A snout inside the Tory telephone canvassing operation says callers are being ordered to talk fast and avoid mentioning they’re calling from the party. A bank of 20 phones is reached through a hidden door in a padded wall at Conservative Campaign Headquarters. Beneath the watchful gaze of a Winston Churchill bust, drones name the local (Tory) MP and prompt voters to raise complaints about the local (Labour) council. David Cameron dropped in one evening to press the flesh but failed to raise morale: Call Me Dave was too grand to pick up a phone and speak to a voter himself.
A slimline George Osborne is proud of the pounds he has shed while the national debt spirals above £1.4trn. The Chancer of the Exchequer has borrowed more in five years than Labour did in 13. So perhaps Boy George was expecting praise when he informed Ed Miliband’s Rottweiler, Tom Baldwin, that he follows “the Fast Diet”, from a publication by Short Books, founded by Baldwin’s significant other, Rebecca Nicolson. “When you lose the election,” Baldwin suggested, “you could always be photographed with your shirt off, saying, ‘I used to be disgusted by my body and look at me now.’” Osborne’s reply went unheard.
Word is that the Department for Transport has hired Simon Baugh, of Heathrow, to burnish the media profile of the Fat Controller, Patrick McLoughlin. At present, the minister is being given the runaround by Labour’s Michael Dugher. Curiously, Dugher and Baugh were political allies in their student days, before working together at the head office of the AEEU union, now part of Unite, where Baugh was assistant to a political organiser called Tom Watson – now, of course, a prominent Labour MP. Small world.
The Greens’ Natalie Bennett won’t beat Labour’s legal eagle Keir Starmer in Holborn and St Pancras, but might save the £500 deposit she lost against Frank Dobson in 2010. The fuss over TV debates will boost the knitter’s longer-term goal: Bennett hopes to fly the hessian flag for the Greens in the 2016 London mayoral election. Boris Johnson wouldn’t be the only politico choking on his muesli if she won.
Labour MPs and activists, especially those living in London, were surprised to receive emails inviting them to join the party for £1 . . . in Scotland. John Smith House, Scottish Labour’s HQ, doggedly refuses to release a full breakdown of December’s leadership scrap. Jim Murphy MP beat Neil Findlay and Sarah Boyack, both MSPs, but some suspect the release of percentages only masks a shortage of members and protects Findlay – who topped the electoral college’s union section, collecting more votes overall than Murphy.
Kevin Maguire is associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror
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