Things must be bad for the increasingly troubled Department for Culture Media and Sport when a loathed Chairman of the BBC has to ride to your defence. Chris Patten told a Press Gallery lunch that the department must not be scrapped, despite the Olympics being over. Since then Maria Miller has driven press regulation into a brick wall and their only other significant project – broadband – is being rolled out at dial-up speed. Patten’s hand wringing will do little to convince Tories that scrapping the department is a bad idea.

In his continued quest to be all things to all people, the Mayor has come out the side of the crooked in the Standard:

“What I feel … this is going to get me into trouble, but I do feel a certain amount of sympathy with all these poor MPs who end up thinking they are having some jovial lunch in which they are hysterically exaggerating their ability to do things. As if an MP would tell you whether he is actually any use or knows anyone or if there is any point in his existence, honestly.”

Hmmm…

He also dealt with a little person-al matter at his 2020 Vision launch earlier. In his own special way. Discussing the fact that London’s population has risen by at least 380,000 since he took over, the Mayor added “no thanks to me”.

He also quipped that he would not be the one to cut the ribbon on Crossrail 2 as Mayor,  “or anything else”.

Cue hilarity in the room…

Quotes via Pippa Crearer

With the mini-reshuffle on the cards for early next month keeping everyone well behaved, the joke doing the rounds of Tory MPs is that Claire Perry “is so far up the PM’s a**e she can almost see Matt Hancock’s shoes.” Play nice, kids…

It’s not just ministerial movements in the offing. As Guido revealed in yesterday’s Sun column, the PM’s press secretary Susie Squire is weighing up leaving Downing Street even if Gabby Bertin, for whom she is covering, does not return from maternity leave. It would be the perfect opportunity to bring in someone with some print experience who can command some respect amongst hacks, leaving Craig Oliver to do what he likes doing – dealing with the TV news. They couldn’t afford Guido, obviously…

Back in January Ed Miliband called government benefit cuts “punitive” and “unfair”, he said they “must not happen”. The month before he told the the Mirror that benefit cuts “showed they are not fit to govern because they played political games with people’s livelihoods”. He told the FT “I don’t want to be cutting benefits”. The polls showed he was on the wrong side of public opinion. Tomorrow he will endorse some sort of benefits cap and admit that Labour will not reverse  £2.3 billion in child benefit cuts. In 2010, the new Labour leader told the BBC:

Reverse ferret!

Poor little Chris Leslie. He’s getting all the tough gigs for Labour’s Shadow Treasury team this week. Yesterday he was forced onto the airwaves to not answer on whether Labour would cut departmental budgets and today he has the pleasure of trying to respond to OECD’s spring report. Why would Balls want to avoid this?

Leslie, forced to play Ed Balls’ Chloe Smith, says:

“The OECD has once again cut its growth forecasts for the UK economy, warning that youth unemployment is too high and that weak growth means wages are not keeping up with price rises. And the OECD is just the latest organisation to say that the Government needs to increase the number of homes being built and that investing in infrastructure now will improve our economy for the future.”

Sure. But are you not forgetting something Chris? Turn to page 95 of the report. Leaving aside the bit where the independent experts say “employment performance has been good”, what do you say to their call for further fiscal consolidation?

Are you just going to ignore that? Is that really the plan? They are saying further cuts are needed to sustain our economy. You’re arguing for fewer cuts, but how’s that going to work? And no, taxing bankers bonuses is not the answer this time.

Dave has finally surfaced after hiding under the radar for this week’s homnishambles. Popping up on the Today programme, he claimed he “did not accept” that large parts of the Tory party do not feel he “represents them”, snappily telling the presenters that he would know as he “spends more time with the voluntary Conservative Party than anyone in this room”. Who are far too often “yes men”.

He’s starting to look a little delusional given the number of Tory activists defecting to UKIP; the swathes of grassroots hitting the airwaves to complain about him; as well the disquiet of many of his own backbenchers. It’s hard to believe the Prime Minister “does not accept” many in his party really despise him. Whether he cares or not is a different matter.

One life long Tory described the PM to Guido just yesterday as “worse than that traitor Heath”. Guido was told recently that the PM’s mail was being screened so he was not seeing the huge amounts of correspondence coming in from his own constituents on the gay marriage issue. We all know what happens to PMs that go into a bunker mentality…

The Indy were rather chuffed with their “some of Britain’s most successful and eminent business leaders” having a go at Eurosceptics in their paper this morning. A little dig into who these signatories are should wipe the smile off their faces:

• Roland Rudd – corporate lobbyist for multinational firms and campaigner for Britain’s membership of the single currency which he still believes in.
• Richard Branson – non domciled, campaigned for Britain to join the Euro and wants a single European army.
• Martin Sorrell – Chief executive of advertising agency WPP – Roland Rudd’s boss who owns Rudd’s Finsbury PR.
• Dame Helen Alexander – former chief executive of the Economist.
• Lord Kerr – Foreign Office and UKREP career as a diplomat who helped draft the EU constitution.
• Sir Andrew Cahn – career civil servant and worked for Lord Kinnock at the EU Commission, who infamously with his wife Glenys received more than £10 million in pay, allowances and pension entitlements during their time working at the European Union in Brussels.
• Sir Nigel Sheinwald – non exec director of Shell, who brokered the ‘deal in the desert’ between Tony Blair and former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
• Sir Roger Carr – Chairman of Centrica who criticises business for their “greed” while hiking energy costs. Outgoing President of the Euro-loving CBI.

The usual suspects and men of dubious judgement. They might as well have got Huhne to sign it…

See also: Some More “Guilty Men”

Star guest at this morning’s 10:00 meeting for Tory special advisers at CCHQ was Lynton Crosby. It opened with a warning from party chairman Grant Shapps that they would be “fired by the Prime Minister” if any SpAd was caught leaking the details of the meeting. At which point poor old Craig Oliver – who has been at the sharp end of plenty of leaks and briefings recently – turned around and gave each of them an individual “death stare”. That worked well…

Where there are unemployment figures, there is a chance to spin. Especially for Watson-trained Balls Political Adviser / bruiser Alex Belardinelli. There he was, gleefully tweeting killer stats to talk down today’s unemployment figures:

Apparently we should "celebrate" the fact that unemployment is higher today than when this government came to office—
Alex Belardinelli (@abelardinelli) May 15, 2013

You wouldn’t realise from that tweet that the unemployment rate is actually 0.2% lower: falling from 8% when Gordon left to 7.8% today. The total number of people in employment has risen 880,000 from May 2010. The total number of unemployed has risen by 100,000 from May 2010. With a growing population, Belardinelli knows exactly what he is doing. In reality the facts point to better employment figures today then three years ago, albeit hardly by much more than flatlining. There is spinning and then there is misinformation… 

The line Labour types will be pushing today, the January to March figures compared with the previous three months:

Unemployment was 2.52m in Jan-Mar, up 15k on Oct-Dec. Employment was 29.71m, down 43k—
Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) May 15, 2013

And the saving grace for Osborne, this month compared to last:

Unemployment rate falls from 7.9% last month to 7.8%.—
Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) May 15, 2013

Select as per partisan preference. Those figures in full here. Essentially little has changed…