10 and 11 to move fast is the only monetary policy committee member who saw the coming crash. Ministers are listening as Professor David Blanchflower urges emergency spending to prevent mass youth unemployment. With 800,000 under-25s out of work and another 600,000 leaving school this summer, he wants the budget to borrow £90bn to rescue them.

When I began making my film about Ken Livingstone last year it became clear pretty quickly that there were serious issues around the accountability of the Mayor of London. To his credit this was something that Ken always realised. When challenged about the fact that he ran London as his personal fiefdom, Ken agreed, because he understood that was this was pricedsly the structure of the office of Mayor established when the institution was set up. Quite early on in the Boris campaign, the Tory candidate was asked about issues of accountability and he admitted that he didn't understand what the fuss was about. His advisers soon pointed out that this was a huge issue (and vote winner) and Boris began to talk the language of the democrat. But it didn't last very long into office.