Sex-text pest and FCO Minister Ivan Lewis has been slapped down by Iraq’s Ahrar Party leader Ayad Jamal Aldin after wading into Baghdad politics. In a move straight out of the New Labour playbook, Lewis used a piece in the Arab newspaper The Daily Star to urge Iraqi voters to judge their politicians on “better public services, fixed roads and transport systems and providing new jobs”, while ignoring the rank corruption that is crippling the country.  Sound familiar?

Fearless transparency campaigner Aldin, who has survived six assassination attempts, hit back hard though:

“Ivan Lewis MP misses the point with the Iraqi people’s political dissatisfaction. Corruption within the government must be the major issue on which the forthcoming election is fought. It is the corruption that prevents these services from being implemented as the money to fund them is siphoned off by Maliki’s government ministers. We will not stand for this anymore and promise tackle corruption head on so that all Iraqis can benefit from a fair and transparent administration which will benefit all the people of Iraq.”

Guido’s man in the Green Zone got in touch to put the boot in “It’s no surprise a UK Labour politician wants to ignore corruption, their spin won’t work here.” It’s a new low when even Iraqis are lecturing Labour about corruption.

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Dr Anthony Seldon has written measured biographies of John Major and Tony Blair. his biography of Brown will be published in the autumn. That he intends to end the story on election day is revealing isn’t it?  Seldon clearly thinks Brown’s political career is finished.

Ed Balls may be an unpleasant bully, but he is no fool.  He knows Labour is going to lose the election and he knows he will be blamed almost as much as Brown, for he is Gordon’s homunculus.  The politics of reckless dividing lines, big government over-spending, the vicious briefing against internal party enemies, his personal use of “Mr” McBride to poison politics and his low, lying Machiavellian ways are not going to be faulted for Labour’s defeat if he can help it.  If they are, his ambitions will be thwarted. In private he and his few allies are blaming the prospect of defeat on Hoon and Hewitt’s recent divisiveness.

Labour’s defeat will, he and other loyalists claim implausibly, be nothing to do with the years of kamikaze politics from Balls and Brown…

Guido gave a talk at Microsoft’s groovy London HQ to the Online News Association’s UK chapter. We did the usual bit of blogger v journalist banter, laughed at Nick Robinson’s ‘Michael Fish moment‘ and then Guido tried to push his new meme.

Having spent a few years writing the advance obituary for the “Dead Tree Press” as well as pushing the digital disintermediation meme, the new, new thing for the start of this decade is the idea that the “news stream” has killed the “news cycle”. Guido recognises that this might sound a bit like a Steve Hilton strategy memo.

Sorry the above slides are more of an aide memoire than a presentation.  The last slide contains the logos of a few “news brands” which are more profitable in aggregate than the whole of what was once called “Fleet Street”. The British newspaper industry is  for the most part a form of vanity publishing, not a business.

UPDATE : Just noticed there was live real-time reportage of the event : live blog and Twitter stream.