Click this for a great quote from Oaten on the Jeremy Vine show. Fast-forward 33 minutes…

The Times destroys the latest excuses Hughes makes. Four hours before Trevor Kavanagh told him the game was up, he lied to them through his teeth:

So why did he lie? His latest line is that he comes from an older political generation in times when it was more repressed and he didn’t want to upset his mum. Purrrlease.

His mum? The eighties were repressed? With Boy George and George Michael at #1 in the charts. Even a young Guido was down at (handy for Westminster) Heaven, sweating on the dance-floor with poppers-sniffing YC’s.

It doesn’t wash. His party would not have rejected him if he was out. The real reason he could not admit to being bisexual/gay was because he got into parliament on the back of a hypocritical homophobic campaign in 1983. All his (too late) recent apologies can not hide that. He lied because he was ambitious and he still lies today because he is still ambitious. His come-uppance is well deserved.

Unlike with Oaten, there is no reason why Simon Hughes should resign says Cowley Street. The only “professional” gayer Simon Hughes shat on, was Peter Tatchell. Whereas with Oaten…

Hat-tip : Popbitch, “home of gayers, webmongs and unemployed freelance journos”.

Sky News and the Sun are having fun with the LibDems this morning and so, truth be told, is Guido. Now which LibDem leader was Lembit referring to? Do the activists know? Is it another “open secret” at Westminster not fit for the public? Enquiring minds want to know.

Lembit Opik is on Sky News now defending Simon Hughes! Simon Hughes is doomed!

UPDATE: Lembit Opik says, in this ill tempered interview, “We could ask, should a man who has had an affair be Prime Minister?” Whomever could he mean? They really are dirty in-fighters in the LibDems…

John Major has good reason to smile, the Tories are resurgent with an agreeable leader and his part-time job at the Carlyle Group is rewarding. So how much will he make from the forthcoming privatisation of Qinetic?

It will reap his firm (he is the chairman of Carlyle Europe) a £330 million return on an investment of £42 million.

Carlyle always rewards its people very well and this will reap him a seven-figure bung. Labour really doesn’t do these privatisations very well, it has excluded private investors from applying directly for shares. Not exactly popular capitalism, but an 800% return for foreign investors in three years. Is this the wealth redistribution Gordon Brown is always telling us about?

UPDATE: Tin-hat paranoia time, post goes up 10.48, within half an hour they come and stare at the blog for 8 minutes. They make death rays! You know what they did to David Kelly! Help!

Hughes ran a horrific 1983 campaign in Bermondsey that was the most hypocritical and dirty campaign in the history of Liberal low tricks – and that is saying something for the masters of dirty tricks. Liberal activists subsequently admitted going round council estates knocking on doors wearing “I’ve been kissed by Peter Tatchell” badges. Working – class Bermondsey was conned, their prejudices were played to and the Labour candidate, Peter Tatchell, was pummelled.

Hughes had for years denied that the LibDems were responsible for that campaign, then in the last few days he admitted responsibility and said, pathetically, that he had apologised to Peter Tatchell for using ‘an unacceptable form of language‘.

Last week he told the press that he was unlucky in love with the ladies, his spinners referred disingenuously to his “deep-felt Christianity” whilst at the same time gay barmen were hawking stories around the tabloids and Hughes was running up bills on Gay chat-lines. What is it with politicians that they are so contemptuous of the public that think they can lie blatantly to us and then expect to be trusted by us? Hughes is an ambitious, lying politician who has lied to everyone for twenty-two years, why should anyone trust him now? If he had been a Conservative, the apologists for him today would be rightly attacking him for hypocrisy and that 1983 campaign. Now what do they say? They blame The Sun…

Shaking hands with a twisted torturer and smiling, its a disgrace. Didn’t Uday know what George Galloway – Barrymore’s twisted tormenter – was capable of doing? Gorgeous taunted alcoholic Barrymore with “poor me, poor me, pour me another drink”. Cruel, but fair methinks.

Mental cruelty is a terrible thing (but sometimes fun) and it’s a shame Gorgeous is going to be voted out of his CCTV’d prison tonight. A Guido co-conspirator emails to tell that it seems the phone number to evict Galloway has been barred from parliamentary office phones. Must have been costing too much.

Over at Guido and the Monkey we’ll be posting our latest podcast tonight, so saddle up your high horses, Ipods and feeders. Experiment by clicking on Guido’s iPod bedecked visage (on the left) for the idiot-proof way to download it. For the more geeky, here are our XML thingies that will do it all automatically for you.

No, we don’t understand them either.