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Is Gordon going crackers?
Published 28 August 2008
In this summer of suspicion, nothing is regarded as confirmed until it is officially denied
Labour phone lines are buzzing with talk of a Chinese takeaway for Gordon Brown after the curry coup of two years ago that jettisoned Tony Blair. The eager young pretender David Miliband is to speak at a ticket-only fundraiser in Withington on the Saturday night of Labour's upcoming kill-fest in Manchester. The excited chat is of Miliboy testing grass-roots support over the prawn crackers. In this summer of suspicion, nothing is regarded as confirmed until it is officially denied.
Yet I hear that all is not well among the Primrose Hill Set of disgruntled Blairites and Guardianistas championing the ambitions of the Foreign Secretary. The story splashed a short while ago across the front page of the Daily Torygraph trumpeting how Alan Milburn would be Miliboy's Downing Street neighbour, as chancellor of the Exchequer, is being treated as an orphan after it backfired. No one is eager to claim responsibility, but I have it on good authority that the parent was Sarah Schaefer, spinmistress. She'd envisaged a few approving paragraphs on an inside page to keep the ball rolling - not setting Miliboy's campaign hurtling downhill. A radar-lugged snout rang to speak of tensions between Schaefer and her co-spinner Madlin Sadler.
There's an intriguing exchange on cocaine, heroin, etc inexplicably omitted from the "Drugs, illegal" entry in the index of Druggie Dave on Druggie Dave, that Tory party animal Dylan Jones's application for a safe Tory seat, or a cloak of ermine. Dylan Jones: "I know what you're going to say, but I have to ask it anyway. Have you ever taken Class A drugs?" Druggie Dave: "I've answered this question in the way that I choose to, which is to say that I believe all politicians have the right to a private past." A simple "No" might have required your correspondent to refer to Druggie Dave as David Cameron, so thankfully he remained evasive.
Team GB may have won more Olympic medals than the Aussies but the other Team GB hopes a touch of Oz will be golden for Brown. Discussions are afoot for the Labor prime minister Down Under, Kevin Rudd, to inspire the Manchester conference to victory, either in person or by satellite link. Rudd's plain speaking will guarantee him a hearing. Suffering an upset stomach, he declared: "We've all had to drive the porcelain bus at some stage." Translated, that means holding the toilet bowl with both hands while vomiting.
Alas, insufficient space remains this week to do justice to a couple of snippets involving George "Oik" Osborne's mouthpiece David Hass. I was amused, if unconvinced, by the chap who insisted that the mini-spinner is so hairy he's known as Bilbo Hass. Hobbits aside, I'd welcome additional information from a snout with a peculiarly juicy titbit. We both know who she is.
Kevin Maguire is associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror
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