Last night’s Pesto phone-hack flap was over the fact that Coulson had his severance pay “Compromise Agreement” strung out such that there was an overlap with when he started spinning for Dave. It looks bad to be still taking the Murdoch shilling when you work for the man who wants to be Prime Minister.

It was almost a vintage phone-hacking day. Pesto got the leak, Guardian got cross and finally Tom Watson wrote a letter to someone. Apparently there must be a full investigation into all of this, however it seems these sort of delays are nowadays not so uncommon. Despite what Brillo and Yelland are saying about their respective terminations:

My original NI editor contract said if I resigned I was entitled to nothing. #hacking—
Andrew Neil (@afneil) August 23, 2011

When I left NewsCorp I didn't sign or have any 'compromise agreement! I just left.—
David Yelland (@davidyelland) August 23, 2011

Brillo and Yello stopped taking the Murdoch shilling a decade or more ago. Guido can reveal that right now those journalists dismissed from the News of the World last month have similarly had their payments subject to a delay which means their own “Comprise Agreement” severance payments will not be settled until October 6. Certainly one way of keeping mouths shut until after Conservative Party conference…

Cynics might think that yesterday was a good day to bury a little bad news for News International. But that would be casting aspersions on Pesto’s independence from his mate Will Lewis, News International’s general manager. He surely would never leak anything to Pesto, his friend of two decades…

Incidentally, whilst we are on the subject, Coulson walked for the illegal activities which happened on his watch. Will the Guardian’s Rusbridger do the same if his journalists get nicked?

The Livingstone campaign have backed down and are taking down the photo that they posted of Ken’s activists grinning and laughing outside the Mayor’s family home. The majority of the Labour twitterati did their utmost to try to defend the picture, probably because they were in on the “Winning in Islington” joke too. The statement from Ken campaign guru Mike Joslin says:

“We have removed a photo that appeared on this page earlier today. YourKen.org contains a range of photos of our volunteers campaigning across London, in this case Labour canvassers campaigning in the recent Islington byelection. No pictures identify the names of residents in particular addresses, including this one. As Harry Cole and the Guido Fawkes blog have chosen to reveal the name of a resident in this house we have decided to replace this photo.

Why was it there in the first place? Is this what Labour meant by “beating Boris in his own backyard”, as the by-election hype said? And who took the photo Mike?

So their hilarious spin is to say that it’s all Guido’s fault for revealing that it was Boris’s house. However we obscured the number and the public interest is firmly on the side of revealing, yet again, the former Mayor’s spectacularly bad judgement. This is a man that wants to be in charge of London’s security during what will be the biggest test the Met has ever faced.

With less than a year to go until the London grudge match, the gloves seem to have been abandoned by Ken Livingstone. Last week we had his “Boris is Hitler” comments, and now with launch of Your Ken, an off-the-shelf activist recruitment website, comes another gaffe:

Why exactly is Ken Livingstone putting out pictures of his rival’s family home* with a crowd of his grinning apparatchiks outside it? There is taking the fight to your opponents and then there is a unnecessary poor taste by broadcasting where the Mayor, and his young family, sleep. Guido doesn’t think an apology would be out of the question...

*Guido has obscured the prominent number displayed on the front door.

There’s nothing more former Treasury spinner Will Straw and his band of merry progressives like doing more than talking down the UK. So eager are they for any chance to kick Osborne that they leave their flanks vulnerable. Their graph showing Britain’s tragically anaemic growth while tragic has unintended consequences for the tax and spenders. Have a look at the three countries leading the growth figures:

We on this blog are huge fans of the Baltic model, but apart from pretty blonde girls, what do Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have in common? Well flat taxes of 24%, 25% and 33% respectively for one. Discuss…

“Tea with Tony Blair at No. 10. He was yawning a lot and drinking endless cups of tea. I tried to wake him up a bit.”

The above is Piers Morgan’s own diary dated March 26, 1997, taken from his 2005 account of his days in newspaper journalism, The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade.  Those of you who are political insiders will realise that John Major, not Tony Blair, was in Downing Street in March 1997. Morgan just lies and lies. As this example shows, he isn’t even a good liar.

Nevertheless for some reason the DCMS select committee isn’t planning to recall Piers to explain his claims to them, in the light of subsequent evidence uncovered, that he cleaned up The Mirror and should be congratulated for the same. He claimed:

“If there are particular grievances about how the Daily Mirror has behaved, and I say that our record in this area is exemplary, exemplary. I don’t say this because we somehow got away with this, I say this because we operate the [PCC] Code of Practice effectively and seriously.”

Yet we have by his own written admissions the clear implication that under his editorship hacked voicemails from Sven-Göran Eriksson to Ulrika Jonsson as well as  from Paul McCartney to Heather Mills were the basis of stories. Data from “Operation Motorman” also reveals that the Mirror Group paid private investigators some £442,878.73 to illegally procure personal data like tax records, DVLA records, medical and phone records. 65 invoices for criminal transactions can be traced back directly to Piers Morgan’s Daily Mirror during his time as editor, a time when he told the DCMS he should be “congratulated” for cleaning up the paper and operating the Press Complaints Commission’s Code of Practice “effectively and seriously”. His claims of exemplary behavior are not just an exaggeration by Piers, they are the exact opposite of the truth, he lied to the parliamentarians to their faces.

During the last hearings James Murdoch was asked if he was aware of the term “wilful blindness”, in not knowing or choosing not to know what was going on at the News of the World. The committee plans to recall him as a result. The ongoing failure of the DCMS Select Committee’s chairman John Whittingdale to recall the second most prominent procurer of blagging and hacking, besides Andy Coulson, is unfathomable. In fact it is bordering on “wilful blindness”…

UPDATE: DCMS Select Committee member Louise Mensch tweets in response:

@GuidoFawkes Cttee looking at prior testimony from witnesses, wouldn't be appropriate to discuss any specifics.—
Louise Mensch (@LouiseMensch) August 23, 2011

As his first foreign policy adventure peaked, David Cameron travelled through the night from Cornwall to be by the big red phone in Downing Street. After the debacle of the Prime Minister being in Rome as his own country burned a few weeks ago, Dave clearly wasn’t taking any chances. There was even a chance to bask in a little glory…

But now twenty-four hours later Cameron has left Clegg in charge to chair the Libya meetings while he returns on holiday to Cornwall. Nobody is doubting that our leaders should have some time off, but this is Dave’s fifth holiday in just a year. At the weekend Guido wrote about the growing prospect of One Term Tories. At the climax of a revolution that you helped cement, swanning off to Chelsea-on-Sea hardly looks like commitment from a fighting leader…