ONLY a few days ago they were fighting hard for the Democratic presidential nomination, but on Friday Senator John Kerry and General Wesley Clark arrived in Wisconsin to shower each other with praise.

The front-running Massachusetts senator was “the right character to bring America forward”, Clark told cheering students in Madison. “He will stand up to the Republican attack dogs and send them home licking their wounds.”

Kerry was equally generous. Clark had shown “great selflessness and great courage” by ending his campaign and offering his support to a former rival.

It was exactly the display of solidarity that many Democrats had been praying for as Kerry closed on his party’s nomination to challenge President George W Bush. Yet behind the public back-slapping lurked a potential scandal that hinted at splits in the Democratic ranks.

Evidence was emerging that members of Clark’s campaign staff were the source of last week’s internet rumours that Kerry had engaged in an extramarital affair lasting at least two years.

Matt Drudge, the internet gossip, claimed a “world exclusive” when his Drudge Report website announced on Thursday: “Campaign drama rocks Democrats: Kerry fights off media probe of recent alleged infidelity, rivals predict ruin”.

Heading for Wisconsin ahead of this Tuesday’s primary, Kerry initially declared that there was “nothing to report, nothing to talk about”. Later he denied the story “categorically”. He added: “It’s rumour. It’s untrue. Period.”

Many Democrats suspected a ploy by Bush’s “attack dogs”, but The Sunday Times has established that the story first appeared on February 6 on an obscure internet website run by a self-confessed “web junkie” who worked for the Clark campaign. There is no evidence that Clark was aware of it.

Six days before Drudge’s story appeared, a political website named WatchBlog published an item purportedly discussing negative tactics in presidential campaigns.

“Rumour has it that John Kerry is going to be outed by Time magazine next week for having an affair with a 20-year-old woman who remains unknown,” alleged the WatchBlog item, which went almost unnoticed at the time. “The affair took place intermittently right up to Kerry’s autumn 2002 announcement (of his presidential candidacy).”

WatchBlog is the brainchild of Cameron Barrett, 30, a balding, bespectacled computer geek from Brooklyn who was hired by the Clark campaign last year to set up the general’s “blog”, or web-based diary.

Barrett, an amateur writer of short stories, attracted media attention in 1998 when he became one of the first people in America to lose a job over something published on the internet. Some of his colleagues at a Michigan marketing firm complained about sexually explicit fiction that he had posted on his personal website. One story concerned two snowmen having sex before they melted.

Barrett joined the Clark campaign soon after it was launched last September and was widely praised for his innovative use of the internet to rally the general’s supporters.

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