YouGov’s data is now out from the Sunday Times Labour leadership poll which forecasts Ed Miliband winning. The Labour party’s use of AV shows how perverse that electoral system can be.

• 44% think David Miliband “would be most effective, as leader of the opposition, at holding the present government to account”, versus 21% for his brother Ed.
• 55% think David “Is most likely to lead Labour to victory at the next General Election”, only 25% think Ed would do so.
• 45% think David “Would make the best Prime Minister” versus 28% for Ed.

Yet YouGov calculate Ed will just shade it on second preferences. Are they mad? Labour supporters think David Miliband is twice the leader his younger brother will be, yet they are going to choose the weaker candidate on second preferences. As Forrest Gump might say – “Stupid is as stupid does”…

Kay Burley’s new book First Ladies, could be problematic. Burley is quoted in the Telegraph as saying “readers will certainly recognise the three women in my novel”, it tells the somewhat more racy than Mills & Boon tale of “three formidable women, united in their love of one man (who just happens to be the prime minister), but soon set on a path of revenge”.

The fictional women are; the “titian-haired” Sally Simpson, “a powerful magazine editor … in skin-tight Prada and killer heels, she is every man’s fantasy”; Valerie Jenson, a “deeply unhappy” and “weary first lady” who “spends her time drinking”; “sexy TV reporter Isla McGovern, who has caught Julian’s eye and will do anything (or anyone) to get to the top”.

Wonder who she based the characters on?

The re-Catholicisation of England remains Guido’s long-term objective, so it is a pleasure to welcome to England the key player in the struggle to re-unify Christendom, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI. It is not without irony that the Pope will address the great and the good on Friday gathered in Westminster Hall inside the Palace of Westminster. It was in Westminster Hall some four centuries ago that Guido Fawkes was tried and found guilty of trying to overthrow a Scottish protestant tyrant and his political allies (some things never change). Guido’s ghost haunts Westminster to this day seeking revenge on politicians who had him tortured…

The would-be defender of the faith, Prince Charles, bent the knee to the Pope when he visited the Vatican for the funeral of Pope John Paul II. It seems to Guido that the Church of England is more of a dwindling cultural movement than a religion with eternal truths. This Pope has no truck with wishy washy sixties-era cultural compromises and happy clappy Anglicanism, he wants to upgrade the C of E to RC standards. The re-unification of Christianity will be on Roman terms or not at all…

Ed Balls told the Independent on Sunday…

“There is nothing the Daily Mail could do to me which could ever knock me down.”