Supreme Leader Gordon Brown lecturing the bruvvers and sisters on the Monday of the TUC threatens to make Tuesday night’s general council dinner a sober affair. The bunfight is usually a jolly occasion, Uncle Gordie and that Tony Wotshisname alternating as gagmasters. The Talibrown’s new seriousness and Wotshisname’s retirement required Congress House to book a new turn. Cue raised eyebrows over Alistair Darling (below) topping the bill. Here is a minister who is to oratory what salmonella is to eggs Benedict. Next year the TUC should dig deep for a new sign-up by the renowned JLA agency. John Prescott, for it is he, is available to mangle the English language in return for £25,000.
A Labour voter meandering through Sutton Park, one of Yorkshire’s nicer piles, thought she recognised the smarmy groom and his simpering bride in wedding photos in the drawing room. Close inspection revealed the couple to be Citizen Dave and yummy mummy Sammy. Her parents, Sir Reg and Lady Sheffield, charge £6 (Sundays and Wednesdays) for the other half to see how their half live, including a glimpse of the Tory leader’s nuptials. “We shouldn’t really advertise our political connections,” croaked a retainer, “but fortunately most people still don’t recognise him.”
Continued bad blood between Blairites and Brownites is hampering BBC plans to reunite new Labour spin doctors from the 1990s. Comical Ali, I hear, threatened to boycott the programme for the Radio 4 series The Reunion if his old rival Charlie “Load of Bollocks” Whelan was permitted to broadcast his version of history. Whelan agreed to take part and David “Over the” Hill accepted without preconditions, leaving the harassed producers in a tizz over what to do about Precious Campbell. Sounds to me like a job for the Acas conciliation service.
The prospect of dissent over changes to Labour’s policymaking, a sort of sub-Clause Four moment, is obsessing the Supreme Leader more than an election date. MPs have been ordered to Brighton to proselytise among trade unionists ahead of the party shindig in Bournemouth. So exercised is Uncle Gordie at the reluctance of general secretaries to pull their own teeth, agreeing to scrap emergency motions at conference, that he’s taken to pleading on the answerphones of horny-handed sons of toil. One irreverent unioncrat thinks Gordie’s voice might make a good ringtone.
The last over has been bowled in the hacks v bruvvers match played ahead of the TUC, composited into history by the football-preferring general secretary, Brendan Barber. Last rites will also be read for another fixture, the industrial correspondents’ Golden Bollock award for bad journalism. Past winners include the scribbler who wrongly predicted a miners’ strike and the hack who forecast that Concorde would be scrapped a year before its, erm, maiden flight.
Kevin Maguire is associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror
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