All the gossip from the Westminster Village
Gordon Brown has outed himself as a closet Burt Bacharach fan. Between wrestling with soaring joblessness and plunging shares, the Supreme Leader bumped into the Yankee composer in, erm, Downing Street. Bacharach was touring the bunker, crooned my snout, after parleying with a couple of Talibrown at the BBC Electric Proms. The Uncle Gordie encounter was unscheduled and to the immense surprise of No 10 flunkeys their man (interests: football and football) knew the legendary songsmith's hits and, instead of a standard default inquiry into which team Bacharach supports, he displayed a fondness for What's New Pussycat? Bacharach didn't respond by asking about banking liquidity.
There's nothing like a dame as David Cameron faces another revolt in the Tory ranks. Squaddies Patrick Mercer and Gerald Howarth are, I hear, spooked by Dame Pauline Neville-Jones. Druggie Dave's shadow security minister and one-time chair of the joint unintelligent committee is behaving as if she's Judi Dench, a Tory bossy M. The grand dame in the Tory pantomime routinely dismisses views other than her own. Colonel Mercer and RAF reservist Howarth are on the party's armed wing and not prone to surrendering. A quantum of solace is required to avert civil war.
Alex Salmond's gut Tartanism poses an increasingly big challenge to the SNP. Two informants whispered separately that the King of Scotland is routinely levered out of his limo away from prying TV cameras to avoid an expanding belly creating a diversion in the Glenrothes by-election. Salmond's widening circle of power has prompted sniggers about his over-enjoyment of the fruits of office.
One sideshow in Yachtgate was the titanic tussle between Mandy acolytes Roland Rudd and Tim Allan to be the genuine mouthpiece of George "Oik" Osborne's would-be Russian sugar daddy, Oleg Deripaska. Both Allan's Portland outfit and Rudd's Finsbury PR, which conveniently also speaks for Nat Rothschild, competed to issue "no comment" on the record. Off the record, sinking Oik cries he was the victim of a classic new Labour sting.
A flashback to Manchester when a BBC mole recounted in detail how radar-lugged Scotland hack Tim Reid was in the Hilton hotel's crowded elevator when David Miliband stepped in with spinmistress Sarah Schaefer. Asked by her line manager to award his speech marks out of 10, Schaefer offered six. The young Foreign Secretary then loudly issued his infamous Hezza moment-avoiding excuse. That's all Labour history, except official denials sound hazardous now we know the lift contained other witnesses. Were you there?
Kevin Maguire is associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror
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