This pen is mighty, all right. Let us hope it is also lethal

I have never read a political article, anywhere -- and I've been around a long time -- about a serving Prime Minister that remotely compares with Nick Cohen's personal and professional assassination of Gordon Brown in the new issue of Standpoint, Fear and Filth at Brown's Number 10.

Read it all, when you have time, but permit me to give you some idea.

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. [...](Osborne smear) [...] (Dorries smear) [...] ...

Cohen cites Martin Amis's 'Clint Smoker, a porn-obsessed journalist...' and goes on

Brown has surrounded himself with Clint Smokers throughout his career and set them loose to tell stories about enemies real or imagined. No claim was more laughable after the guerrilla blogger Guido Fawkes leaked the McBride briefings than Labour's insistence that the aide was a lone wolf acting without his master's tacit consent. In my experience, all his men -- McBride, Ed Balls, Charlie Whelan, Ian Austin -- share a prolier-than-thou belief that their opponents, whether Blairites or Tories, are decadent fops from a depraved elite. Any tactic is justified in the campaign against them.

Cohen goes on to make the increasingly familiar analogies between Brown and Nixon:

For Brown, as for Nixon, it is always worth playing dirty.

For you underestimate the Prime Minister if you see him merely as an ordinary operator, inspired by the everyday political calculation that it may be advantageous to besmirch a rival. He has a characteristic left-wing belief in his own righteousness. Those who oppose him cannot have an honest objection to his policies, but must be motivated by malice of envy. In his mind, no blow is too low when he fights critics who are not merely mistaken but wicked.

And motivated to damage him, personally. For example, Cohen describes the occasion on which, finally seeing Frank Field after months of Field's trying to get him to take action on the 10p tax rate debacle, Brown assured Field that no-one would lose out.

'Why don't you go on the record and say that?' Field asked.

Instead of answering a legitimate question, Brown pushed his face into Field's and with features contorted with anger, screamed, 'You've always hated me, haven't you? You're always trying to do me down.'

Cohen details personal attack after personal attack on Brown's Cabinet colleagues, up to the time he threatened his way to his coronation and beyond.

At the time of Granita, Cohen says, Brown pulled out of the contest with Blair because he was advised that he would lose a leadership election even if he stood against John Prescott or Margaret Beckett, never mind Tony Blair. Nevertheless, Brown went on to a sort of glory when Blair went, because:

he could pretend that his economic policies had abolished the business cycle and then as now threaten potential rivals with having their reputations trashed.

But then, as it all began to fall apart,

Brown's lack of legitimacy, the sense that he was a usurper, niggled away at the Brownites like a toothache, and made them more vicious than before.

Cohen argues that the explosion of 'his empty boast to have abolished boom and bust' led the Brownite gang to be 'meaner still' as they worked to get Balls accepted as heir apparent.

This is a comprehensive and merciless assassination of Gordon Brown, exposing the hollowness of the man's every claim to political and personal decency. The mask is gone and we see a deeply nasty, vain and over-estimated man.

Then having eviscerated Gordon Brown and his henchmen (yes, all men) Cohen speaks of his joy as he beholds the hitherto silent -- and fully-informed, as he describes -- Lobby correspondents 'scurrying from the wreckage' after 'Guido Fawkes detonated his gunpowder under Westminster'. He acknowledges the realpolitik of Westminster journalism.

Left-wing journalists are condemned for allowing themselves to be played upon: 'Do you really want to do the Tories' work for them?' to which, Cohen says, almost sympathetically, they answered, 'No, not really.' Exept Martin Bright, who was despatched by Brown's henchmen, the dirty deed covered up by Geoffrey Robinson. Right-wing journalists never felt what Cohen describes as fear, but they too wanted their stories from the Bunker and so they kept their mouths shut.

Almost every paragraph of this article is an eye-popper, and as I said before, I have been around a long time. A long time.

But I have a question for Mr Cohen, who describes how he was on the inside of a lot of what he now condemns and even present at some unedifying incidents with the likes of McBride and Whelan.

So, just as he shames the Lobby, than whom he was a lot less vulnerable had he chosen to speak up, why did he not speak up, and use for a noble purpose the glorious verbal technicolor which he now feels able to use? That, he does not explain.