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Treasury attack dog Liam Byrne just said that Tory plans to crowd source analysis of the budget small print shows Tories “need help”. Self evidently they do. The clue was when Eric Pickles emailed thousands of people saying “we need your help”.

Meanwhile Ed Miliband says he wants to crowd source Labour Party manifesto ideas…

Patricia Hewitt is speaking at the International Corporate Governance Network tomorrow morning.  According to the programme notes she will try to answer questions like “Who holds the moral compass determining the balance between just deserts and too much?”  Wonder if she is charging them £3,000?

Dizzy suggested two weeks ago that the Tories should harness the distributed brain power of the web and crowd source their response to the budget. Yesterday Eric Pickles announced that is exactly what they are going to do today:

Wading through all this small print ourselves is a huge job. This year we’ve decided to do something a bit different – we’re going to crowdsource our response to the Budget. Once the Budget’s out, we’ll publish it in a simple format as soon as possible so you can have a good dig into it. The Treasury has hundreds of civil servants working on all this and there’s no way we can match their resources – so it’s important for as many of you as possible to lend a hand in analysing the detail.

CCHQ clearly follow blogs closely. The see-through government idea – publishing the details of all government contracts – was another idea first promoted by a blogger and taken up as Conservative policy.  Unfortunately it seems Tory taxation policy is controlled by this blogger instead of these ones…

Michael Foot, who recently died and is soon to be deified (though not as a result of one of Gordon’s recycled speeches), was a bit of a dark horse with the ladies.  According to his biographer the old firebrand admitted he had three affairs: with two of his secretaries and an Indian journalist at Tribune. ‘We had quite a close association at Tribune. We sometimes stayed after everybody else had gone and I sat on his knee. You can imagine sometimes things happened.’ recalls one aide.  Sounds almost as much fun as the Speccie under Boris…

Strangely one mistress when asked if she found him attractive replied ‘Not particularly, no. He wasn’t really.’

A Blairite source tells Guido that Ed Balls is already telling Labour colleagues that the blame for a potential Labour defeat lies with the Blairites for (a) rocking the boat with repeated attempted coups (b) getting caught money grubbing. Coincidentally he is expected to be Charlie Whelan’s chosen candidate against Blair’s protege Miliband. Nothing like getting your attack in first…