The DeathbyEmail blog is reporting that a senior aide to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has resigned following the discovery of several emails he sent in an attempt to organize a smear campaign against members of the Conservative Party, which are the PM’s rivals. The aide, Damian McBride, was previously Brown’s political spokesperson. Here’s a look at what the emails contained:

McBride suggested the website spread false rumors that pictures exist of Osborne “posing in a bra, knickers and suspenders” and “with his face ‘blacked up’,” adding: “He wouldn’t be the first student to do some cross-dressing at university. But … why would a student in the late 1980s black up his face for the amusement of friends in their private college rooms? This in the era when young Tories wore ‘Hang Mandela’ T-shirts.”

McBride wrote: “Embarrassing photos have followed George Osborne around throughout his career: posing in his Bullingdon Club uniform at Oxford, lying on the carpet at home in his permed mullet, playing Monopoly with his fellow viscounts and standing in an … embrace with a prostitute at a party in London. But he knows that the most embarrassing photos from his past have yet to emerge.”  (This is in a reference to pictures published in 2005 of shadow chancellor George Osborne with a prostitute, Natalie Rowe, taken 12 years earlier, and a notorious Bullingdon Club photograph of Osborne taken when he was at Oxford.  The Bullingdon Club is well-known for its members’ wealth and rowdiness.)

McBride suggested spreading gossip, entirely unfounded, that Conservative Party leader David Cameron may have suffered from a sexually transmitted disease.

Yet another case of a high ranking political official not thinking before he hit send. When will they learn? A very good rule of thumb when it comes to sending emails is to never send anything  you wouldn’t be comfortable seeing on the front page of the newspaper. Careless emails can damage company reputations, cost jobs and customers, and even get you in legal trouble. Think about that!