Before today’s Daily Mail nonsense appeared, quite a lot of blogosphere and Westminster connected people knew the identity of ‘a Cabinet member’ accused of homosexuality ‘which he vigorously denies’. Most of us were fairly certain it wasn’t true. But Guido Fawkes ploughed on – and as a result of this, has caused even his long-term business associate and fellow blogtrailblazer Iain Dale to call the campaign ‘spiteful and reprehensible’.

Once again the issue of what is or isn’t in the public interest comes to the fore. Reading down the comment thread at Dale’s site this morning, apart from the usual platoon of Guido-f*ckers for whom he can do no wrong, there were also a number of comments about it being ‘alright to slander Gordon Brown on the basis of baseless drug-taking rumours’ but not alright to ‘show Hague up for the gay boy he is’.

They are wrong on two points.

First, William Hague isn’t gay – and even if he was, it’s his business and nobody else’s. If you’re gay, straight, small or huge, such a condition is unlikely to reduce your aptitude for a senior Cabinet job.

Second, the ‘baseless rumours’ of Gordon Brown’s anti-depressant usage were nothing of the kind – and the case in favour of running suspicions of it remain obvious: that the country’s Leader seemed to be severely depressed, clinically obsessive, and therefore highly likely to have his ability to do the job impaired….as events subsequently justified. (Only today, Blair’s autobiography extract maintains that Brown’s borderline OCD persistence drove him to drink for a while).

As the original source of the Brownonpills story when the editor of the Slog’s predecessor nby, I still contend that suspicion of Brown’s use of MAOI antidepressants was neither rumour nor invented. As much of the dust has now settled (and a key source has died, while another has retired to well-deserved anonymity) I can be reasonably straightforward about what happened.

Brown’s compulsive and depressive nature was first communicated to me by a former Minister in 2004. Further enquiries revealed in fact that his ‘weird’ personality was common knowledge in both Whitehall and Westminster circles.

In 2006 I heard for the first time (and had it corroborated soon afterwards) that Brown was allegedly taking antidepressants. As a long-time depressive myself, I was appalled by the tone in which the initial comment was made – and told the person so.

Then in the summer of 2009 I attended a function where, shall we say, rather a lot of excellent wine was in full flow. On that occasion, a senior Civil Servant related a story about “some crazy new diet Sarah has got Brown on”. When he related the forbidden substances as part of this ‘fad diet’, I recognised them instantly as those things denied to patients taking MAOI drugs. This person clearly had no idea of the significance of what he had been told.

This was third-hand stuff. But a month later by pure coincidence, a former advertising colleague contacted me with news of “an interesting bloke who has something he wants you to hear about the Prime Minister”. I contacted the source, and was given the identical list of forbidden foods.

I now began actively to follow the leads up. The first confirmation was from a Lobby correspondent: but it was just vague talk about ‘happy-pills’ – and when a hack claims to know something he hasn’t printed, you have to wonder how seriously to take the information. But then a source trusted over many years gave me a name, and I rang the nominated person.

This time – having opened with the old line about “just clearing up some details on the story” – I gained the immediate impression that the story was true. Not only that, I was left in no doubt that the source wished to implicate the Tory Shadow Cabinet in a story of collusion in the knowledge about Brown’s parlous state. Cameron and his colleagues, the person insisted, were very happy to leave Brown to unravel in public, because they feared facing any other leader.

Shortly after this, I asked another colleague to contact his father, whom I knew to have (as a physician) some very high-level contacts. Back came the word: Brown was ‘in a very dark place’, and his wife was beside herself with concern about the Prime Minister. On the same day, another medical source contacted me to counter recent press releases about the PM’s eyesight.

“They’re all lies” he alleged, “Brown has a second retinal problem. He will almost certainly be blind within five years”.

On the basis of these and other corroborations, I ran an exclusive at nby (see link above). The story would most probably have gone nowhere had not the blogger Anna Raccoon picked it up within hours and repeated it on her site. Ironically, Guido Fawkes then spotted her piece and began an ‘Is Brown Bonkers?’ series of pretty tasteless cartoons very much at the same infantile level as his current stuff about William Hague. However, the net result was that the story – after the more staid online mag The First Post ran various diary pieces – rapidly gained national significance.

That the Left Establishment now rushed to defend Brown and rubbish my provenance is undeniable. The following day Peter Mandelson dismissed me as ‘a far Right neo-Nazi blogger’ (a total untruth) and was rapidly followed by both Ed Balls and Ben Bradshaw – the latter of whom went onto BBC’s Question Time to repeat the slander, and bleat pathetically “But it’s all a lie”. In turn I was interviewed by both the Guardian and Channel Four, both of whom took the tack ‘Brown on pills blogger admits he has no proof’ – as if this might be a revelation of my making it all up: of course I had no physical evidence – had I done so, the story would’ve appeared in a national title in very short order.

Finally, the following Sunday – for reasons which I have never been able to entirely establish – Andrew Marr asked Brown the question point blank on his BBC Sunday morning slot….but quite specifically mentioned prescription painkillers. This allowed Gordon Brown to flatly deny the story – but neither I nor anyone else had ever even mentioned prescription painkillers. (It is a reflection of the thick ignorance of many in the Labour movement that at the Party Conference the next day, Marr was jostled and insulted – despite having saved Brown’s bacon by asking this quite surreal question of him).

As to denial of my original piece, Brown has never done so. Number Ten’s press office denied it to me ‘off the record’ – the only time such a bizarre thing has ever been said to me by any press office anywhere. The eyesight problem, however, was denied – and then immediately found to be true when the Daily Telegraph caught Brown sneaking into a specialist eye hospital. Number Ten then lied about the results – which were leaked, and so once again a hasty ‘misspoken’ retraction had to be put out.

It is quite possible that now Blair’s memoirs are out, the subject of what medication if any was used to control Brown’s very obvious personality disorder will be revived. My own view is that any and all evidence would have been destroyed within days of the nby story breaking. The only thing that would stick now is first-hand personal testimony on the record; and that is something I narrowly failed to secure at the time.