Mr Paper Clips and “Thumbscrews” Watson - all the gossip from Britain's favourite village...
The talk at Tory Towers is of a sofa war lost by Andy Coulson, editor of the Conservative Party. The former News of the Screws hack suffered what staff call "one of his Alastair Campbell moments" by behaving as if he was running the country. My snout muttered how toys left a pram when Coulson failed to persuade No 10 to sit Gordon Brown alongside David Cameron on GMTV's settee. New Labour nationalising banks with Tory support has shaken the political kaleidoscope but bipartisanship has its limits.
Coulson dreamed up the wheeze after learning Uncle Gordie was to sit on the GMTV upholstery an hour after Druggie Dave's scheduled appearance. Miffed by the PM's refusal to play footsie, Coulson pulled Druggie Dave in an act of extreme sacrifice, surrendering the show to the Supreme Leader. These are pressured, nay precious, political times.
The early minister catches the office. The cabinet member for paper clips, Liam Byrne, and his West Midlands enforcer, Tommy "Thumbscrews" Watson, yawned into Downing Street at 6am to bag the suite vacated by the jettisoned chief adviser Lord Carter of Nine Months. Inspired by the German towel-on-sunlounger technique, the pair left family photographs on desks to bag the best seats.
Byrne and Watson need to be up still earlier if they want to beat Shriti "the Shriek" Vadera, the Supreme Leader's small business minister with the terrifying temper. Word is she marched into Brown's bedroom at 5am, where he was snoozing in his pyjamas with Mrs Gordie, to declare that Alistair "Now Everybody's" Darling had bought a couple of banks. To be shaken awake by the Shriek is the stuff of nightmares.
Snappers corralled behind metal barriers in Downing Street to chronicle the arrival and departure of cabinet ministers agree that Caroline "Heart of" Flint is the slowest walker. The Labour pin-up's snail's pace and eagerness to smile on cue is appreciated by the political paparazzi. Not that she courts the coverage. Oh no.
Lord Mandy of Sleaze was surprised by the state of the NHS when admitted with back-stabbing pains. It was, he confided to colleagues, his first overnight stay in hospital. "I had a TV," enthused Mandy, "and a little radio to listen to the Today programme. It wasn't what I expected." Mandy left Britain in '04. He made it sound like 1904.
Lurking in the No 10 pen, a sharp-eyed snapper spied a folder under the arm of Paper Clips Byrne with the heading: "The beatings will continue." Beatings? Continue? Surely David Miliband's suffered enough . . .
Kevin Maguire is associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror
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