Andrew Neil told Total Politics magazine about that picture…

“It’s not Miss Bordes. It never has been Miss Bordes. That was a picture of a woman from New York that I was going out with in 1995. She worked at Fox and she is an Afro-American. She’s not Asian, she’s not Indian, she’s not British. The picture was taken as we came off the beach in Barbados, by Terry O’Neill. It’s been presented now as if (a) it’s Miss Bordes and (b) that we were in some kind of nightclub and I’m there in this stupid shirt in a nightclub. It was a beach we’d come off, hence the baseball cap and beachwear.”

Regardless of your views on the new hair do, a slightly more aggressive Osborne scored an unexpected victory at this afternoon’s Chancellors Debate. The CCHQ debate preparation team take note – anger works.

Osborne was helped in no uncertain terms by the music hall duo of Flanders and Neil beasting Cable on his reputation and record. These two have history, but the old yellow sage was left speechless by Brillo’s “Isn’t the biggest myth of the election your reputation?”

Guy News Special in the edit right now…

Just watched the Straight Talk interview (on iPlayer here).  It starts off easy enough, Cable perhaps expecting the usual “You saw it all coming and you can dance as well Mr Cable?” type of fawning interview he sometimes gets.  Brillo lures Cable into admitting to some fundamental policy flip-flops.  Twinkle-toes ends up blinking as badly as Ed Balls did under cross examination.  How anyone could think Vince called the crisis right after watching this interview amazes Guido. It was like watching a frog boil, Cable got more and more agitated as Brillo turned up the heat.

See also Cable Admits He Got Crisis Wrong

Guido has been saying for some time that Vince Cable’s reputation as a seer is much overstated and that his reputation is cashing cheques his actual policy account can’t cover. His ability to provide authoritative sounding soundbites to journalists is fantastic.  Hacks never bother to check his prognostications and previous policy flips (who knows what the LibDem policy is on anything besides PR?)  He thus gets a free ride in comparison to Labour and the Tories.

So it will be worth tuning into Straight Talk tomorrow where by all accounts Vince Cable gets a mauling from Andrew Neil about his history of changing his position on a range of issues during the financial crisis and Brillo gets him to admit that he was wrong last autumn to support the merger of Lloyds TSB and HBOS.  Vince admits to Brillo when challenged “you’re right – perfectly fair comment that my first reaction was not the right one.”

Brillo also spotted that in Cable’s just released policy paper for Reform he is proposing to cut items that were only earmarked by Nick Clegg and Vince Cable in February as part of a planned increase of £6.7 bn in spending on childcare and education.

By all accounts it is worth tuning into Straight Talk on BBC News tomorrow night to see Brillo hold Cable’s feet to the fire for all his flip-flopping on economic policy.

UPDATE : Sam Coates over at Red box has spotted another Cable incoherency.

UPDATE II : There is of course the whole Darth Cable / Brillo Skywalker angle about this: Cable was Neil’s economics tutor at Glasgow.  Now the circle is complete, the student is the inquisitor.  The force is strong…

Andrew Neil gave Blears a policy stealing monstering which went, errrm, right over her head. See report on GuyNews.TV.