Guido hears that Huveaux plc, the parent company of The House Magazine publishers, Dods and the yawntastic ePolitix.com (written by many, read by few) is for sale and on the block with private equity house August Equity LLP circling.

The parent company has £18m of debt and a capitalisation of only £40m, Guido suspects that any buyer will therefore be keen to spin out the political publishing arm. Huveaux supposedly paid £5m for “Political Wizard”, a political search engine and “sophisticated campaigning tool”. Not.

ePolitix until recently claimed to be the “UK’s premier politics site”, but after a bit of needling about them trailing some political blogs (which Guido is too modest to mention) they changed their slogan to “shaping the political agenda”. Meaning they will reprint any lobbyist’s press releases for cash.