Any villager should know that walking down Victoria Street yelling into their phone is never going to end well. A co-conspirator, walking just behind one of Labour’s regional coordinators, was most amused to hear about a massive pledge of support from Unite in a meeting this morning, “politics is a funny old business, but we shall see” about activist turnout and most amusingly high praise for Dave. Apparently his question to Brown at PMQs about crossing picket lines caused much amusement, and the general consensus in Labour HQ was that it was a very good line.

Over at Portcullis House on the last busy day of this Parliament, other eyes and ears have been at work. One of the greatest uses of the EyeSpyMP twitter feed is the busting of hacks and their sources. Stewart Jackson was spotted earlier chatting away to the Standard’s political team, and hey presto, Paul Waugh tweets some insider gossip:

We are watching you…

UPDATE : Stewart Jackson emails: “I never “briefed” Paul Waugh or showed him any Whip’s messages. My only comment in a two minute chat – with another Conservative MP present – was that David Cameron had played a blinder!”  Very loyal.  So who was the other MP?

Reuters is reporting that Geoff Hoon has been asked to stand down from his prestigious role on the NATO steering committee:

“It was the British government that nominated Mr Hoon to be one of the group of 12 experts and he has served there with distinction. However, given that it is clear the British government no longer supports Mr Hoon’s participation, the secretary-general has decided to ask Mr Hoon to end his participation in the group of 12,” the spokesman said.”

Next stop, stripping these disgraced parasites of their Right Honourable titles.

As Guido mentioned earlier, CCHQ keep a close eye on the blogs.  He hadn’t realised that Dave was such a fan though. In his budget response he referred to Liam Byrne as “Baldemort“. As far as Guido is aware that nickname was first applied to him here last week, before being lifted by the Mail.

Another happy customer.

Treasury attack dog Liam Byrne just said that Tory plans to crowd source analysis of the budget small print shows Tories “need help”. Self evidently they do. The clue was when Eric Pickles emailed thousands of people saying “we need your help”.

Meanwhile Ed Miliband says he wants to crowd source Labour Party manifesto ideas…

Patricia Hewitt is speaking at the International Corporate Governance Network tomorrow morning.  According to the programme notes she will try to answer questions like “Who holds the moral compass determining the balance between just deserts and too much?”  Wonder if she is charging them £3,000?

Dizzy suggested two weeks ago that the Tories should harness the distributed brain power of the web and crowd source their response to the budget. Yesterday Eric Pickles announced that is exactly what they are going to do today:

Wading through all this small print ourselves is a huge job. This year we’ve decided to do something a bit different – we’re going to crowdsource our response to the Budget. Once the Budget’s out, we’ll publish it in a simple format as soon as possible so you can have a good dig into it. The Treasury has hundreds of civil servants working on all this and there’s no way we can match their resources – so it’s important for as many of you as possible to lend a hand in analysing the detail.

CCHQ clearly follow blogs closely. The see-through government idea – publishing the details of all government contracts – was another idea first promoted by a blogger and taken up as Conservative policy.  Unfortunately it seems Tory taxation policy is controlled by this blogger instead of these ones…