Thanks to the generosity of Guido’s co-conspirators we can offer a second £1,000 reward for information leading the to the arrest and prosecution of the second extinguisher wielding yob now identified clearly by Sky News. You do not have to give your name.

Email Guido.Fawkes@Order-order.com…

He is wounded, but without a smoking gun Coulson isn’t going to be forced anywhere. However let us just say a few months into the new year a job offer he can’t refuse might arise and off he goes. Whenever Coulson leaves, and in whatever way; be it disgraced, or off back to News Corp., British Petroleum or a spin merchants at board level there will be one hell of a power vacuum in Number 10. There is no way that the control-freakish Steve Hilton isn’t going to want to fill the post with one of his own. One of the Zen Men so to speak…

Since months before the election the name of Ian Birrell has been floating around CCHQ and wider Tory-circles.  Since they sing from the same hymn sheet it seems likely that Hilton wants the Big Society enthusiast and former deputy-editor of the Indy inside Downing Street. Other than being a mate of Dave and Steve’s what is it about Birrell that is so desirable? Even ConservativeHome today calls for Birrell and three other people to be added to the No.10 machine, despite the Tories promising to cut the number of political advisers. Is something afoot? Birrell’s big-society, blue-sky, Cameroon credentials are not entirely to ConservativeHome’s taste…

UPDATE : Well connected source texts speculating that he could replace Ed Llewellyn, Dave’s chief-of-staff. Hmmm…

Guido was outside CCHQ on Millbank late yesterday afternoon to see the action for himself, the fires were burning, a couple of thousand demonstrators were there, the outnumbered police were struggling to regain control.

The crowd was mainly made up of middle-class students with a couple of hundred of youths clearly up for trouble, masked and tooled up. Many of the protagonists were wearing official NUS hi-vis tunics and had loud-hailers, they were not calling on students to disperse or refrain from violence, they were in the thick of it. Officially the NUS is condemning the violence to the media, but that line was not taken on the ground. NUS activists were revelling in the moment. Look at the video evidence and you can see many of the rioters are in official NUS garb.

We’ll hear the speeches from the NUS leaders and others deploring the violence, but the reality was that most of the NUS student members found this all thoroughly exciting. The air was rich with the smell of weed and adrenaline, the 2,000 or so protestors outside 30 Millbank cheered the most aggressive protestors and booed the police resisting them.

The NUS marketed this march as a “Demo-lition” and thousands of their members took them at their word by attempting to demolish the Tory HQ. Worse than the demolition of property was the threat to life – yobs who smashed their way on to the roof tossed from the top of the office block a fire extinguisher – which narrowly missed the police targeted below.

If that had hit a policeman or protester below their life would have been extinguished.

The NUS leadership deliberately chose to march students past CCHQ to rally nearby outside the Tate. Why?

Demonstrations of this size usually rally at Trafalgar Square or in Jubilee Gardens on the Southbank. Before yesterday the NUS leader Aaron Porter was telling students they needed to be not just on “the streets of London” but “inside the rooms where the deals will be made”. The protesters took him at his word and managed to get inside the governing party’s headquarters, the buck stops with Porter and he should accept ultimate responsibility for inciting this riot. His members could have killed a copper or one of their own yesterday…

UPDATE: Both Dizzy and Tory Bear think Aaron Porter is in trouble. LBC dip an oar in too.

From: Sendorek, Alan

Date: 10 November 2010 16:33

Subject: Contact with journalists

It is vitally important, both for the quick dispersal of the crowd outside, and for the safety of people inside this building, that people do not contact journalists to give an account of what is going on. e.g. news reports that the Chairman is on site are extremely unhelpful. Any such leaks from CCHQ will be treated very seriously.

On Friday Guido noticed that Dave’s brand guru Anna-Maren Ashford had been quietly slipped onto the Civil Service payroll, but would have nothing to do with the PM’s image. No Siree.

