Who was the stilletoed brunette who exited this Bentley with Boris last week at the back of the Norman Shaw building? Answers to editorial@thefirstpost.co.uk.

Michael Gove is making a much anticipated speech this morning which is expected to be the intellectual equivalent of a bitch-slap to Gordon Brown. What the kind readers of this blog always say in the comments whenever Guido features Gove is that “he has a face you just want to slap”.

Gove is clearly aware of this and possessing a fair amount of ambition he has made some efforts to ameliorate this reaction. He lost the glasses earlier this year and his clothes have got sharper since his journalist days. He explains in article this morning “thus you have the paradox, which I exemplify, of the individual who is both plain and vain, a man who tries to dress smartly because of an anxiety to minimise the unhappy aesthetic impact of one’s appearance.”

What Michael should understand is that the collective urge to happy-slap him isn’t strictly to do with his looks. It is the sheer swottyness of him, exemplified in the article, that brings out the latent playground bully in us all.

UPDATE : His speech is a measured dissection of the Brownies problems.

As Dave said live “Let me outline the action that a Conservative government would take. As we have seen, some of the increase in population size results from natural change – birth rates, death rates. Here our policy should be obvious… “

Microphone switched on, Julie cracked: “Extermination.”

A Sky News spokesman said: “A comment was made in the studio during David Cameron’s speech that was broadcast in error. The comment was not intended for broadcast. The off-the-cuff remark was regrettable.” She is shortly off to work with Trevor MacDonald on the re-launched News at Ten…

Stephen Glover was one of the founders of the Indy and he still writes a weekly media column for the paper. All credit to him for this morning in his column covering and criticising the editor of the paper for Indy-gate. Some thought it amusing that it had been unmentioned in his column of last week. (Guido did inquire of Glover if he would be covering it when it went without comment).

“You can’t expect him to criticise his own editor in the paper” Guido was told by other hacks. Well he did. Independent? Glover is.

Bob Piper and few other left leaning bloggers are getting excited about Flying Lion Limited and bemoaning Guido’s lack of digging into it. They have been digging into the company (now known as “Con Air” because it ferries Tories around) in the hope of uncovering something murky. The Bahamian registered company has got them more than a little agitated.

It is hard to see why they are getting so excited since they should already know it is owned by Ashcroft and a quick perusal of the Electoral Commission website shows £19,819.60 given in the last twelve months. In the year before more than £50,000 worth of flights were registered as reported by The Times in May 2006. So the only reason Guido hasn’t been digging into it is because it is not news…

(Incidentally Dave flew BA to Berlin last week.)

Hain can’t seem to hold a SpAd down since Phil Taylor’s departure. Robert Philpot has gone back to Progress. Who are Hain’s SpAds nowadays? Why did Philpot leave so soon? Hain could get a Basher Davis type reputation for staff turnover at this rate…

In what is in truth an everyday tale of New Labour sleaze, the Guardian exposes on the front page something that happens regularly at the Parliament of Whores in Westminster.

Lord Hoyle was paid a “counsultancy” fee by lobbyist Michael Wood, of Whitehall Advisers, a firm specialising in the murky world of lobbying for arms deals. The firm boasts in publicity of their ability to influence MoD purchases and that they have played a role in £10 billion of UK equipment procurement.

The undeclared payment is the subject of evolving explanations by Hoyle. He originally admitted to the Guardian

Lord Hoyle accepts he was asked to arrange the lobbyist’s introduction “to say hello to the new minister”. He told the Guardian that Lord Drayson was asked to come for a drink. Mr Wood was already there. He says he told the minister: “Mike Wood of Whitehall Advisers would like to meet you.”

At the meeting, which Lord Drayson, the Minister for Arms Procurement, appears to have correctly and formally noted, Mike Wood made his pitch for his firms clients.

So we have an undeclared, under-the-counter payment to a peer to introduce a lobbyist pimping on behalf of arms dealers to the Minister, Lord Drayson, in charge of buying arms – who himself bought his way into the legislature. Remember the 1997 promise of New Labour to be “whiter than white”…

UPDATE : As a co-conspirator points out in the comments, Tory MP Gerald Howarth obtained a parliamentary pass for Mike Wood. Why? He does enjoy a lot of defence related junkets…