Just wanted to re-work the famous headline.

Incidentally, one side-effect of the collapsing pound is that Britain will have to pay £8 billion extra into EU coffers by 2013 according to research by Open Europe. That is equivalent to a penny on income tax for the next 5 years.

The EU gravy train is priced in euros…

As Guido picked up the late edition of the London Evening Standard off the counter the shopkeeper, looked quizzical and said “ee’s off his ‘ead, innee?

The shopkeeper has it right. The grand plan is a joke. It is a re-hash of an existing programme, it would according to the insulating industry take 10 years to complete. The energy producers say the costs will have to be passed on to consumers. Worse, Brown gave helpful tips at the staged photo-op this morning to wrap-up warm, close the curtains, sit in the dark and stick a balloon up the chimney. You could not, as they say, make this up…

Labour MPs are despairing…

Some odd findings come out of the Populus pre-conference polling of voter perceptions. Guido is working on the assumption that the poll methodology is good – poll pundits like Mike Smithson or Anthony Wells might beg to differ. Some of the findings were:

Most people inside politics and informed enough to read political blogs would disagree with those findings and believe that Brown is to the right of his party and Clegg is more right-of-centre liberal than Ming. So how do you explain the perception disparity?

We live in a tele-democracy, most people are not interested in political detail. Which is why when Dave went off to hug a husky, polls showed that the Tories were seen as more green than the LibDems. McCain is sweeping up woman voters because he has a woman on the ticket, never mind her policy stance. What the likes of Karl Rove, James Carville, Rupert Murdoch, Peter Mandelson and Steve Hilton understand is that perception and image matter more than policy substance in a tele-democracy. People who are not interested in politics have votes. George Dubya Bush was on to something when he said “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and they’re the ones to focus on”…

Tim Kiddell is the man with the most difficult job in Whitehall. He is according to the FT the newly appointed speechwriter for the PM. Presumably as a civil servant he will write the non-party speeches.

Gordon was asked by the press this morning for an idea as to what he’ll be saying in his speech to the Labour Party conference. He desperately needs some new lines because yet again Brown said he would be telling them he would be “getting on with the job”. Not if he carries on as vacuously as he is…

It is nearly a year since Gordon dithered and then bottled calling an election. The greatest strategic error of his political life. He said at the time and repeated this morning at his press conference that it wasn’t a few polls in the marginals that scared him off, it was so that he would have time to set out his vision to the people.

Well he has had a year to do just that. Given he now says they are going to “rethink policy” does that mean it will take another year to set out his vision? Does anyone now better understand his vision?

A third (33.4%) of LibDem grassroots activists privately polled by the party are dissatisfied with Nick Cleggs leadership rating it “ineffective” or “very ineffective”.  Of those that expressed an opinion a similar number (31.7%) thought that the LibDems were on the wrong track.   

The ever ambitious Chris Huhne will take comfort from the fact that not one of the 46.9% who said they voted for him to be leader said they had any regret about doing so.  He has been suspiciously quiet lately…

Tucked away in a dark corner of the Westminster Arms yesterday evening Guido spied the Mirror’s political editor and the PM’s infamous spin doctor self-medicating. McSnide looked very rough. The Ollie Reed of blogging is no position to criticise, but Damian really looks like he has been hitting it hard. Bloated. Suppose it must be tough in the bunker. In Berlin in 1945 they were dosing themselves up to the eyeballs on amphetamines to escape from the inevitable reality. Damian should think about switching his medications, amphetamines are slimming.

Who knows…?

Another rat is leaving the sinking Downing Street ship.  Paul Sinclair, formerly Wee Dougie Alexander’s SpAd before becoming the Prime Mentalist’s Scottish spin doctor, is jumping ship ahead of the Glenrothes by-election.  He is off to spin at Hill & Knowlton according to Paul Waugh.  Sinclair was considered a potential candidate in Glenrothes…