Well it seems this trick has been spread amongst former CCHQers who couldn’t quite be found jobs in Downing Street or departmental political roles. In the States when a new regime comes in, they bring the civil service too, but that’s not officially how things are done over here. It seems the Cameroons been watching too much of the West Wing…

Strangely a lot of new civil servants do not appear on the grand organigram of government departments, late additions perhaps, but funny how Sam Freedman who was Michael Gove’s man until May is now a senior civil servant at the Department of Education; Jo Penn, formerly Teresa May’s advisor, moved from CCHQ to the Home Office in May, into a politically neutral role. Back in May Rishi Saha went from doing CCHQ’s new media stuff to doing Downing Street’s new media stuff. The official numbers of SpAd’s may have fallen, but the Civil Service count has risen…

Before this May’s general election CCHQ’s Anna-Maren Ashford was the “Head of Brand Communications” and is credited with styling “Brand Dave”. The former advertising executive was brought in by Steve Hilton from Young & Rubicam to kick out the old Tory torch logo and bring in the huggable tree. The glossy 30 year-old made the right look right.

She successfully helped detoxify the Tories and turn them into the beautiful people…

Post-election she still answers to Hilton and is close to hand in the Cabinet Office should the smooth Brand Dave need further polishing – just nowadays it is at the taxpayers’ expense as a civil servant in Whitehall. Officially she works with the Behavioural Insights Strategy Team known universally across Whitehall as the “Nudge Unit”.

Dave controversially put his personal photographer, Andy Parsons, on the Civil Service payroll, the news that his image stylist has also become a civil servant will infuriate many who will question his priorities…

CCHQ’s opposition research operation really should have spotted this and used it to rebut Labour’s demented attack on the Housing Benefit “final solution” (© Polly). LibDem blogger Peter Black highlights this manifesto commitment

‘Housing Benefit will be reformed so we do not subsidise people to live in private sector accommodation on rents working families couldn’t afford’

Eminently reasonable in policy terms, £20,000 a year in rent is of course way beyond what the majority of us can afford. The quote is taken from the Labour Party manifesto, written by one Ed Miliband…

James Purnell when he was at the DWP said he wanted to ensure “people on benefits do not end up getting subsidies for rents that those who work could never afford”. Last week Ed piously called on LibDems to block the implementation of a policy he advocated in the Labour Party manifesto, claiming, “That is not what they came into politics for. I hope they will vote with their consciences.”

The barefaced hypocrisy is breathtaking.

UPDATE : Tim Montgomerie scolds Guido for missing that the Tory Press Office tweeted the Miliband quote on Friday and Sayeeda used it later on Any Questions. Nevertheless Guido contends that if CCHQ had been on the ball it would have been deployed at PMQs which is where it was really needed.

Guido learnt that William Hague had pulled out of an “in conversation” this lunch time with the Telegraph’s Peter Oborne. Quick off the mark the CCHQ spinners were suggesting that Guido had got his facts wrong and that the “in conversation” was with Gove, who has stepped in as a replacement. Complete and utter spin.

Before embarking on such sub-par spinning perhaps they should have checked page 84 of the official conference handbook, which has a rather prominent half-page advertisement:

3/10 for effort. See Coulson later…

If as many expect Mili-D wins the MPs’ vote, splits the members vote with his brother, but Mili-E still wins overall because the union vote goes overwhelmingly to him, Guido gets the impression that the few remaining Tory strategists sitting in CCHQ won’t believe their luck. Kevin Maguire can see the danger, Mili-E will he says be “portrayed as the union’s man, lacking a mandate from the Parliamentary Labour Party”.  He will be “Red Ed” – the union baron’s preferred puppet…

Is the Labour Party actually going to reject Mili-D, the only candidate who is attempting to reach out to the centre and hasn’t given into the left, for his younger brother? “They’re skipping Hague and going straight to IDS, in tune with what the party members want, out of tune with what the voters want” says one CCHQ source. Polls show that Labour Party members themselves know Mili-D is more likely to beat Cameron, they still don’t care, emotionally they want a leader who tells them what they want to hear. Soon we will find out if Labour’s heart has ruled over its head…

Well here’s a unique solution to the growing rift between the Tory-right and the Cleggaroons. While it may be love at the top of the party, clearly this is not the case among the rank and file. Guido was just taking time to sort out his conference passes, (jury still out on whether to go to Labour’s,) when he was asked for his advice on how to make the Tory conference better:

Other than stop holding it in Birmingham and install more bars this year, he couldn’t really care, but the helpful suggestion of speed dating could not go without comment. Tory speed dating… Imagine the horror.

It was oft said that the old Young Conservatives was a marriage bureau, but have things really got so bad that the Party is considering officially organised bonding sessions? Membership is declining and unity might become an issue at the conference, but surely this is not the answer…