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?

Ed Miliband told Piers Morgan that he was a bit of “a square” at university, hence why he never took drugs or slept with as many girls as Nick Clegg. While Guido didn’t have much trouble believing this, with a little help from his mortar-boarded co-conspirator he has been digging around that vessel of truth – the 1980s Oxford student press.

While yes there is a vast amount of extremely dull comment from one “Ted” Miliband, president of the Corpus Christi JCR about rent hikes and other pressing issues of the day (you can have a read of some his greatest moments here,) it was a mention of the Ted’s Labour club that really caught Guido’s attention:

(click for original)

In PMQs at the end of last year, Miliband declared he was proud of his student politician days while the PM was throwing bread rolls and trashing restaurants. The quip was widely seen as a good hit on Dave’s Bullingdon days, but it seems little “Ted” was prone to the odd bit of smashing stuff up too. Oh to be the ruling elite…

This is Courtney Love, newly elected as Oxford University Conservative Association’s ’Non-Executive Officer for Rock and Roll’. She was elected to her position tonight after an evening of drinking, in this instance the teen spirit was port. Courtney contributed to the OUCA Port & Policy debate calling for a foreign policy based on morality and said Wikileaks was a step forward for democracy. She is pictured above twirling Winston Churchill’s cane and below with the Vivienne Westwood clad president-elect, Joe Cooke. Appropriate for Conservative caners…

Guido didn’t weigh in on the minimum pricing story yesterday because if he jumped on every broken promise from Dave he would be typing till the cows came home. Instead of living up to his promise of being on the “cider” pubs (gettit?) Dave is continuing the crippling of the industry. Proponents of the hike Alcohol Concern say “duty is so low in the UK, that it will still be possible to sell very cheap alcohol and be within the law.” Something that is frankly nonsense given booze duty is up 26% in the last two years. The British Beer and Pub Association are quick to hit back. Just look at the how much tax Brits pay on their drink compared to their neighbours:

It’s not much better here in Ireland, guess Guido will have to stay in France more often…

It was the who’s who of the Westminster gay scene at the Speakers apartment last night for the launch of “ParliOut”, though Lembit Opik was sure to never lose physical contact with his latest blonde, just in case anyone got the wrong idea. There were huge cheers for the popular Deputy Speaker Nigel Evans, who came out in to the Mail on Sunday, joking that IPSA no longer let him claim for a closet.

More amusing was his suggestion that it was the bored researchers and hacks favourite, EyeSpy.MP, that had triggered his move. Evans had recently been spotted in Soho’s gay Ku Bar drinking champagne. Apparently he was more concerned about being grassed up for the banned fizz than his choice of company…

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.”

Lord Ashcroft’s “Dirty Politics, Dirty Times” doesn’t hold back on Red Ed’s newly appointed Murdoch fixer. If we turn to page 216 we find a nice anecdote about Tom Baldwin’s cocaine habit:

“…which regrettably seems to have become more serious in recent years. Indeed, during the Conservative Party conference in October 2001, he put Peter Stothard’s suite at the Imperial Hotel to ‘good’ use when his editor was unable to make it to the conference as planned. In the company of two journalist colleagues – Giles Coren and Alice Miles – Baldwin snorted lines of cocaine from the glass coffee table in Stothard’s suite. I certainly have no evidence that his colleagues took the drug, but I am told that Baldwin’s appetite for it was voracious and also that at least one colleague reprimanded him for his stupidity, saying: ‘What the hell do you think you are doing, Tom?’ Such is Baldwin’s craving for the drug that he had taken the not inconsiderable risk of smuggling cocaine through the hotel’s high-level security in order to feed his habit.”

Hacks sniffing coke at Tory conference? Whatever next…

Tom Baldwin is the new spinner for Ed Miliband I can reveal—
George Pascoe-Watson (@GPW_Portland) December 13, 2010

Hearing that the former Times hack’s role will apparently be “strategy” rather than frontline comms. Guido will believe that when he sees it, though perhaps they are waiting for the dust to settle from articles by Baldwin such as “Labour’s biggest donor refuses cash over fears about Miliband“. Certainly an interesting choice that has got people scratching their heads, and their noses. What’s the betting his close friendship with Alastair Campbell had something to do with him taking the job?

You would have thought Labour would have learnt from their past, and their attacks on Coulson, not to choose another spinner who is at risk of becoming the story…

Vincent K arguing against Qatarphobia…

“It’s going to be great – sitting in a non-segregated stadium, next to a chick in a mini-skirt, sharing a beer with the gay guys in the front row and cheering on Israel.”

Philip Green is a sharp businessman who turned round the Arcadia chain when they were closing shops and made them profitable. He turned Top Shop from a fading also ran into an international brand with cheap chic credibility. In doing all that he secured thousands of high street jobs, boosted profitability and made a billion.

He bought Arcadia via an offshore company, perfectly legally and paid that famous billion pound dividend perfectly legally. He did it the way he did it because this country punishes entrepreneurs and risk takers with capital gains taxes on top of income taxes. Double taxing those who create and produce.

Arcadia pays hundreds of millions in taxes every year, VAT, carbon taxes, stamp duty, business rates, National Insurance, employee’s income taxes and the myriad of other taxes that penalise enterprise and entrepreneurs. That isn’t enough for the type of parasites and political activists the great novelist Ayn Rand correctly identified as “looters”.

The looters are killing this country because, in their humanitarian noble-minded, public-spirited contempt for entrepreneurs, they forget how much they rely on entrepreneurs. With each new restrictive regulation designed to enhance equality and “justice” they make it harder for the remaining entrepreneurs to create the Vodafone-supplied iPhones from which they tweet their bleatings about “fighting the cuts”. Self-styled “Anarchists” calling for higher taxes to fund a bigger state are no anarchists.

Philip Green deserves his billions, he is a self made man who left school at fifteen, worked hard, took risks, clearly enjoys himself and defends his just rewards from the rapacious grasp of the tax man.  If only we had one hundred more Philip Greens…