Gordon Brown's former special adviser Damian McBride, who had to resign from government after plotting to smear senior Tories, has said he was an "accident waiting to happen".
McBride, who served as senior aide to the former prime minister for many years, was forced out of Downing Street in April 2009 after he was caught conspiring with another Labour figure, Derek Draper, to set up a website designed to spread allegations about the private lives of David Cameron and George Osborne.
Giving evidence to the Commons public administration committee on Wednesday morning, McBride admitted: "It was a bit of accident waiting to happen that I would get myself in that kind of problem."
"I made moves around the end of 2008 to try and exit Downing Street and was persuaded my role was too important and I had to stay and carry on," he said, acknowledging he should have left before the scandal erupted.
"I got to stage around 2008 where I effectively wanted out, I didn’t want to be there anymore. Far too much of the coverage, it wasn’t about me necessarily, but I was paart of it.
"Rather than being the person responsible for generating coverage or preventing bad stories I had become part of the story."
McBride, who now works as head of media and PR for charity CAFOD and writes a must read blog detailing his time in government, said his life had been "totally overtaken" by his work for Brown.
"I was at funerals and I would take phone calls from the press, I would be cooking Christmas lunch and be taking calls from Gordon Brown, it was all consuming," he said. "I didn’t have much a life outside of it."