Damian McBride sent the first of two emails that would cost him his job at 6.30pm on 13 January. "A few ideas I have been working on for RedRag," he wrote to Labour blogger Derek Draper. "For ease, I've written all the below as I'd write them for the site."
The email suggested a series of unfounded and puerile smears against senior Tories. Draper responded 20 minutes later: "Absolutely totally brilliant Damian. I'll think about timing and sort out the technology this week so we can go as soon as possible."
The two main targets of McBride's emails were the Conservative party leader, David Cameron, and the shadow chancellor, George Osborne.
McBride suggested spreading gossip, entirely unfounded, that Cameron may have suffered from a sexually transmitted disease. He wrote that Cameron should be challenged to publish his "full financial and medical records". He also suggested "inserting [a] picture of Dr Christian Jessen", who appears on the Channel 4 programme Embarrassing Bodies. There was no suggestion the two men knew each other.
McBride's other idea was to falsely hint at the existence of embarrassing photographs of Osborne from his university days.
In a reference to pictures published in 2005 of Osborne with a prostitute, Natalie Rowe, taken 12 years earlier, and a notorious Bullingdon Club photograph of Osborne taken when he was at Oxford, McBride wrote: "Embarrassing photos have followed George Osborne around throughout his career: posing in his Bullingdon Club uniform at Oxford, lying on the carpet at home in his permed mullet, playing Monopoly with his fellow viscounts and standing in an ... embrace with a prostitute at a party in London. But he knows that the most embarrassing photos from his past have yet to emerge."
McBride suggested the website spread false rumours that pictures exist of Osborne "posing in a bra, knickers and suspenders" and "with his face 'blacked up'," adding: "He wouldn't be the first student to do some cross-dressing at university. But ... why would a student in the late 1980s black up his face for the amusement of friends in their private college rooms? This in the era when young Tories wore 'Hang Mandela' T-shirts."
McBride wrote: "If you think these work, let's think about how to sequence them in with the others."
He also suggested spreading rumours that "secret tapes" existed containing evidence that Osborne had sex with the prostitute. Osborne has always denied that, or that he took drugs with her.
