Big Gordie is frightening his colleagues again -- this time with hugs. Brown has become all touchy-feely since the Prime Monster bullying row. I hear from a surprised visitor to No 10 that he has taken to greeting ministers and MPs with a mighty embrace instead of a growl. The government's less robust members complain that the Great Hugger's mateyness is intimidating. One said he would rather take his chances with a flying Nokia than a bear hug that squeezed him to within a breath of his life.

The Tory whip Simon Burns is plotting revenge on Speaker Bercow after he denounced Burns's rowdy behaviour at Prime Minister's Questions. A tearoom informant whispered that a seething Burns is threatening to stand against Bercow when the new Commons comes to elect its chair. If David "Daddy-to-Be" Cameron tells Burns to hold fire, the Chelmsford West bruiser has a plan B. He will run for deputy speaker. "I would be," Burns was overheard saying, "the deputy from hell."

"I am the daughter of working-class Italian immigrants," Gloria De Piero wrote on her CV for the Labour candidacy in Ashfield, Nottinghamshire. Twice. It worked. The former GMTV presenter, who came 85th in FHM's 2008 list of the World's Sexiest Women, won the ballot to succeed the rather less glamorous would-be lobbyist Geoff "Buff" Hoon. She was once known as "Tony Blair's favourite broadcaster", but it seems the ex-PM is not quite as popular with her. On her CV she also cited interviews (for this magazine) with Gordon Brown, Alan Johnson and Ed Balls. One name absent from the two pages was Blair.

Cash-strapped Labour is charging hacks £13,000 to sit on a bus to follow Brown during the election. The price smacks of an unsubtle subsidy. Fleet Street is revolting, if you know what I mean. There is talk of a boycott.

The Tory union-basher Michael Gove was a serial striker in his younger days. A snap of the trainee hack on a picket line outside the Press and Journal in Aberdeen two decades ago isn't the only evidence of Red Mike's militancy. A snout recalls Gove downing pens at the BBC in 1994. During unrest at Auntie, he was despatched by union officials to persuade other right-wingers to join the walkouts. By all accounts, he was effective. Up the Tories!

The target of Gove's recent anti-union blasts, Charlie Whelan, evaded the Tory tabloids by tweeting that he had been fishing when the British Airways strike started. But that very same day my spy observed a Whelan-like bloke in Unite House, the union's London office. Fishing for parliamentary seats, perhaps.

Laura Moffatt, MP for Crawley, had her majority at the last election -- 37 -- tattooed on an ankle. Quitting has its upside. Before deciding to step down, fiftysomething Moffatt had originally planned, if she won this time around, to get another tattoo. On her bottom.

Kevin Maguire is associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror

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