The forces of hell: Charlie Whelan and Damian McBride

By James Kirkup, Political Correspondent Published: 10:00PM GMT twenty-four February 2010

Mr Whelan and Mr McBride have a good understanding in common. Both are undoubtedly constant to Gordon Brown and have modernized his bulletin forcefully in exchange with reporters and politicians alike. And both had to renounce from Mr Browns use among domestic controversy.

Like majority domestic spin-doctors, the dual took a no-holds-barred proceed to politics, as peaceful to conflict associate Labour members generally allies of Tony Blair as the Conservative opposition.

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That ruthlessness done both men greatly without a friend with majority colleagues. But their efficacy swayed Mr Brown, so majority so that he still has links with one of his ashamed operatives, Mr Whelan.

Mr Whelan grew up in Surrey and attended a in isolation school, but affects the glottal stops and football-obsessive mannerisms that heed so majority middle-class Labour apparatchiks.

After operative as a kinship official, he became Mr Browns orator in 1992 and accompanied him in to Government in 1997.

In the autumn of 1997, he became scandalous for lecture reporters around a mobile phone from the Red Lion beer hall in Westminster that discordant to Tony Blairs goal Britain would not stick on the European Monetary Union.

His contingent rain came in Jan 1999 when he was blamed for leaking inform about Peter Mandelsons debt arrangements, leaks that led to Lord Mandelsons initial ministerial resignation.

After a spell in the wilderness, in 2007, prior to long after Mr Brown became Prime Minister, Mr Whelan became "political director" of Unite, the countrys greatest traffic kinship and a vital monetary donor to Labour.

Precisely what he does for the kinship is unclear, and a little of his time appears to be outlayed behaving as an unaccepted help and confidant to Mr Brown.

According to Andrew Rawnsleys The End of the Party, Mr Whelan in 2008 plainly speedy reporters to inform that Mr Darlings pursuit was on the line. On Wednesday, he posted a summary on the Twitter website suggesting he was the plant of "smears."

Today, Mr Whelan is a unchanging caller to both No 10 and the House of Commons, where he can mostly be found in one of the multiform bars in the Palace of Westminster.

Mr McBride, by contrast, has dead from the Westminster stage.

He quiescent as Mr Browns domestic confidant last Apr after he was suggested to have helped issue a tract to allegation comparison Tories and their wives around an arms-length website, a tract Mr Brown has denied all believe of.

Raised in north London, Mr McBride attended a state propagandize prior to going on to Cambridge University, where he took a postgraduate grade in domestic history. He afterwards assimilated the Treasury as on the polite use fast-track.

A destiny as a mandarin beckoned, but Mr McBrides polite use career finished in 2005, interjection to his overzealous await for Mr Brown. As the then-Chancellors press secretary, Mr McBride crossed the line from domestic objectivity in to partisanship, lecture reporters with attacks on the Conservatives.

Sir Gus ODonnell, right away the Cabinet Secretary, told Mr Brown that Mr McBride could not sojourn a polite servant, so Mr Brown rehired him as a special adviser, means to rivet in narrow-minded domestic warfare.

In that role, he became both one of Mr Browns majority devoted aides and a hugely divisive figure, blamed not regularly rightly for planting disastrous media stories about ministers and their career prospects underneath Mr Brown.

Now operative at his old propagandize in north London, Mr McBride told BBC Radio Five Live on Wednesday: "The thought of me lecture opposite Alistair Darling is all wrong."