A sideways look at life in the Westminster Village
Labour evidently needs to learn a few new tunes after Jon "Crusher" Cruddas went backstage at the NEC in Birmingham to secure Sugababes's backing for the Hope not Hate anti-fascist tour. The lefty Dagenham MP and wannabe wearer of the Labour deputy's tiara admitted he didn't know who the poptastic trio were. Jon C wasn't star-struck until he came across the veteran rocker Billy Bragg. He hung on to the Bard of Barking's every word for an hour. Surely a case of new Labour, old music?
Your correspondent bumped into Caroline Goyder, the voice coach whose trained ear detects a distinct softening in Big Gordie's speech: made more fireside than firebrand under Project Human, to give him people appeal. She believes the best sound in Westminster is that of a Cameroon, Ed "Crazy" Vaizey, the relaxed member for Bon Vivant South. Memo to Druggie Dave: sack your coach. Goyder reckons you sound inexperienced - indeed, panicky. In fairness to the tutor, Dave is, as his shaking hands at the despatch box reveal.
Cries of censorship after the Commons library refused to stock a copy of the prison writings of Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed Kurdish nationalist. House officials claim the book glorifies terrorism, whispers my snout, because the PKK is a proscribed group. Quite how a leader who renounced violence as a guest of the Turkish government on the fortress isle of Imrali could still be a threat is puzzling parliamentary bibliophiles. Talk is of MPs smuggling a copy into the Mock Gothic Fun Palace, a rare case of a book being lent to a library rather than borrowed and never returned.
Druggie Dave's cuddly Conservatism has reached out to embrace the energetic anti-abortion campaigner Fiona Pinto. The 2001 ProLife Alliance flag-waver in Welwyn Hatfield has made it on to the Tory approved list. Pinto was once arrested at a demo for the distinctly uncuddly act of waving a placard of a dead foetus. She is best remembered for what a newspaper called "drunken fondles" with the Labour-turned-Libido Democrat "love rat" Paul Marsden, then MP for Shrewsbury. Married Marsden had vengeful Pinto banned from the Fun Palace, a bar that could prove tricky if she finds a winnable seat.
Another volume the village is unable to peruse is the memoir of Bill Morris. The yellowing outline of his proposed autobiography fell into my hands, a tome alas unwritten when the union baron became a real baron as Lord Morris of Stab-in-the-Back. He described Lord Kinnock as Labour's "historical version of Iain Duncan Smith". On 11 September, when Tony Blair was at the Brighton TUC, he claimed to have "privately told the Prime Minister that he should make a short statement and leave". Modest Morris's role in history, preventing Blair staying by the seaside when the twin towers tumbled, deserves a wider audience. He should publish and be damned, if he can find a publisher.
I'm told that the jolly green giant David "Brains" Miliband fancies adding Energy to his Environment brief or moving to Health if he doesn't run and Big Gordie is crowned Dear Leader. After Margaret Beckett's blood-curdling "human sacrifice" warning, Mili might end up in hospital either way.
Kevin Maguire is associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror
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