Mrs Two Shags wants a hairy chap as ghost-writer. Diary secretaries need not apply

Tearoom talk is of the end of Peter Hain's dream of grabbing the Labour tiara following the leaking of a purloined campaign memo. The note, boasting of support from 30 MPs and identifying dozens of targets, was posted to scribblers from Greenford in the London Borough of Ealing. Known as Greenfordgate, the first dirty trick of the deputy leadership battle is judged by old lags to have killed his bid stone-dead. One of those listed, the one-time economics lecturer Roger Berry, has already declared UDI from Hain. Others are shuffling away. Failure to make the cut would at least free the Northern Ireland Secretary to spend more time with Ulster Unionists rather than trade unionists.

Back-bench bookies reckon it will be a four-horse race. My man with the numbers declared Alan "Mr Quiffy" Johnson, Hilary "Son of Which Tony?" Benn and Jon "the Crusher" Cruddas as definite starters. Each already has the required 44 signatures in the bag. The likely fourth name on the ballot paper will be either Mrs Pepperpot, aka the diminutive party chair Hazel Blears, or the lilac revolutionary Hattie Harman. Mrs P is slight favourite, though the pair could yet split the sisterhood, in a triumph for macho politics. Jack "the Lad" Straw is not expected to run, realising he wouldn't win.

Sure-footedness from Iain Duncan Smith noticeably absent from his stint as Tory leader. Producers of a Saturday-night telly ice-skating show offered him 40K to put on a pair of skates and make an ass of himself. IDS, who's been there and done that, considered the unkind offer for a nanosecond, then croaked, "No." Now, if only the TV people had asked that stunt addict, Slippery Dave . . .

Pete Wishart, the Scot Nat musician and the first MP to appear on Top of the Pops if we discount Neil Kinnock larking about on a Tracey Ullman video, has perfected the art of silently taunting the outgoing premier. Whenever Tony Blair is being goaded at the despatch box over Inspector Knacker's inquiries, Wishart holds his hands together in front of his face as if wearing handcuffs. The gesture is deemed permissible by the Speaker, unlike the right-hand coffee-bean shake popular among Labour's rowdier element.

Pound signs can be spotted in the eyes of John "Two Shags" Prescott, preparing to cash in by publishing a memoir of his romp through politics. The demob-happy Deputy Premier is spending weekends shouting into a Dictaphone and has interviewed, whispers my man in the flat cap, potential ghost-writers. Turning the Romeo's spoken England into readable English will be a gargantuan challenge and his wife, Pauline, insisted on a precautionary veto before the appointment is made. Mrs Two Shags understandably feels a hairy chap will be best suited to the task ahead, so fortysomething female diary secretaries need not apply.

Mr Quiffy's compulsory cookery lessons in schools will be arriving too late to teach Blairites how to bake a cake with a file in it, but the cash-for-coronets inquiry has triggered back-stabbing on a heroic scale in Downing Street. The political fixer John McTernan, reported in the public prints to have sung like a bird, was known in this column by the moniker McTurkey. To sweating colleagues, he is now McCanary.

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

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