Debbie Abrahams almost has Guido feeling sorry for Andy Burnham. The Shadow Health Secretary’s PPS still hasn’t apologised to the House for stupidly repeating “Dr” Eoin Clarke’s lies in PMQs, and now her incompetence has gone a step further. Last night Abrahams somehow thought it would be appropriate to retweet a twitter loon accusing the government of “genocide”:

You would have thought Debbie might have learned her lesson about listening to nutters on the internet…

UPDATE: Abrahams has now deleted the offending retweet, as reported by @DeletedByMPs.

Debbie_abrahams: RT @JamesPhelge: Looks like @David_Cameron Govt are using the Benefits & NHS cuts – and ATOS decis… bit.ly/1413VP4—
Tweets MPs Delete (@deletedbyMPs) January 22, 2013

UPDATE II:

I apologise for inappropriate retweet last pm 1/2—
Debbie Abrahams (@Debbie_abrahams) January 22, 2013

Still waiting for that Eoin Clarke apology…

Steve Richards of the Indy is normally level headed, if often wrong. Today however he’s come out with a corker. Tweeting about Barclays he claims:

“This is the Millie Dowler moment for some banks.”

Really Steve, really?

Guido has read Bruce Anderson’s Steve Hilton take down a couple of times now and has come to the conclusion that is worthy of an Order of the OTT. Anyone who has ever drunk in a bar in Westminster will know that Anderson takes personal credit for “discovering” Cameron and tipping him for great things when he was a mere backbencher. Since then he has been his avuncular defender in the press, though just as when he declared Dave to be “our Charles De Gaulle”, sometimes he over plays his hand. Is Steve Hilton feeding a few titbits on his way out of the door really “one of the most despicable instances of disloyalty in political history.” Probably not. And this one was filed before lunch…

UPDATE:

Well connected Bruce Anderson lunching solo in Bank Westminster. Just a bottle of red and a selection of broadsheets for company.—
Eye Spy MP (@eyespymp) May 21, 2012

Poor Jeremy Hunt is getting frightfully carried away with his £12 billion Olympic baby:

“come and enjoy what will be the most exciting time in British history.”

Guido is looking forward to catching up with all the “excitement” after a month at the Maison Secondaire.

Guido is happy to welcome Jacking Ashley into the Don’t Unseat Ed Miliband Association, but he’s not sure she’s doing the cause any favours with this morning’s hysterical hyperbole. While discussing Ed’s critics she compares their behaviour to US Marines urinating on dead Afghans:

“It’s a game that the Westminster village has always enjoyed. Nick Clegg was last year’s victim, now it’s Ed’s turn. If enough pundits treat him as the US marines treated the Afghan dead, and if the public notices and reflects this contempt back through opinion polls, then somehow or other he might collapse.”

They even link back to the Guardian’s own coverage of the incident, just in case you missed this gloriously unsubtle point. Guido is still trying to work out whether the comparison with holding the Leader of the Opposition to account was done with a straight face. He has a feeling it was…

Along with Alastair Campbell’s partner Fiona Millar, Francis Gilbert is the co-founder of the Local Schools Network – an anti academy front group set up to try to derail school reform. Paul Goodman over at ConservativeHome is a real fan. This morning Gilbert took to BBC Breakfast in a last ditch effort to talk down the Free School project that is seeing the first batch opening their doors this week:

FG: You’ll get a certain type of middle class parent putting their child into this school and then the local state school will take the more socially deprived pupils who don’t have the savvy parents. So you get this kind of segregation which  has led to things like the London riots in our schools already…

BBC: Let me just stop you there. You’re saying segregation in education in London schools led to the London riots..?

FG: It contributed a certain factor because you’ve got the poorest students concentrated in a quarter of our schools in this country and that’s a real problem. So we really need to solve that by bringing all our children together and this free schools programme will contribute more to this social segregation.

No doubt he is fully signed up to the non-reality based community theory that the riots were caused by teenagers having their Educational Maintainence Allowance cut…

The increasingly impressive James Purnell mooted some pretty well trodden ideas last week. The former Labour MP had the audacity to question whether millionaires should really get a pensioners free bus pass and state supplied fuel. A long overdue debate, but Labour grassroots have whipped themselves up into a fury of self-righteousness, that only they do best. The pitchforks and iPads have been out in force, culminating in one of the greatest headlines on LabourList that Guido has seen in a long time:

“Purnell is a heretic, and he’s in the wrong party”

He should then of course be burnt at the social-democratic stake right? Sentiments like that go a long way to explain Labour aren’t being taken seriously. A well deserved Order of the OTT…

It’s definitely time for an Order of the OTT given some of the absurd hyperbole that lefties have been spouting this week. Revolutionary darling Owen Jones gets a special commendation for his attempt to pull up the ladder with his “Abolish Oxbridge” campaign. Guido is sure it must be a spoof.

However Red Ken’s bad case of foot-in-mouth-disease has struck again, leaving even the most loyal of Labourites wincing. Showing his characteristically spectacular poor judgement, Ken described Boris’s new Chief of Staff as the “the Mladic of local government” at a campaign event last night. Eddie Lister reformed Wandsworth Council, streamlining services and creating savings. Mladic killed 18,000 Muslims. Good day for Boris.

Trade union fat cat Bob “lets tax email” Crow has  been at the type-writer again. An RMT press release said today:

“Government plans to slash already inadequate health and safety inspections will give the green light to employers to cut corners and cause more workplace deaths and injuries…When ConDem ministers talk about easing regulation what they mean is removing it, and when it comes to health and safety that is a charter for death and injury.”

The nonsensical hyperbole peaks with:

“The message that the government is sending with these cuts is that nothing, even the lives and health of working people, should stand in the way of profit, and these plans are part of the government’s general attack on working people.”

Everyone got the memo? The ConDems are killers.

It all becomes clear. We’ve all been so blind, but now finally someone has joined up the dots and shown us the truth. Labour front bencher Karen Buck has solved the mystery of why the government are cutting Housing Benefit. It is to force “black women, ethnic minority women and Muslim women” out of London obviously. Silence from Ed…