I know it’s the Westminster Village story de jour, but I’m finding it very hard to work up motivation to blog on what is being portentously dubbed ‘Smeargate’, Labour’s cretinous attempts to stick the boot into the Tories.

Damian McBride, the author of the emails slurring his opponents, has deservedly lost his job (hard to believe, by the way, he’s 34 – if ever there were a walking advertisement for not becoming Gordon Brown’s media-bitch, it’s Damian). Derek Draper limps on as the public face of LabourList.org, reduced to empty exhortations for “the whole blogosphere, right and left, to commit to a new start, where offensiveness and personal attacks are avoided and debate is elevated not dragged down into the gutter”. Okay, Derek, ‘course we believe you’ve turned over a new leaf this time.

The Tories are demanding apologies, and the right-wing blogosphere is up-in-self-righteously-triumphant-arms. Labour is embarrassed, and the lefty blogosphere is torn between condemnation of Mr McBride, and tribal loyalty to Labour and/or tribal hatred of the Tories.

It’s predictable, it’s inevitable, it’s sterile.

Alastair Campbell made the most telling point on his blog – the last thing Labour wants to do is find itself mired in personality and process stories. It would do far better, key much more into voters’ fears, to focus four-square on the Tories’ policies:

… on reading the emails [McBride] sent, I was struck not just by their unpleasantness, but also by their incompetence and, most of all, how much they miss the point about where we are politically. The Tories are at their most vulnerable on policy. As I have been saying for some time, it is in this area that there has to be sustained, co-ordinated and vigorous attack, ensuring the public are aware of the incoherence and inconsistencies in the positions of those who would claim to be the next government of the UK.

(Of course, it’s much easier to be high-minded when out of office. It was Alastair Campbell, after all, who invented and spread the unsubstantiated rumour that John Major tucked his short into his pants. An innocent enough lie compared with Mr McBride’s, to be sure, but the tapestry’s woven from the same cloth).

My guess – and it’s just that – is that the weekend skirmishes will have little effect on the public (or at least that part of it which didn’t have better things to do with its Easter weekend than watch/read rolling news coverage). The whole tasteless episode will get wrapped inside the general ‘they’re all at it’ / ‘politicians are divorced from reality’ meme sparked by the recession, and ignited by the MPs’ expenses scandals.

Insofar as ‘the blogoshere’ will have entered the public consciousness, it will have seemed as distanced from their lives, as obsessed with the Westminster Village, as fuelled by egotistical machismo as those scrounging politicians held in such contempt by their constituents.

This was a squalid, tawdry story from start to finish which reflects badly on the gossipy, onanistic world of Westminster politics. The fact that it’s beem amped-up on the Internet doesn’t change that rather banal fact.