Kevin Maguire brings you all the gossip from the Westminster Village

Excited chatter is echoing through Westminster corridors about the future of Druggie Dave’s spinmeister-in-chief, Andy “I Knew Nothing” Coulson. A friend of Cameron’s £270,000-a-year hit man stopped your correspondent to inquire if I’d heard that he would happily abandon editing the Tory party to run a national newspaper again? I hadn’t, but thankfully our well-placed snout relayed the inside gossip from Wapping. Coulson remains on good terms with Rupert Murdoch after quietly departing the Screws of the World over that royal bugging scandal, Andy claiming – somewhat implausibly, many felt – he was unaware his rag paid a hacker £100K to tap princely mobiles. The informant insisted the Sun editor, Rebekah Wade, is keen to do an MBA to climb Rupert’s greasy pole. And who better to fill her boots than the favoured son, granted political asylum by the Tories until the right royal stink died down?

Ken Livingstone is suffering from a public aversion to carrying anything in his hands, I hear. Given a commemorative mug at LBC, where the one-time London mayor settles scores on his Saturday-morning radio show, DJ Ken stuffed the cup into his shoulder bag. Every few months, it seems, he’s required to use his mitts to fend off voters who want to get close and personal. To avoid a similar fate is perhaps why Boris Johnson cycles everywhere.

Talking of cycling, a Tory snout muttered that the two wheels on which Druggie Dave spins to the Commons for the cameras before PMQs on Wednesdays used to be owned by his glamorous erstwhile friend Rachel Whetstone. She’s now googling in the United States. But who’d have Notting Helled it? Cameron rides her bike and in unhappier times she rode his stepfather-in-law Viscount Astor.

Ousted as leader of the yellow peril after looking at life through a glass, Charlie Kennedy is sporting smart new glasses.

The round wire frames tend to perch on the end of his nose, reminding my snout of the actor Robert Hardy playing the vet Siegfried Farnon in the TV series All Creatures Great and Small.

Before you suggest that my informant needs to go to Specsavers – I checked, and they share a ruddy complexion.

As the PM took off for South America (including Chile and Brazil), the untold story of his last trip west over the Atlantic – to address both houses of Congress – was the credit crunching of the press pack. Even the political galacticos of the Daily Mail and the Times of London fly economy in this turbulent financial era. Sitting alone in club class was the Bloomberg wireman Rob Hutton. The irony that only the City boys who collapsed capitalism can afford the £5,000 tickets was not lost on cramped lobby comrades.

Jim Murphy, teetotal veggie, has finally broken his eight-year Tartan silence with the Nat rocker Pete Wishart. After refusing to speak to the SNPer since he complained about his office expenses in 2001, Big Jim, the Scots Sec, has recently taken to humming and looking the other way when they pass each other in a corridor. I’d wager it’s not a Runrig tune.

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

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