Former Ambassador Brian Barder has been trying to crank up the argument that Guido has to carry a sizeable share of the blame for spreading the odious contents of the McBride emails:

… virtually all the smear stories sent privately as possible blog material by McBride to Draper are now in the public domain — in the newspapers and on radio and television, not just on an obscure and scurrilous blog — and causing real pain and embarrassment to their victims, at least one of whom is threatening legal action (against whom?). 

And who was responsible for this widespread publication?  ‘Guido Fawkes’, who somehow got hold of copies of the e-mails, wrote about them on his blog and gave them to the newspapers (he denies having sold them), and the newspaper editors who have seen fit to reproduce the juiciest elements of them in extensive print while piously denouncing McBride and Draper for their wickedness in passing them from one to the other and daring to contemplate making them semi-public in a blog. 

The Conservative Party leadership and the other victims of the smears must be very grateful to Guido/Paul and his right-wing media contacts for so enthusiastically exposing this muck to public view.

See the ensuing to and fro in the Comments, including one from Guido himself.

Brian is wrong. The person directly responsible for leaking these documents and getting them published was not Guido but the person somewhere in the Labour elite who somehow made sure that they found their way to Guido, a high-profile writer/blogger/commentator. Everything else is a detail.

In my own notorious leaked email drama in 2005, someone senior in HM government leaked my email to the FCO/Treasury to stir up amusing trouble, who knows why. That person was responsible for the leak and disseminating the email’s contents, not the Sunday Times which published the thing.

Bottom Line: as soon as you write anything controversial on a computer and press Send, you are in the moral position of the person who brings a stick of dynamite to a Fireworks Party and leaves it on the mantelpiece inside the house with a label attached saying Dangerous – Do Not Light.

If then someone takes the dynamite outside and lights the fuse, that person is in an opportunistic sort of way immediately responsible for the consequences – but surely the person who created the danger in the first place by bringing the explosives into the house is  most to blame?

Bang.