Cherie Blair is finally to get her biographer. The film-maker Linda McDougall has signed up to write the book, which will be serialised in the Express. She has asked the first lady for her co-operation, and a frantic telephone conversation with Downing Street is under way. Meanwhile, the redoubtable McDougall, the wife of the Eurolout MP Austin Mitchell, is interviewing Cherie's girlfriends from her teenage years. And boyfriends: don't imagine that the great helmsman was her first. As the midwife of Mrs Robin Cook's disclosures, who also did a Channel 4 film on the hounding of Saint Mo, she will produce a corker.
The TUC general council dinner in Glasgow was robbed of its star turn by the petrol crisis. Tony Blair, billed to appear with a £14m begging bowl for the general election, cancelled. Gordon Brown, in town for his first address to the TUC as Chancellor, did not take his place, sending Ed Balls instead. The brothers, who had invited the entire Cabinet, had to make do with Baroness Jay who, upon meeting Ken Cameron, the Fire Brigades Union leader and most outspoken member of the general council, asked: "Who are you?"
Social highlight of the week in Glasgow was the cricket match between the general council and the media. Unity, the labour movement bank, which sponsors the event, asked union nabobs to wear logo-emblazoned green baseball caps, while the journalists were given orange ones. This, in the most religiously divided city in the British Isles outside Belfast.
Missing from the TUC platform was Jimmy Knapp, the railway union leader who last year went three rounds with a wardrobe in his hotel room after a particularly congenial TUC dinner. The wardrobe won on points.
I hear that John Monks, the Europhile TUC general secretary, has bought himself a dacha in the Wye Valley (where Peter Mandelson once had a country cottage) for the weekends. During the week, he dosses down in Great Russell Street.
Expect trouble in Betty Boothroyd's West Bromwich seat if the Millbank machine parachutes in a Blairist clone for the by-election created by the resignation of Madam Speaker.
Labour's NEC is to impose a shortlist on the local party. The most obvious candidate is Adrian Bailey, the deputy leader of Sandwell Council. He will romp home if party bosses allow him to stand. But he is in his fifties and, horror of horrors, he has a beard. So the betting is shifting to Valerie Vaz, the sister of the clean-shaven Foreign Office minister, Keith Vaz.
Meanwhile, in another part of the West Midlands, there are frequent sightings of the renegade Tory, Shaun Woodward. Millbank has stopped the selection process at Birmingham Perry Barr (where Jeff Rooker is retiring) on grounds of "corruption". The truth is that the seat is being kept open for Woodward.
A footnote to the Hague pre-election manifesto. Officials at cash-strapped Central Office are looking for the twerp who faxed all 162 pages of the document to a large number of Tory MPs, spending a small fortune. They already had printed copies, and website access. Part of the more-money-than-common-sense revolution, presumably. They need look no further than the deputy chairman, David Prior, the effete son of the wet Tory peer.
Joe Ashton's autobiography, Red Rose Blues (the story of "a good Labour man"), rails against press exposure of his tribulations in a Thai massage parlour in Northampton. Like Clinton, he will be remembered for "only one thing", he laments. Strange that Joe should engage in royal tittle-tattle, recalling that Charlie Pannell (the minister of public building and works, 1964-66) discovered the Duke of Windsor's real secret: "The only man in history to give up a throne because he finally met a woman who could make his cock stand up."
Ashton won't wear a new-Labour pager. But friends insist he is still "on massage".
The writer is chief political commentator for the Mirror
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