Guido left the Speccie summer party early – summonsed by Mrs Fawkes who is convinced Miss Fawkes has Swine Flu.  So this will probably be the first report back from the party.

Dave did his usual 15 minutes (his routine is that he shows his face at an event – tells the hosts how wonderful it is, if required he makes a speech name-checking the organisers / sponsors warmly.  Smooth with a quick exit back to Notting Hill).  No speech today and he didn’t tour the garden.  For the first time that Guido can remember the party wasn’t a crush.  The Speccie have annexed their neighbour’s garden, doubling the space for the party.  You could actually move about easily…

Had a chat with Michael White, it was civil.  He even let Guido get a word in.  Guido exited before Sir Michael could introduce Shriti Vadera, not from intentional rudeness, rather because Mrs Fawkes was screaming out of the Blackberry – “she has a temperature of 39.1″.   Andrew Neil blocks the exit, “going so soon?” Ironic really, in years gone past Guido would go to some effort to crash the party, now they extend an invitation and he dashes out.  Maybe Guido just isn’t that clubbable.

At that debate on Tuesday, Sir Michael White interrupted Guido’s speech criticising him to such a degree that it was cut short.  So Guido sent the full text over to the Guardianistas’ to republish. Taking the fight to his own lair.

He has responded of course

What I do that really annoys Guido, Peter Oborne and other right-wing attack dogs is defend the political class as a whole from unwarranted assaults that are corrosive of democratic discourse and public trust. I don’t defend the indefensible, but I don’t hunt with the media pack either.

The Lobby is the pack, the likes of Oborne and Guido do not constitute a pack.  Read both articles and judge for yourself – you pays your money you takes your choice…

If you are not getting any government press releases emailed to your inbox Guido has found out why:

The Government News Distribution Service at the Central Office of Information is, due to a system change-over, unable to e-mail out any press releases to subscribers.

The C.O.I. has a £150 million budget to distribute government information and they have lost the email list.  A new government I.T. low…

UPDATE : The C.O.I. have been in touch:

There is an issue with the news alert subscriber system which COI is investigating a fix for. No email lists or data have been lost.

So how many months has this been out of order? If you have the email list of subscribers, Guido could probably fix you up in a couple of hours for a small fee…

Everybody is saying they won’t go on Press TV now and Hopi Sen has a cryptic reference to Guido’s appearance on the Iranian regime funded Press TV channel.

Guido had a bit of a laugh with Press TV:  was invited to spar on a debate show hosted by Nick Ferrari with a Labour baroness (can’t remember her name) and Anne McElvoy over regulating blogging. Guido managed to accuse the baroness of wanting it to be like in Iran where they throw bloggers in jail.  Did my best a few times to correctly pronounce the names of Iranian bloggers in Iranian jails (information courtesy of Index on Censorship)

Also tried to get the producers to make out the appearance fee cheque to the Conservative Friends of Israel – which they refused to do.  Here is something that should worry the mullahs putting up the money for the station – the young hip, producers hate you.  According to Guido’s intern/spy who was sitting in the production gallery they were genuinely laughing about the launch of a televised tirade against Iranian tyranny on their station.  Not sure if it got censored for broadcast.  Should say that the chat show host Nick Ferrari didn’t blink either, suspect he was amused as well.

Guido got the impression that the young producers who control the station had basically blagged the money off the regime using family connections to set up a station.  They weren’t that interested in pumping out propaganda – though no doubt they have to make efforts to keep the paymasters happy.  In any event the appearance fee ended up in Index on Censorship’s account…

The sheer madness of Gordon’s state of denial became clear yesterday.  He stood there at PMQs and claimed spending would grow 0%.  He has set himself a dividing line alright, it is the line between economic reality and economic fantasy.  He is on the wrong side of that dividing line.

Andrew Grice reports that the rest of the Cabinet, including the Chancellor, wants him to take a reality check.  They have agreed to admit there will be some cuts out of necessity, but to argue that the Tories will cut more, this was the position that Mandelson argued for originally.  At PMQs Cameron and Clegg were united against Brown – the LibDem leader accused him of “living in complete denial”.  It appears the Cabinet agrees.  It remains to be seen whether or not they can get the Prime Mentalist to change his “no cuts” tune.

If you wade through the numbers in the Treasury’s recently released Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses 2009 (page 83), you can see the Tories are right about the government’s own plans to cut spending on services in real terms in 15 out of 25 departments in 2011.  Gordon’s lying has lost him the argument about cuts, the reality is it that it is a question about the degree and timing of cuts.