Having got back from a five bottle lunch Guido was more than a little confused when he tuned into the parliamentary debate about a donkey called monkey.  Anyone fill us in?

For some reason Downing Street are fighting Mark Pritchard’s Wild Animal in Circuses Bill.

He claims “they”, presumably he means the government whips, offered him a job to drop it – “a pretty trivial job” - admirably he’s ended up going rogue and sticking to his guns. What is it about  the exploitation of circus performers that Downing Street opposes?

Oh what a circus! Oh what a show!

Mehdi Hasan went into damage control mode over at the Guardian this morning, with a long piece that essentially boils down to “please don’t blame my book for Ed’s nosedive in the polls”. He goes on to offer helpful advice about how the struggling Leader of the Opposition might be able to up his game. But it’s a bit late to be trying to curry favour again. 

Miliband’s office deny suggestions that Shadow Cabinet members were told by Tom Baldwin not to attend the book launch on Tuesday. Guido’s sources denied any edict went out either on or off the record. Neil Kinnock pulling out as the speaker at the last moment was unfortunate. Could it be that the former unsuccessful leader of the Labour Party didn’t want to be seen to be endorsing the book about the so far unsuccessful current leader of the Labour party? Seems ungrateful since he got his party back.

Ban or no ban, it’s clear Team Ed are rather angry with their former cheerleaders-in-chief. And they have good cause to be. Take a look at the ICM/Guardian net approval ratings before and after the Mail on Sunday serialisation of the book. The latest Ipsos-Mori data confirms the ICM findings:

The book led the storm of bad publicity for Miliband in the weeks that saw the six point approval-rating drop. Despite what Hasan argues in his piece, the evidence is to the contrary. 

Guido has never understood why since the Second World War governments, all allegedly committed to decentralisation, maintained the waste of money which is, or rather was, the Central Office of Information. The COI was formed in 1946 out of the Orwellian Ministry of Information and was for many years the biggest spending advertiser in Britain, splurging millions on nanny state public information messsages. Notoriously COI spending invariably went up most in pre-election years. The whole ethos of the COI was “Big Government” knows best.

In what signals an important cultural change “Mad” Frankie Maude hasn’t reformed or streamlined the COI, he has closed it. That is the kind of quangocidal decentralisation we need to see more of from the government…

Last Thursday Melanie Phillips  unexpectadly announced that she was no longer going to be writing for the Spectator and would be moving her conversation starting pieces to her own personal website.

In a strange coincidence there is an expensive looking retraction on the front page of the Spectator’s website today, referencing a story by Phillips. If Guido could make a helpful suggestion, perhaps Mel could go write for HuffPo…

Dougie Alexander has a rather long winded way of saying the you can’t trust the Brownites:

“You draw lessons from these times and politics relies on the capacity to have a sustained iterative strategic conversation about the direction of the government — if that’s imperilled by distrust, that’s not a good thing”.

As the LibDems linger around the 11% point in the polls, Nick Clegg has come up with his latest idea to try and make people like him – giving every taxpayer shares in RBS and Lloyds, the banks they own. Individuals could sell their stake once the price of the 46 million shares rose above the cost of bailing out the banks. The idea was originally mooted by the CPS, and Guido is intrigued, but also a little worried it could cost at least £250 million to administrate. It’s going to take a while for any fruition, given the government is currently down nine billion pounds. Clegg will be hoping people will be able cash out at a convenient time…

Sometime around spring 2015 would be ideal.