Alastair Campbell on BBC R4’s Loose Ends, on Saturday claimed that he had never briefed journalists with negative stories about ministers. Whereas Gordon used aides (Balls and McBride) to harm the reputations of other ministers:

“Gordon did have people around him who were briefing against colleagues all the time. I just didn’t. Politics is a team game.”

So who said Gordon was “psychologically flawed”?

Will any Lobby hacks actually call him on this? Didn’t he just recently openly slag off former Labour Minister Clare Short at the Chilcott Inquiry, live on TV?  C’mon Rawnsley, Rentoul, Sir Michael White, tell us: is Alastair telling the truth?

Alastair has long revelled in his macho, hard-man, Malcolm Tucker image. He has gone through four Iraq inquiries and he gave no ground at the latest Chilcot Inquiry. He has also dealt with the “beyond doubt” question many times.  Why did Marr’s mild interrogation unsettle him?  Was it a cynical, calculated act or is Al cracking up again?

Bad Al is also said to have groomed Gordon Brown for his Piers Morgan interview, where he too tears up and gets emotional. Are they going for the sympathy vote?  Three months before the election Brown is blubbing for the cameras, having always claimed he was a private man and criticising Cameron (and by implication Blair) for doing the touchy-feely stuff.  Are they trying to fake up some kind of emotional connection with voters to compensate at the last minute for Gordon’s lack of EQ?

Guido is on Nicky Campbell’s breakfast show tomorrow talking about this topic.  What do co-conspirators think?

UPDATE : Bad Al has just blogged that his “exasperation button” was pressed.

Not content with a bad novel set to flop, bad Al Campbell is still trying to flog copies of his other work of fiction – his diaries.  Via his website he will be donating £7.50 to Labour from every sale of the unwanted trade copies otherwise destined to be pulped.  Guido is not sure how successful this campaign will be given that you can get a copy of the book for a quid in Poundland or a free .pdf of it here.  In a bid to encourage people to fall for the fundraising gimmick, bad Al will be signing copies with a personal dedication. You can send him exactly what to write directly from his website without having to pay.

What would you like Bad Al to say?

Everyone knows Bad Al used to make ends meet writing soft-porn for Forum magazine. The question is has the experience of the years since those sex and drink filled days made his saucy prose any better? Judge for yourself, here is the sex scene verbatim from his new novel Maya:

“She wasn’t wearing a bra. I reached down to cup her breast. She breathed in sharply, leaning towards me. I felt dizzy. I took a deep breath, my hand immobile for a few seconds, just holding a breast that had fed so many fantasies, so much frustration. It felt better than the best of any fantasy.

Then I indulged in another fantasy. I gripped the expensive fabric of her green dress in my two hands and I tore it. With a shimmer, the silk fell away to her waist. It was the first time I had seen her breasts. Though there were several highly erotic scenes in ‘An English Rose Abroad’, Maya had never been filmed naked from the front. Now there they were, perfect objects of desire, my hands touching them and my lips moving down to kiss them. I ran my tongue around her nipples and then into the valley of her throat and up to her lips. ‘Kiss me,’ I said, and as she did I felt both her hands on my shoulders, then running down my back, up to my shoulders again, as our tongues ended a two-decade courtship, circled each other again and again, till I sucked her hard into my mouth, and she me into hers. She grabbed at my belt, helped me open my trousers, then force them to the floor as she pulled me on top of her. My hands fell away from her breasts but I wanted them back there, to make that moment of first contact endure. I raised my self up so that I could keep my mouth on hers but also touch her nipples once more, than I moved down to kiss them, and as I kissed and nippped and bit, she grabbed my hair, tugged it hard and behan to emit little gasps, momentary bursts of sounds that said to me I was giving her pleasure. Her pleasure was now my sole ambition. She brought her mouth back to mine, then tugged on my shoulders and I was lying on top of her, the outside of my thighs touching the inside of hers. I felt her calves on mine as she locked her legs around me, our tongues danced around each other once more, and she was wriggling beneath me, her hands on my hips, then she was pulling me towards her, directing me to everything I had ever hoped for. I thought the walls were going to fall down as we stroked and screamed our way through hours of pleasure to the union for which my whole life had been a preparation.”

So it took more than 45 minutes to explode then…