Be careful what you say – you don't want to be on Contempt of Court – Andy Coulson %$#@!+&%$#@@!$%&#@@+@$%%@ m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotla…—
Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) June 18, 2013

Careful now…

Guido has done his best to provide free advertising for the Guardian’s ill-fated coffee shop, yet it all seems to have been in vain. This is the scene in Shoreditch sent in by a reader this afternoon:

At the time of going to pixel just 41 cups have been sold today, well short of the 270-a-day they need to flog to break even. Perhaps they are being put out of business by all those fake GCHQ coffee shops they’ve been telling us about…

Shirkers of the world unite. This weekend a vanguard of beret-wearing commie-sympathisers will be meeting in London to discuss, wait for it, “Ideas for Freedom: Marxist ideas to turn the tide”. Kicking off with a “radical East London walking tour”, the revolutionaries will of course be discussing how Karl Marx can help them fight cuts. Class war fighting comrades already signed up include a host of trade unionists from Unison, the RMT and PCS. They will be joined by Maria Exall, TUC activist and civil partner of Shadow Cabinet member Angela Eagle, so it’s good to know the Marxists have an in to Team Red Ed. Buy your ticket for a capitalism-busting £33…

Despite their self-confessed devoted readership of the blog, it turns out Patrick Mercer’s “office” aren’t fans. Guido’s brief chat with a familiarly bad-tempered voice answering Mercer’s phone this lunchtime didn’t go too well. Guido politely asked if Patrick would be repaying the money he has declared from Alistair Andrews Communications, to which came the curt reply:

“You’re certainly not going to get an answer from me. I think it’s best if we end this conversation now. Goodbye.”

Goodbye indeed…

Amol Rajan the unfortunate man holding the mic on Channel 5′s Wright Stuff a few years back. In fairness he was a good sport about it:

“Camera 4, the one that gets right up in your face – my face – caught my swivelling around to Wright in bafflement, shamelessly revealing myself to be the kipper that had been proverbially “done”. What the camera could not detect, but which posterity should nevertheless record, is the sound of the gallery staff – the director, producers, editors, autocue bunnies – screaming in my ear: “Get the bloody mic away from him, Amol! Move the mic away!” And, for reasons I still cannot fathom, I declined this request, so that the microphone sat just below Eric’s lips as he ventilated his final enquiries: “You know, like a bit of man-on-man action? Do you fancy a bum?”"

How far he has come…

Labour’s Simon Parkes, beamed down from the mothership to his seat on Whitby Town Council when he’s not on a different planet, has confessed he has a secret lovechild named Zarka after an extra-terrestrial tryst with an alien he calls the Cat Queen. His wife isn’t pleased now the truth is out there:

“My wife found out about it and was very unhappy, clearly. That caused a few problems, but it is not on a human level, so I don’t see it as wrong.”

Probed further, Parkes says his real mother is a 9 foot alien with green fingers:

“Two green stick things came in. I was aware of some movement over my head. I thought, ‘they’re not mummy’s hands, mummy’s hands are pink’. I was looking straight into its face. It enters my mind through my eyes and it sends a message down my optic nerve into my brain. It says ‘I am your real mother, I am your more important mother’.”

Helpfully he has even drawn a 4-dimensional sketch of what the little green men look like:

Perhaps this is an example of what those anti-gay marriage Tories were warning us about…

Two weeks ago Dave’s key defence against Tory plotters, his relative popularity compared to the party, was wobbling. Today Peter Kellner has some figures that will have Downing Street breathing a collective sigh of relief. Ed is less popular than Labour, somehow Clegg is less popular than the LibDems, though Cameron is again preferred to his party. Kellner says this is the graph that shows the Tories will lose in 2015 if they ditch Dave…

Alistair Andrews Communications was the fictitious company created by the Telegraph and Panorama to string disgraced Tory MP Patrick Mercer. Its non-existent offices in Sydney and London and less-than-convincing website somehow duped Mercer, whose suspicions failed to be raised.

Deliciously, Mercer has just declared a £2,000 payment from Alistair Andrews Communications in his Register of Members Interests. Apparently he did two days’ “consultancy” work for them back in May. The fake name, fake Old Queen Street address and fake job all on official record. £2,000: the price to sting a corrupt MP…

10 years ago when Bridget Harris was working at the Welsh Assembly, Lord Rennard, then Liberal Democrat chief executive made a series of unwanted advances towards her which she described as “furtive, obtrusive and upsetting”. 

Craig Oliver, the Prime Minister’s embattled Director of Communications, has been told by his friends to put his family before his job, lest his marriage go the way of other Downing Street denizens. Craig is married to the BBC News presenter Joanna Gosling, with whom he has three children. The unrelenting 24/7 pressure of his Downing Street job spinning for the PM is, Craig himself admits, “a lot of stress”…

Ironically David Cameron pledged in opposition “to make the UK the most family-friendly country in Europe” yet has seen the marriages of his former press secretary Gabby Bertin as well as that of his “gatekeeper” Kate Fall break up. Kate is the chillaxing PM’s hardworking deputy chief of staff. It looks like Osborne will need to find money in the budget to hire more staff to lighten the workload if Downing Street is to really be a family-friendly workplace.