Uncle Gordie summons a pit pony to carry the can
Northern Crock isn't the only problem gnawing away at Alistair "Nobody's" Darling now that mice infest the Treasury as well as Downing Street. Discussing financial turbulence in his Whitehall lair with a couple of FTSE-100 bods, the nation's bank manager spied a small rodent. The captains of industry spotted the creature, too, and there was (I hear) a bit of a scene with much jumping up and down when it darted under their settee. Darling is thinking of locking his moggie Sybil in the office overnight to catch the critter, but as it's a PFI building he might be handed another bill for £100bn. Old lags remember when the Treasury was only full of rats.
Uncle Gordie's quest for a Labour general secretary to carry the can when disaster strikes isn't going smoothly, the queue of those who don't want the cursed post being considerably longer than the queue of those who do. One who resisted the Supreme Leader's charms, mutters a snout, was the Grauniad bigwig and Low Pay Commission head honcho Paul Myners (below), who the PM wanted to be a chief executive figure. The front-runner is David Pitt-Watson, an ex-party apparatchik endearingly nicknamed Pitt-Pony by Geordie MPs and backed by the one-time Labour boss Larry Whitty. My informant mumbles that Pitt-Pony rejected Brown's suggestion that he serve as Myners's deputy. The unlucky winner will be announced on 10 March, presumably resigning some time in 2009 or 2010.
The street cred soars of disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, Greg Clark, after a Middlesbrough Tory - yes, there is one - boasted about how the Cameroon MP's father is a Smoggyland milkman. Perhaps that helps explain Druggie Dave's peculiar choice of Benny Hill's "Ernie (the Fastest Milkman in the West)" when the Old Etonian picked his Desert Island Discs.
A spin war rumbles on over who leaked government plans to permit bugged evidence in court cases. Within a quarter of an hour of the Supreme Leader briefing Druggie Dave and Nick Clog on Privy Council terms on the eve of this month's parliamentary announcement, the news was out on the airwaves. Uncle Gordie and Druggie blame each other, the Lib Dems' half-Dutch leader protesting his innocence. Call me cynical if you wish, but I suspect that it was six of one and half a dozen of the other.
How fitting: new Labour pagers were formally silenced as Northern Crock was nationalised. The favoured tool of the control-freak tendency vibrates no more, the remaining few disconnected. Instructions headed "Rapide" now pop up on mobiles - presumably orders to get a move on and not just the apt name of the service.
Kevin Maguire is associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror
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