All the gossip from the Westminster village...

No seat at the top for another Old Etonian

Tory thoughts have returned to who will replace Metal Mickey when, as is now widely anticipated, Speaker Martin vacates the chair before the general election. The view is that the bicycling baronet Sir George Young's hopes are punctured by David Cameron's representing Eton in the Mock-Gothic Fun Palace, with even Tory cap-doffers acknowledging that two OEs would be stretching the old school tie. Matchbox-sized John Bercow continues to fancy his chances and dabbled with Labour during Gordon Brown's brief heyday, but remains unpopular on his own side. The new name bandied about in the Commons bars, I discover, is that of Damian Green. The Dreyfus of the Tory party is championed as just the chap to defend the rights of MPs after Inspector Knacker comes knocking. Labour MPs have other ideas, with the bulk intending to plump for a Lib Dem to spite the Tories, other-worldly Sir Ming Campbell being favoured over a Sir Alan Beith who could bore for Britain.

So who did call Big Gordie when his Nokia rang - twice - during that speech in Davos? The PM wouldn't say and the word in No 10 is that it wasn't Barack Obama or Peter Mandelson, nor even Sarah, asking what he'd like for his tea. My snout mutters that it was Tommy-Gun Watson the fixer, forced to leave a voice message warning that British workers were demanding British jobs in power stations.

To Afghanistan, where commandos fighting the Taliban declared a ceasefire to recollect targeting Mickey Fabricant's unnatural mop during parliamentary manoeuvres with the armed forces. Convinced it was a wig, the band of brothers first tried to hook the suspiciously luxurious strands on a fishing line lowered into an Arctic snow hole where he was sheltering. A second, more direct assault saw the John Le Mesurier of Druggie Dave's Tory army directed down a pitch-black tunnel leading into a hidden water tank in the marines' Lympstone training base in Devon. A corporal posted to rescue Sgt Fabricant was ordered to pull him out by the hair. Bullets flying in Helmand do not assuage the disappointment at the memory of the Tory wet emerging still attached to his blond barnet.

Labour strife as the soft-left poster boy Jon Cruddas issued an apology after gracing a rally in Brum for Kevin "Wapping" Coyne, the Rupert Murdoch-backed challenger to Derek "Del Boy" Simpson for the leadership of the dis-Unite union. Contrite Cruddas insists that he was confused, unaware that the gathering was a campaign meeting for Coyne of Wapping. But a seething Del Boy, who bankrolled Cruddas's tilt at the Labour deputy leadership, intends to greet him with an unfraternal: "Et tu, Jon?"

Kevin Maguire is associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror

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