Winter: They’re smearing me for telling truth
A LABOUR bid to smear Martin Winter led by Ed Miliband’s new adviser Alastair Campbell and his media ‘mouthpiece’ backfired spectacularly.
Mr Winter said he was ‘appalled’ by comments made by disgraced former No 10 spin doctor Campbell and his ally, Roy Greenslade, a Left-wing media commentator.
Campbell called The Mail on Sunday’s account of Winter’s book ‘desperate’, while Greenslade called the ex-Doncaster Mayor a ‘political nonentity’.
Mr Winter said: ‘Labour set its attack dogs on me because they know everything I said is true.
‘Miliband and his elite regard all ordinary Labour voters as nonentities. That is why they are not popular – and that is the whole point of my book.’
Campbell and Greenslade went into action after Labour chiefs could not deny Winter’s claims – because they knew them to be true.
Instead, Campbell, a ‘consultant’ to Miliband, and Greenslade, a friend of Campbell, tried to smear Winter – and this newspaper – on Miliband’s behalf. It failed, largely because of the tarnished reputation of both men.
Campbell was forced to quit as Tony Blair’s spin doctor in disgrace in 2003 after the death of MoD weapons expert Dr David Kelly and the ‘sexed up’ dossiers on Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
Kelly revealed the scandal to a journalist in a secret meeting. In an attempt to discredit him, his name was leaked in a Downing Street operation involving Campbell. Kelly was found dead shortly afterwards – most people believe he killed himself.
Greenslade was accused last week of ‘doing Labour’s dirty work’ over the Winter book – and on other occasions.
In 2002, when The Mail on Sunday revealed how Blair’s No10 tried to ‘muscle in’ on the Queen Mother’s lying-in-state, Blair and Campbell complained, saying it was a ‘lie’.
Greenslade backed Campbell’s bogus claim and used similar methods to smear those who had exposed the truth.
In the end, Blair and Campbell had to make a humiliating climbdown when the story was proved to be true.
Mockingly referring last week to ‘Professor Roy CampbellGreenslade,’ the Daily Telegraph’s Peter Oborne said Greenslade had long been seen as a ‘leading apologist for Campbell, launching vicious attacks on those he disliked’.
Campbell and Greenslade worked together at the Daily Mirror in the 1990s under tycoon Robert Maxwell, who was later shown to be crooked.
Greenslade, Professor of Journalism at London’s City University, has also come under fire over his IRA links.
He stood surety for convicted IRA man John Downey, suspected of carrying out the Hyde Park bombing in 1982 in which four soldiers were murdered. The charges against Downey were dropped because of a police bungle.
In the 1980s Greenslade secretly wrote for a Provisional IRA propaganda sheet. And he is a close friend of Pat Doherty, named as a member of the IRA Army Council.
Irish historian and writer Ruth Dudley Edwards called Greenslade a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ character – ‘tunnel visioned, partisan, angry and guilty of ethical lapses’.
One of his ‘ethical lapses’ was to fix a ‘spot the ball’ contest when he was Daily Mirror editor. ‘I fixed a game offering a million pounds to anyone who could spot the ball and ensured that no one won,’ he confessed, adding: ‘Mea culpa.’