Ever since he was revealed to have furiously hurled three Nokias at a Downing Street wall Gordon Brown has been the unofficial mobile phone throwing world champion. Until now…

The Prime Mentalist has cruelly had his top Team GB achievement taken away from him after Finland set a new world record for throwing a mobile. 18-year-old Ere Karjalainen launched his phone an impressive 101.46 metres, smashing Gordon’s previous personal best of the width of a room in Number 10. Guido is sure Brown would never let anyone take his gold away from him…

Regular readers will remember Pippa Bartolotti, the Green Party leadership candidate who waved the flag of a Syrian fascist organisation that use a swastika as their emblem and base their party anthem on ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’. Now Pippa has admitted to driving a luxurious gas-guzzling Jaguar X-type:

“Yes, it does damage my image within the Green Party – but I’ve got the same problem everybody else has got. Am I suddenly going to pay 25-grand for an electric car which I can’t charge up hardly anywhere, because there’s no infrastructure, and even if I could charge it up, a lot of the energy would be coming from dirty, coal-fired power stations? It might look nice on the face of it, but that would be cosmetic”.

Guido had always assumed that Pippa walked from A to B. Or marched…

Guido has reported with interest on the internal restructuring going on over at Labour HQ during the last few months. Two weeks ago the party finalised their austerity programme, hoping that a spate of voluntary redundancies and structural reform would rake in significant efficiency savings. They need to – Labour overspends by £1.7 million each year.

Guido has pointed out the hypocrisy of advocating increased public sector borrowing to tackle the economy’s woes while making cuts within the party, but now it seems Labour’s money men might be toeing the same line as the Shadow Chancellor. The latest figures show that Labour has almost £10,000,000 worth of loans outstanding and, while cuts had apparently been seen as the order of the day, they have taken out new loans worth £7,300 in the second quarter of 2012:

Some things never change…

See the screen shots showing the Guardian‘s latest spin unravel…

…Over on Media Guido…

The Guardian has come under heavy fire over the last week for running an opinion piece by Joshua Trevino, a journalist who sparked controversy by saying he was “cool” with the idea of the IDF shooting American citizens on a flotilla bound for Gaza:

Dear IDF: If you end up shooting any Americans on the new Gaza flotilla — well, most Americans are cool with that. Including me.—
Joshua Treviño (@jstrevino) June 25, 2011

When Al Jazeera reported on the story and claimed Trevino had been hired as a correspondent, the Guardian contacted them demanding that they issue a correction since apparently he was only a freelance contributor. However, judging by these before and after shots of two press releases from the paper, it looks like some creative editing has been going on at Guardian towers:

Before:

After:

First they announce Trevino as a new member of their editorial team, then demote him to a mere commentator. The Guardian has some nerve asking for a correction when they have had to correct themselves…

While the sky-high union funding of the Labour Party will hardly come as a surprise, Guido was intrigued to note a sizeable donation to the LibDems in today’s latest figures. The largest yellow donation was generously given by a property development company by the name of Brompton Capital Limited. Brompton Capital – owned by millionaire businessman Rumi Verjee, an entrepreneur who made his fortune selling pizza - gave the LibDems £250,000 in the second quarter of 2012. Guido is sure that it is nothing than coincidence that last year Verjee dined with Nick Clegg at the LibDem leader’s posh home in Kent. Hopefully Verjee got more than a Domino’s for his money…

Figures released today show that trade unions gave almost £2 million to the Labour Party in the second quarter of 2012 alone. Len McCluskey’s Unite was once again the biggest single donor to any party by some way, while overall unions donated some £1.8 million to Red Ed and co:

Overall party donations fell by almost £1 million between April and June. Participation by the people is plummeting while the unions’ bankrolling of Labour goes from strength to strength…

UPDATE: 

Well over half of Labour's funding in the last quarter came from just 3 big trade unions. Over 70% of all donations from Unions.—
Owen Meredith (@owenlmeredith) August 20, 2012

Read all about the latest failed injunction, and an interesting new ruling by the High Court…

…Over on Media Guido…

The High Court has ruled that exposés of affairs by celebrities are in the public interest. Over the weekend former England football manager Steve McClaren lost his bid to obtain a privacy injunction against the Sun, who then revealed that he had cheated on his wife with a former lover of another England coach, Ulrika Jonsson’s former squeeze Sven Goran Eriksson.

The decision seems to be a significant step back from the creeping privacy law established in similar past cases.

Brian who?

This morning the GMB has denied to Guido that Iain McNicol, the Labour Party General Secretary, still holds the position of Political Officer at the strike-happy union. That despite McNicol’s sponsor Frank Doran claiming in the Register of Interests of Members’ Secretaries that, as of 20th July this year, the party’s most senior employee still held the post:

If it turns out that McNicol retained his senior job at the GMB while he was helping Labour decide their political strategy than this would be the most worrying example yet of a union lobbying Labour from within. The GMB are insisting to Guido that Doran doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Suspicious…