Chris Bain, the chief executive of Cafod, has said that a newly-published memoir released by the charity’s head of media and PR Damian McBride will not affect the organisation’s relationship with key political figures.

McBride joined Cafod’s communications team in 2011. He resigned from the government in 2009, where he had been Gordon Brown’s press adviser, after reports emerged that he tried to circulate false rumours about political opponents.

McBride has this month released an explosive memoir about his time in government, called Power Trip: A Decade of Policy, Plots and Spin, which has been serialised in the Daily Mail and has sparked calls for him to lose his civil service pension and be interviewed by police.

Speaking to the Catholic newspaper The Tablet about whether McBride’s book could jeopardise Cafod’s links with senior politicians, its chief executive Chris Bain said:

“Cafod has strong relationships with many figures across the political spectrum which are based on the strength of our work in reaching out to the hardest-to-reach communities living in poverty and challenging the root causes of that poverty through our advocacy work and not on personal relations," he said.

"Damian McBride's work for Cafod has had no bearing on those relationships in the past and we do not expect it to do so in the future. Politicians are intelligent people well capable of distinguishing Cafod the organisation from the background of any individual employees."

The royalties from McBride's book's will be split between Cafod and Finchley Catholic High School, McBride's alma mater.

Cafod did not respond to invitations to comment this morning.