Augean open-plan offices

Right.  Barring the appearance of another round of revelations on the McBride/Draper emails, it looks as though the story is more or less over.  What, if anything, have we learned from it?

The deep unpleasantness of Gordon brown’s closest advisers can have been no news to anyone who has read Rawnsley or Bower on Brown and the Labour Government.  For McBride in 2009, read Whelan in 1999.  Nothing has really changed.  Alice Miles’s column today is spot on, and rather dispiriting, because one thing is certain: McBride’s nature and methods, and by extension the nature and methods of the whole coterie of Brown advisors from Balls to Watson, were known by every political journalist in the country.  What has been striking, however, is the sheer mean-spirited lowness that this affair has revealed.  Squalid and debasing and utterly unworthy of a Government.  It’s been like turning the light on and watching the cockroaches scuttle into the shadows.