Whipped like curs to turn up for votes on the Finance Bill - the only bona fide piece of parliamentary business in this phoney election period - Labour backbenchers have little else to do but gossip about who's up and who's down. Most up, by his own estimate, is David Blunkett, who is absurdly confident of going to the Home Office after 7 June. He noisily promises to make Jack Straw look like a wishy-washy liberal. This may be a time to buy shares in private jails. But not in Stephen Byers, the perma-tan Trade and Industry Secretary, whose own people are predicting a shift across Whitehall to Education and Employment.

Amazingly, this column's prediction of a glowing future for ex-Trot Lord (Gus) Macdonald, who refuses to shave off his moustache and talks a good transport crisis, may also come true. He is tipped to take over from Baroness Hoity-Toity, otherwise known as Lady Jay, as Leader of the Lords. John Prescott is expected to move to the Cabinet Office, retaining his courtesy title of Deputy PM. Blair would dearly love to sacrifice Margaret Beckett, but he doesn't have the nerve. A day's pay that she will survive and prosper.

Cheerfully to the launch of John Rentoul's revised biography of Tony Blair, where the wine was copious and the speeches mercifully short. The author assured me: "If you've got a good story, I say, tell it again, but longer." Well, up to a point. The mammoth new version discloses that the Great Helmsman was nearly expelled from school (gosh) and was a fake "soft-leftie" while a member of Labour's Solidarity Group (wow). Rentoul's blind loyalty to Blair prevents him from believing the truth about the Gordon Brown leadership stitch-up.

Glenda Jackson was happy to give up government, apparently. In an interview for the University of Nottingham magazine, she says: "I loved my two years as a minister, but I can do without the red boxes." She is also scathing about Westminster as theatre: "If it is, then it is under-rehearsed, badly lit and with even worse acoustics." She doesn't miss real theatre because "acting exists only when you are doing it. If you are not actually doing it, there is nothing to miss." This verdict could also apply to politics.

The final desecration of John Smith House, Labour's old HQ in Walworth Road, is well under way. Southwark Council, the new owner, is moving in a private company, W S Atkins, to manage the borough's schools under a public- private-partnership scheme. Roger Smith, the council's grandly titled "strategic director of education and lifelong learning", assures parents that "the transfer of Southwark's education services . . . does not mean that your children's schools are being privatised". Of course not - just as devaluation, in Harold Wilson's phrase, did not mean that the pound in your pocket was worth any less.

When the history of the Socialist Labour Party, aka Arthur's Barmy Army, comes to be written, my bulging files will disgorge details of Scargill's crushing moves against dissidents in 1998, one of whom was Imran Khan, the Stephen Lawrence family solicitor. Above his flourishing signature, Scargill denounced the efforts of members to sustain democracy in the SLP as "unconstitutional, undemocratic and a direct challenge to the authority of the NEC, Congress and me as General Secretary". Voters in Hartlepool - where the man still being paid to be president of the NUM takes on Peter Mandelson - may wish to reflect on this "me, me, me!" dimension.

The best intelligence is that the Tory renegade Shaun Woodward is to get the safe seat of Normanton, West Yorks, currently held by Bill O'Brien. This shameful hijack of my home town will disappoint Ed Balls, the Chancellor's economics adviser, who fancies the constituency, which is next door to the one represented by his wife, Yvette Cooper, the health minister. O'Brien, a former pit deputy, is destined for the Lords.

Paul Routledge is chief political commentator for the Mirror

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