Eamon, don’t let the sneaky backroom boys get you down

DEAR Eamon, I’ve been half-wondering when it would happen.

The sneaky little bit of back-stabbing. The careful placing of a damaging story, just at the moment you don’t need it. The nice juicy anecdote designed to put you on the defensive, and hopefully to keep you there.

It goes with the territory. I’ve been a supporter of every Labour leader since Brendan Corish, and every single one of them has had to put up with that attempt to sort them out. It nearly always starts the same way, with an unattributable remark that is designed to be personally and politically belittling. The trick is to put you in a position where if you don’t react, you look like a wimp. But if you over-react, you look childish and petulant. You did the right thing — you dismissed it out of hand, and got on with your job. It would probably do no harm to make a bit of a joke out if it in due course. But you avoided the main trap they were trying to set for you, which was to get you to confirm, by your reaction, that the original put-down was true.