Sixteen-year-old conference darling Rory Weal had barely sat down before Guido’s inbox started to fill up. His schoolmates were particularly unimpressed with their rebranded chum:

“I attend Rory’s school and know full well that he does not speak in the way he did… the dropped letters all added to his persona..”

There was also some surprise from his classmates that while tear jerking in his speech that since the withdrawal of EMA-dole for students he can’t afford pencils for school, it seems he can in fact afford a £499 iPad to tweet his tales of poverty from:

Did he buy that with his EMA?

The Mail have details of the privately educated Rory’s privileged upbringing. When his property developer father’s firm went bust he had estates worth £2.25million and Rory experienced some social mobility, moving from his private school to a grammar school. Did nobody at Labour HQ take a moment to do a background check, or were they too busy tweaking the speech they wrote for him?

Whilst Rory has been compared to Tory Boy Hague, Guido thinks young Rory is more of a Blair in the making. Remember Tony’s mockney Estuary English. As with Rory the preferred narrative of that public school boy who went on to be PM was a bit more proletarian than the reality. As Rory’s grandma says, like Blair, “he’s a brilliant actor”…

In these austere times we can always rely on Derek Draper to show solidarity with the workers:

2 a.m. Derek Draper decadently pouring champagne at the Jury's Inn Bar in Liverpool…—
Eye Spy MP (@eyespymp) September 28, 2011

His close friend Gloria was showing a bit of leg:

Gloria Del Piero wearing exceptionally short dress to host Gala Dinner—
Eye Spy MP (@eyespymp) September 27, 2011

Love is in the air according to a co-conspirator propping up the conference bar in the Jury’s Inn Hotel.

“Luciana and Chuka arrived hand in hand at the bar at Jury’s very late last night and were all over each other. It maybe back on.”

The beautiful people back together, Guido loves a happy ending…

The Brighton Argus has apologised to Lucie Collier and Joseph Batstone over a story headlined ‘A love of Labour leads to romantic proposal’ after suggesting they were Labour Party campaigners.

They complained to the Press Complaints Commmission who forced the paper to publish a correction:

“The Argus would like to apologise to Lucie Collier and Joseph Batstone for inaccuracies in a story dated Tuesday May 31, 2011 with the inaccurate headline ‘A love of labour leads to romantic proposal.’ We would like to clarify that Miss Collier and Mr Batstone have never campaigned for the Labour Party or for any other political party and only their love for each other was what led to the romantic proposal.”

The couple rightly felt it defamatory to be accused of being Labour Party supporters…

Via : Matt Chorley

For reasons Guido can’t fathom Harriet Harman and Yvette Cooper are hosting a ‘What Women Want’ meeting tomorrow at Labour Party conference. What they apparently don’t want is men at the meeting. However Mrs Dromey and Mrs Balls are giving Ed Miliband a sex change for the day and making him an honorary women so that he can address the meeting of the wimmin.

Charlotte Vere, founder of the more mainstream campaign Women On says she is

“astonished that men will be excluded from the meeting, not allowed in, left outside the door. … This is an outrage. Ed Miliband an “honorary woman”? Can you imagine a meeting to which only men are invited and Harriet Harman is an ‘honorary man’?” 

It strikes Guido as a throwback to Harriet’s more radical looney left days…

Guido is hearing from well placed sources that Chris Lennie, Ed’s preferred, yet unsuccessful, candidate to be the General Secretary of the Labour Party, is set to be made his Chief-of-Staff.  The Labour leader has struggled to fill the position. Lennie, known as “The Tailor” for his ability to stitch things up, lost out to union backed Iain McNicol, yet apparently Ed is ready to bring him into the fold. There have been rumblings amongst party staff who complain that Lennie is “the great survivor” always bouncing back despite a lack of any discernible talent. No wonder Ed loves him so much…

Team Miliband has earned plaudits for promising to end elections to Labour’s shadow cabinet team. There has been an outbreak of support for Labour’s version of the Führerprinzip from all corners. While this may put a block on the more loony elements of the Labour left getting into the shadow cabinet, perversely it may increase the control of the unions. They put Ed Miliband into office and they pay the Labour Party’s bills.

He who pays the piper calls the tunes: Miliband will not be able to resist demands from union bosses for their placemen to be in the Labour cabinet. Unite already have a well developed programme of putting their approved candidates on the parliamentary list. They will soon be able to control the composition of cabinet. No wonder Labour is too craven to stand against children being locked out of schools with single-parents being forced to lose income staying at home to care for their children. Union-owned politicians are not in the public interest.

Mandelson told a Progress faction seminar at Portcullis House last night some home truths. “People will not support further tax and spend unless they can see clear value for money. Further enlarging public sector employment is not an option in the coming decade and we need to look to the real economy, to the private business sector, to deliver sufficient numbers of decently paid skilled jobs.”*

Among the Blairite acolytes (Rentoul was in the chair) was Guido’s old friend Dolly Draper. Westminster is seeing too much of Dolly. Mandelson told the Progress crowd “If I talk about the past it is to learn from it, not to go back to it.”

We can but hope…

*A co-conspirator points out that in an oddly Orwellian piece of censorship this “money quote” is missing from the official report on the Progress website.

The Daily Mirror seems to have decided Ed Miliband is a loser. Even at the end of the dark, sad days of the Brown tyranny the Mirror loyally claimed every day that the sun shone out of his fiscal black hole. The paper still bashes the Tories with relish but it betrays no enthusiasm for the Labour leader. Kevin Maguire is, between breaks from appearing on GMTV and Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News, the Mirror’s political editor. Despairing of Ed he seems to have dropped his usual panglossian prose.

On Monday he tweeted from the GMB union’s conference “90.8% of union activists at GMB Congress think Ed Miliband should do better. No jokes please about other 9.2%”. It was the GMB which put Ed Miliband’s picture on the envelope containing the ballot slips that saw him scrape in past his brother David on the back of union votes. If the GMB paymasters no longer back Ed he is in real trouble.

Yesterday our Kev’ was gutted after Miliband bombed at PMQs:

“Cameron escaped PMQs. Miliband should’ve had U-turn Dave begging for mercy. But didn’t.. Cameron should play Monopoly with Sam tonight to use that “Get Out of Jail Free” card from Miliband at PMQs.”

Last week Maguire ominously warned Ed over plans to water down union influence:

Young Miliband’s picking a ­needless fight if he insults loyal members and treats steadfast unions like lepers. The lifeblood of Labour is its members and they deserve to be heard clearly, not muted or ignored.

Maguire has always been in the Balls camp and is a drinking buddy of Damian McBride, who is now back in Westminster lobbying for more taxes to be sent overseas in foreign aid. The old gang seem to be readying to do what they do best: undermine a Labour Party leader.

The ComRes/Indy poll makes pretty sorry reading for Labour HQ (Con 37%, Lab 37%, Lib 12%). The Ed Miliband honeymoon is clearly over.

Guido wasn’t expecting the Tories to be level pegging with the Labour Party in the polls until the autumn conference season. Guido expects Ed will  underwhelm the already restless rank and file during the Labour Party’s conference. With half the shadow cabinet in despair with their weak leader and even Tom Baldwin seeming to have lost his motivation to spin,   MPs are beginning to contemplate the unhappy prospect of getting rid of the Labour leader next year. Plotting Blairites are setting Ed up for a fall, claiming that if Boris wins the London mayoral election, Ed will have to go. Guido doesn’t quite follow why that should be a consequence. The CCHQ “Save Ed” faction is getting worried…