Polly writes movingly today of the fear that is stalking the Guardian reading public sector parasitical classes:

“…Cameron and Osborne have been most successful is in frightening people, not in itself a useful economic tool… However, fear can be useful politically. Cameron’s government has skilfully created a hate campaign directed at the public sector. The release by Eric Pickles this week of all the spending data from his department and its quangos was admirable openness – but mainly a crafty assault on everything spent by public servants… Cameron has performed a political conjuring trick of some brilliance in diverting voters’ wrath from the gamblers of high finance to public servants’ excess.“

Tragic isn’t it? The truth and openness about public servants’ excesses. Enough to fill any decent Guardian reader with fear…

Polly personally knows the meaning of that fear, having to scrape by on her six-figure Guardian salary supplemented only by media appearance fees and royalties from her book Unjust Rewards, co-authored with her husband David Walker a former Guardian journalist, which attacked the rich and inequality.

He is (for now) the axed Audit Commission’s six-figure salaried Managing Director of Communications and Public Reporting, basically an upmarket spinner. With a household joint-income in the top 1% and some ten times the national average, her husband’s looming unemployment must put her in fear for their multi-million pound property portfolio – the £2.4m London townhouse, the villa in Tuscany, not forgetting the holiday home in upmarket Lewes, Sussex. Thank god Polly and David no longer have to worry about their Amy’s private school fees. How will they cope?

Shock waves have been sent through the national media today by The Telegraph’s Bryony Gordon. Seemingly tasked with making Colonels splutter into their cornflakes, the former 3am Girl this week devoted her entire column to her ample bosom and the debate surrounding topless sunbathing. Something about the piece got Guido thinking, so he got the Guy News Fact Check team on the case.

In the article Bryony claims:

“When I go on holiday, I like to sunbathe topless. The beach towel goes down, the book comes out, and the bikini top flies off, often in the direction of a startled looking friend who has clearly never seen a pair of breasts before. Topless sunbathing is a wonderful thing, a holiday in itself from underwired bras… Many believe that the topless sunbather is an exhibitionist, a minx and a strumpet. They are mistaken – mostly, we just don’t like tan lines. And we don’t mind our breasts. Is that such a bad thing?“

But the picture tells a different story. Here is Bryony snapped on holiday, displaying clear and obvious tan-lines where her bikini top has been. Fact Check verdict? Fiction.

There is no denying that the Sunday Times Political Editor’s job is much coveted. Since the news that Jonathon Oliver was heading to spin-land, there have been all sorts of rumours flying around of hats in rings and silent campaigns. Names that have come across Guido’s desk include The Guardian’s Nick Watt (denied from the beach) The Times’s Sam Coates, the Standard’s senior and junior, Joe Murphy and Paul Waugh (denied flatly, though Waugh said it was “nice to be thought worthy of such a plum job”) Guido wasn’t expecting any other response…

Word is that current Deputy Political Editor Isabel Oakeshott is digging in and has her heart set on the job. She’s had a successful run of scoops and ghosted former Labour Party General Secretary Peter Watt’s grenade of a book before the election. An insider says she is greatly respected Wapping way….

With job openings in journalism a rarity these days, with newspapers laying off staff left right and centre, graduate schemes having thousands of applicants for one place and talk of not paying interns laughed out of the media world, you would think the post of assistant editor to a once prestigious and well read magazine would have the applications flooding in. Not at this dying magazine though…

The New Statesman have had to extend the application process for their assistant editor, presumably because of a lack of interest or quality hats thrown in the ring. Who wouldn’t want to be responsible for the dirth of talent at the struggling magazine?

With such cutting edge insight from the Political Editor Mehdi Hasan such as “The next Labour leader will be called Miliband“ and the renowned “Mr Scoop” himself, James Macintyre on board, the job would be a breeze, just watch out for those writs. With circulation rapidly heading for rock bottom – just the libraries that subscribe – perhaps those budding lefty hacks have realised the Staggers is a place to end your career rather than start it…

UPDATE: Mehdi got in touch to insist that he is not the Political Editor but the Senior Editor (Political). If that is the only part of the story he could find to refute then things were worse than Guido thought….

