Guido was just thinking that blog-favourite Steven Purcell had been quiet for a while, and then just as Miliband headed for Scotland, up he popped again. In another stunning PR success, Labour’s one time Glasgow golden-child, was questioned by police over the weekend about an “assault” that took place at his flat at 5:30am on Sunday morning. Guido understands that Glasgow councillor had been out celebrating the fact that the Crown Office had dropped their investigation into his time as chief of the Labour-led City Council. As we covered extensively at the time, Purcell’s career ended with him in rehab and his criminal associates under the microscope. 

Police were called to an “after party” that got out of hand and punches were thrown in a dispute with an invited guest. Having had their investigation into corruption shunned by the powers that be, Guido imagines that the police were only too happy to wade back in to this one. Purcell was questioned for ten hours.

A younger man was also arrested…

UPDATE: Anna Raccoon has more.

In the wake of Smeargate Gordon Brown said that there was “no place in politics” for the likes of Damian McBride and Derek Draper. They were rightly cast out of the fold. However as Guido has been reporting, Dolly’s slow political rehabilitation has begun. He was strutting round conference, head held high, pouring the champagne and pressing the flesh as if he hadn’t triggered one of the darkest moments in the Labour Party’s history. It wasn’t just activists and lefty bloggers willing to turn a blind eye, and in some cases greet him with open arms, look who was he was spotted hobnobbing with:

Yes that’s right, Miliband’s most senior adviser Tom Baldwin was happily chatting away with Dolly. The above picture was grabbed during Ed Miliband’s speech. We all know what happened last time Dolly got chatting with a Labour spindoctor…

Guido was greatly amused to be semi-threatened by a tanked up James Macintyre in the conference bar. Apparently Make-it-up-Macintyre was “surprised in the current climate” that we would be regurgitating those emails between him and Draper. What’s he going to do, get us sacked?

It seems Coke & Sex Week has gone international, with another prominent right-winger’s past being flung into the public eye. This one is going to be huge. Sarah Palin is accused of having a one night stand in 1987, behind her soon to be husband’s back, with 6ft 7in NBA player Glen Rice. The tryst allegedly took place in her sister Molly’s dorm room at the University of Alaska. Palin was a sports reporter at the time. However that’s not all:

“The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin by the respected if controversial author, Joe McGinniss, claims Palin was seen snorting cocaine off the top of a 55-gallon drum while snowmobiling with friends. It also alleges she smoked marijuana with a professor while at Mat-Su College in Alaska.”

Brad Hanson, Todd Palin’s business partner is also accused of sleeping with the former Alaskan governor in 1996. Unlike with a certain Tory Chancellor, at least it seems Palin wasn’t so stupid as to be caught grinning in front a plate of charlie. This might not go down so well with the hockey moms, but Guido is certainly amused…

George Osborne said in October 2005:

“The allegations are completely untrue and dredging up a photo from when I was 22 years old is pretty desperate stuff.

This is merely part of a smear campaign to divert attention from the issues that matter in this leadership contest and I am confident people will not be distracted by this rubbish.

Twelve years ago a friend of mine went out with a woman called Natalie and they had a child together.

I met them together occasionally in the autumn of 1993, and it soon became clear that my friend had started to use drugs.

He became more and more addicted and I saw his life fall apart.

With his other friends I tried to persuade him to seek treatment.

Eventually he did and after a long time in rehabilitation he has now recovered and put his life back together.

I am very proud of the battle he has fought and won. 

That is, and always has been, the sum total of my connection with this woman.

It was a stark lesson to me at a young age of the destruction which drugs bring to so many people’s lives. 

Ever since then I have believed that tough, realistic policies to tackle the evil of drugs should be one of the top priorities of any government.

I now want to respect the privacy of my friend who is now happily recovered and working full-time abroad, and the privacy of his young child.

For the sake of that child I think we should leave them alone.”

He’s up in the House at 15:30. First one to shout “Louise” gets a spanking…

They say life begins at forty, but Guido reckons George Osborne’s birthday today won’t be as much fun as when he was twenty. He still has one vice these days – orange jelly…

Kay Burley sails close to the wind in her political bonkbuster ‘First Ladies.’ Guido has touched on the similarities to certain real life ladies involved the the Blair-like PM in the novel already. Not content with upsetting the lawyers there, Kay pushes things even further…

In the most shocking scene in the book, “Valerie”, nearly dies after taking a drink and drugs overdose in the No. 10 flat, while her husband ‘Julian’, the Blair-like PM, is at a tryst with one of his mistresses. She is discovered unconscious in the middle of the night by her 13 year old daughter. No. 10 officials try to stop doctors rushing her to hospital to stop the press from finding out.

Any similarity between this and a real life drama in No. 10 concerning the Blair family is pure coincidence.

Guido understands that tomorrow’s Spectator diary won’t make for comfortable reading for Tom Baldwin. Lord Ashcroft has his claws out:

“Westminster is exhilarated by the appointment of Tom Baldwin, Ed Miliband’s exciting new media adviser. As deputy political editor of the Times, Mr Baldwin wrote some quite spectacular untruths as part of a campaign to discredit me in general and, in particular, to implicate me in a drug-running scandal. This was somewhat ironic, given what he was later witnessed snorting in his paper’s hotel suite at the 2001 Conservative conference. The whole business (including the retraction I received from the paper) is detailed in my 2005 book Dirty Politics Dirty Times. But now that Mr Baldwin is back in the news, perhaps it is time to dust off some of the morsels I didn’t publish at the time. Meanwhile, let us hope for the sake of civilised political discourse that he has found an alternative way to deal with the pressures of his job.

Morsels eh…

Founder of the right-wing Cornerstone group John Hayes, 52,  is certainly a lively addition to the green benches, but it seems his agent is even more of a party animal. Craig Jackson was denied bail this morning and held on charges of kidnap and possession of dope. According to the local paper in his South Holland and the Deepings constituency, there was an incident involving a man in his fifties on Sunday night.  What could have tipped him over the edge?

Former Home Office Minister Bob Ainsworth says…

“Prohibition has failed to protect us. Leaving the drugs market in the hands of criminals causes huge and unnecessary harm to individuals, communities and entire countries, with the poor the hardest hit. We spend billions of pounds without preventing the wide availability of drugs. It is time to replace our failed war on drugs with a strict system of legal regulation, to make the world a safer, healthier place, especially for our children. We must take the trade away from organised criminals and hand it to the control of doctors and pharmacists.”