Miliboy: boldly going where no MP has gone before - all the gossip from the Westminster Village
Labour Kremlinologists studying every move made by the young foreign traveller David Miliband for signs of a leadership bid will be beamed up to South Shields in November. Tony Blair last year delivered the Tyneside port's annual lecture, organised by Miliboy, with Neil Kinnock and Ken Livingstone among the previous speakers. Thus the whirring of cogs and mumbled questions about what he's up to as paranoid Brownites analyse why Miliboy's invited the starship captain Patrick Stewart to address the Geordie nation this autumn. Perhaps from Star Trek: the Next Generation to New Labour: the Next Generation?
The self-martyred hardman David Davis is looking forward to watching Druggie Dave dancing to his tune when the Notting Heller grits his teeth and heads oop north to campaign for the Magna Carta One in Haltemprice and Howden. Asked at a reception what his by-election stunt will do to help Cameron win the general election, DD conceded within hearing of my radar-lugged Tory snout that it would do very little. "I put my country first," replied the kitten strangler, "then my party." A noble, if unappreciated, sentiment in Tory Towers.
The glam White House press secretary, Dana Perino, triggered chaos at the Gordon Brown-George Bush press conference. With questions for the president picked by a US spinner who had British male hacks drooling, the Prime Minister's dishevelled official spokesman, Mike Ellam, couldn't compete in the style stakes. So the dapper No 10 underling James Roscoe was deployed as the smartest suit in Downing Street. Ali Campbell, eat yer heart out.
Now, to Tony Blair's forsaken would-be by-election agent, Rupert Murdoch, for another source of views. In Downing Street, the warmonger read the Times of London, the Wapping rag's devotion to all things Blairite not unreasonably to his taste. These days, I hear, the former premier is often spied perusing the pages of the Financial Times as he struggles to keep up with all the cash he's raking in from merchant banks. Surely, when Rupe learns the news it will be only a matter of time before he flogs the Wall Street Journal to buy the Pink 'Un in order to be reunited with his old mate.
The Congress House chief carthorse, Brendan Barber, can leave home without fear of being mobbed. The polling organisation ERS discovered that only 2 per cent of trade union members know who he is. A comrade who believes the revolution is always around the corner urges Bruvver Barber to take heart. The result means 129,400 of the TUC's workers can name him. Pity, though, about the other 6,340,600.
Kevin Maguire is associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror
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