Guido is a little puzzled. Everytime he reads something about the Treasury Select Committee, it seems to be proceeded by the words “Tory dominated”:

Take this example from the Guardian, or this one from Progress, or from The Mail. Now take a look at the make up of the Treasury Select Committee:

Andrew Tyrie
(non-voting, chairman)

Michael Fallon
Andrea Leadsom
Jesse Norman
David Rutley
Mark Garnier

Andy Love
John Mann
George Mudie
Chuka Umunna
John Cryer

John Thurso

Stewart Hosie

Can the old hacks not add up, or are they deliberately not mentioning that far from dominating, the Tories are outnumbered?

Guido speculated last week that more people would be coming here for their political news than The Times and the as-of-yet unconfirmed numbers from the first month of the pay-wall won’t make for comfortable reading down Wapping way.  Dan Sabbagh, formerly The Times’ media correspondent, blogs at Beehive City that his sources in Wapping say the figures are 15,000 paying for the content on the web with a further 12,500 paying for the iPad app. Which implies that half as many people now read the Thunderer online as read Guido daily.*

The plan was always fewer, more loyal readers, but unless the Mandy-mania had people flocking to the site last week in tens of thousands, this could get rather embarrassing.

*If it is any consolation to Rupert Murdoch, the two ways readers can pay to subscribe to this blog – via LexisNexis and Amazon’s Kindle – generate about enough revenue to buy a pint per month.

Guido hears that today’s Local Government Association Conference was a right hoot, well perhaps not, but Eric Pickles used his speech there to zero his sight and take aim squarely at The Guardian.

It seems he is coming good on Tories pre-election promise to put public sector job adverts online rather than using taxpayers’ money to subsidise the otherwise unsustainable Guardian business model. Without those public sector adverts the paper is going to be in serious trouble. Not even more deals with Apple will be able to save them. Tragic…

The Guardian has managed to turn a leaked Treasury PowerPoint forecasting lower unemployment  into a 1.3 million public sector jobs losses front page story. Larry Elliott, who really does know better, has ignored the same PowerPoint’s prediction of 2.5 million job gains in the private sector, giving a net gain of some 1.2 million jobs (as illustrated by the above chart). The Guardian chose not to front page the headline that the Treasury predicts 1.2 million job gains…

The Office for Budget Responsibility is equally clear in its forecast of lower unemployment

We expect employment to stabilise this year and to start rising in 2011. The ILO unemployment rate is expected to peak at just over 8 per cent in 2010, before falling gradually throughout the forecast period, to just over 6 per cent in 2014. The claimant count continues to decline, from 1½ million in 2010 Q1 to just over 1 million by the end of 2014 (Chart 3.12).

What is obvious to everyone is that the bloated public sector payroll is going to fall and a recovering private sector is expected to take up the slack. Larry has managed to set the news agenda today only by ignoring the whole story.  The loss making Guardian is of course the house-paper of the public sector, with pages full of advertisements for non-jobs.

The Guardian’s advertising revenues will be hit incredibly hard, to the tune of hundreds of millions pounds, by the public sector hiring freeze and the coming shift of public sector job advertising from their printed pages onto jobs.gov.uk.

A cynic might wonder if that perhaps helps to explain the paper’s editorial stance…

Guido is off to the Institute of Economic Affairs to debate the whats and wherefores of the “liberal elite”. As is traditional whenever Guido goes head-to-head with Sir Michael White, Guido is wearing national dress tonight (pictured).

The Free Society and Liberal Vision will be discussing:

Who holds the liberal torch in 2010: Libertarians, Lib Dems or the “liberal elite”?

Tuesday June 29, 2010 Chaired by Mark Littlewood (Institute of Economic Affairs), speakers include Julian Harris (chairman, Liberal Vision), Chris Mounsey (leader, Libertarian party), Brendan O’Neill (editor, Spiked!), Paul Staines (aka blogger Guido Fawkes), James Delingpole (writer, journalist and broadcaster), Mark Pack (co-editor, Liberal Democrat Voice) and Michael White (assistant editor, Guardian).

The wall is up at The Times even if payment isn’t required yet. It started on May 24 and traffic has more than halved in the month since. It will probably halve again and then some when the cash register opens…

I’ll wager Danny Finkelstein, who is overseeing the Wapping paywall project, that within 12 months no Times political columnist will have more measurable readers online than Guido. Lunch at the restaurant of his choice…