Happy St David’s Day to you all, and to Steve Morgan happy birthday and happy wedding anniversary. Morgan is unfortunately reeling from the recession and reaping the consequences of his sleazy spin antics being widely exposed. Morgan has reputedly been a very angry man since all his ambitions started collapsing, for the maestro behind Hain’s disastrous deputy leadership bid, life this last year has been challenging politically, professionally and personally.

His firm, Morgan Allan Moore, is in ruins with offices closed and clients drifting away. Not surprising really after the firm became the first to be booted out of the lobbyist’s club the APPC, for breaching the rules on client disclosure. The firm was even singled out for criticism by the Public Administration Select Committee in their report on the lobbying industry. A highly risky High Court libel case against a former employee turned whistle blower was dropped when evidence emerged to back up the whistle blower’s claims. Rumour has it that a director’s living room now doubles as the English “office”. On the political front Steve Morgan can’t even count on old mates now once loyal Peter Hain has publicly gone on the record to blame Morgan’s incompetence for his own downfall.

Quite cunning of Morgan to have his wedding (and birthday) on St David’s Day, avoids any danger of him forgetting flowers (presumably daffodils) for the wife, which must be a danger when you are on your fifth marriage. At least his marriage to Deborah (half his age) isn’t falling apart. Is it?

James Bethell, the former Portland PR spinner, left Policy Exchange after less than three months, flouncing out after failing to get the top job when Neil O’Brien became the think-tank’s director.

Former Google PR Amy Fisher replaced Bethell in December as Policy Exchange’s director of communications. Previous to Google she was a CCHQ press officer.

He has now joined PoliticsHome as director. The site has become a useful utility for a lot of people in politics and the media. Bethell is going to try and commercialise the loss-making site, a tough task at a time when rival ePolitix.com is cutting back.

Financial Dynamics is letting go of a dozen spinmeisters – mainly on the public affairs side. FD paid £4 million for dodgy close-to-New-Labour spin operation LLM only last year, just as the usefulness of New Labour contacts became questionable.

As yet unconfirmed rumours going around that the ailing Dods-owned website ePolitix.com is to close with two thirds of Dods reporting staff being made redundant next week. An insider told Guido that they were not “immune” from the downturn.

Morgan Allen Moore MAM, the lobbying firm which managed Peter Hain’s leadership campaign, has been suspended from the Association of Professional Political Consultants (APPC) for “non-compliance” for inter alia non-payment of fees and failure to register clients.Steve Morgan has not had a good year – already under investigation by the police for funding irregularities concerning the Hain for Labour campaign, MAM sued a former employee for libel because James Davenport alleged that MAM had, in breach of the APPC rules, provided campaign services to Peter Hain. The Mail on Sunday alleged that Peter Hain had endorsed MAM clients in what looked like a return of favours.

The MAM case against Davenport collapsed when evidence presented to the Court revealed that cheques were solicited to be sent to MAM’s offices in Cardiff and that MAM employees were dealing with the Hain4Labour campaign finances.

MAM is now reduced to running skeleton staff, with clients shying away and politicians refusing to talk to them, and their influence inevitably waning. Phil Woolas was said to be livid when he discovered that Deborah Morgan (Steve’s wife), for whom his office had arranged a Commons pass, was boasting on her lobby firm’s website that SD Environmental Solutions could influence decisions and had access at ministerial level. Woolas was at the time the Environment Minister.

Steve Morgan claimed to a credulous local paper that he was the “international spokesman” for the Obama campaign. Where was Obama’s international spokesman on the night of Obama’s victory? He was in a Yates’ wine bar in London watching it on TV. Tragic.

Over at the New Statesman Martin Bright lists three foreign donors who routed £50,000 each via British companies to the Tories. The Daily Mail has hit on Robin Saunders, the foxy City financier, paying for a table at a Tory fundraiser with a personal cheque for £6,600, which the Tories returned (because she is an American) and she replaced it with a company cheque. Compare the total of £156,600 given by four foreign donors via British companies to the Tories with the £4,125,000 given by Lakshmi Mittal, an Indian national, to Labour.

Mittal even managed to get Blair to do PR for his company as part of the deal…

Labour’s attack is being marshalled by a re-invigorated spin and smear operation and nobody should under-estimate the powers of the returning Dark Lord. The Tories now have a real fight on their hands, the playing fields of Eton and St Paul’s clearly have not equipped them to deal with Mandelson. This is going to be a long dirty fight.

The House of Lords Communications Committee had the head of the civil service Gus O’Donnell in for a hearing yesterday (video). One of the reasons the chief mandarin gave for the doubling in “communications staff” over the last decade was that there were mounting demands on government communication officers to deal with the increase in political blogs and the growing number of journalists.

“Be very careful what these numbers mean. [There are] 3,000 journalists in the BBC alone – that’s just one institution,” said O’Donnell, “You could easily turn the statistics round and ask ‘why has it gone up so little’.” Well he could ask that, but taxpayers would ask the opposite.

Guido has in four years only twice been contacted by a government spin merchant unprompted.

Nick Clegg is recounting to acolytes that back in 2004/5 when he was still an MEP he had dinner with Mandelson in Brussels. Over the courses Mandy spent most of the evening being vitriolic about Brown.

No doubt this will be attributed to LibDem propaganda and dirty tricks. Everyone else is clearly lying except Mandy…

David Yelland was a vice-chairman at Weber Shandwick, where Mandelson protege Colin Byrne is CEO. Interesting to put a former Sun editor up against Andy Coulson, ex-editor of the News of the Screws…

UPDATE : No confirmation of this yet. Have not seen a retraction either.

UPDATE II 17.20 : Yelland is at Brunswick (former home of Stephen Carter).

UPDATE III : Friend of Yelland tells Guido – “Nah, embarrassingly for Adam, all bollocks. He was in yesterday telling them to calm down about The Sun showing support for Cam.”

Caroline Flint on Newsnight last night was hilarious – “Kirsty, Kirsty, Kirsty” she kept forlornly shouting on the two-way to studio.

In all fairness she has the worst job in government right now – Housing Minister. It can’t have helped that some moronic briefing to the Sun has brought a stagnant property market to a complete halt – why exchange now when if you wait until September you can save thousands in stamp duty? Which genius clumsily leaked the plan scheduled for September?

Damian McBride has the hotline to the George Pascoe-Watson…

UPDATE : Guido’s Crackberry wielding co-conspirator emails again to say Ivan Lewis and his companion spent much of the journey slagging of Alistair Darling as useless, his Today outing this morning was particularly ridiculed.

UPDATE II 6 Aug : Looks like the Mirror didn’t use their “Tory vermin” quote.