New Labour's 12th anniversary in power was marked on 2 May 2009. Steep has been the decline of the high hopes that greeted its victory. A movement that was committed to the democratic modernisation of Britain has imposed a Prime Minister who has not won a mandate at a general election nor secured for himself the smaller but still significant legitimacy that comes from fighting a contested leadership election within his own party. The supposed economic miracle Gordon Brown thought would allow the newly rich to provide the tax revenues for public works and wealth redistribution has crashed into a thousand pieces. Most sinisterly, what we once called "spin", and a more plain-speaking age would have called "propaganda", has degenerated from the manipulation of the press that all governments practise into character assassination and career destruction.

Keep the crisis of legitimacy and the inability to manage the country's finances in mind when you think about what I suppose I can get away with calling the Downing Street filth machine. The political and the economic failures are bound up with the scandalous lies Brown's trusted hitman Damian McBride concocted at the taxpayers' expense.

The Prime Minister and his acolytes are often criticised by women politicians and journalists for their laddishness. Their smears show that the feminists were too kind - far too kind. The Prime Minister's world is more than macho: it is obscene - a place so lost in pornographic fantasy that it can invent libels about the mental state of the wife of a political opponent, while never wondering what its obsessive interests say about its own neuroses.

To put it as politely as I can, dildos loom large in the Brownite imagination. The Sunday Times reported, "In his most lurid slur, McBride suggests that ‘secret tapes' exist containing evidence that Osborne had sex with the prostitute. McBride makes obscene allegations about the use of a sex aid and also claims that drugs were taken." McBride then went on to tell Labour's pornographers to invent a tale about Nadine Dorries, a Tory backbencher, having "a one-night stand with a married colleague during a party away day". Once again, Labour was to "hint that a sex aid was accidentally left in a hotel bedroom". David Cameron was to be spared the full treatment - his young son had just died, after all. Out of respect, the Brownites decided to confine themselves to suggesting that he had a sexually transmitted disease.