Ken Clarke faced a second weekend being briefed against in the Sundays. Guido can only presume the talk of reshuffle and booting Ken out is coming from an increasingly infuriated Coulson who doesn’t like to see Ministers being hounded by The Sun for being soft on crime. Very new politics.

Philip Hammond isn’t having a good time either. While admittedly snow is out of his control, after all the fuss the Tories made in opposition when divine intervention ruined a government media grid, you would have at thought at least some sort of contingency plan would have been thought up. The betting markets moved when the PMOS had to defend him this morning.

While it would be very hard for Dave to fire Ken Clarke, there’s bound to be a shot across his bow. Rumour is that his junior ministers, Crispin Blunt and Jonathan Djanogly and Lord McNally face the chop, with David Laws being lined up to come and shake up the department. A hang ’em and flog ’em Tory backbencher is also expected to be deployed to dilute “soft” Ken. Still no word on when Laws will receive his expected slap on the wrist from the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, but bad news for those who put their money on a return before Christmas…

Union boss Len McLusky says…

“The magnificent students’ movement urgently needs to find a wider echo if the government is to be stopped. We must not let the law paralyse us.”

The new boss of Unite, Len McCluskey has put both Dave and Ed in a tricky spot this morning. His Guardian piece is a boorishly militant call to arms, suggesting that the unions need to take a leaf out of the student protesters book and start smashing stuff up. Well he doesn’t quite say that, but phrases like “preparing for battle” “assault” and “developing our resistance” don’t leave much to the imagination.

Obviously this doesn’t bode well for the Prime Minister’s planned frosty beer and sandwiches  with the union bosses today, but the meeting was hardly going to be sweetness and laughter anyway. It’s Miliband that the article really backs into a corner though. Explicitly slamming New Labour for keeping Thatcher’s union controls and hinting that they want him to shift to the left, Ed has been forced to come out this morning against the very people who gave him his job:

“The language and tone of Len McCluskey’s comments are wrong and unhelpful and Ed Miliband will be making that clear when he meets him in the near future.”

So the purse-string holding unions that Ed schmoozed over the summer are teaming up with the extreme left “Coalition of Resistance”. The more centrist Parliamentary Labour Party, which on the whole didn’t vote for Ed, remains unconvinced by his performance thus far, as do big donors. Leaders of the Opposition need friends, not least on their own side.

When the going gets really tough, who exactly is Ed going to turn to for support?

This week saw Iain Dale depart the blogosphere and a lot of talk that Twitter is supplanting blogging. Guido thinks it more accurate to say that twittering complements blogging, though it is fair to say that a lot of casual commentary has migrated to Twitter. There is a lot of life in the blogs yet…

This week the blog had 380,136 page views from 232,412 visits by 80,886 visitors. The top 7 stories last week in order of popularity were:

• Wheels Come Off Protester’s Complaint
• Hancock’s Sex Scandals Coming Out in the Open
• LibDem MP Tells Constituent to “Get a Life”
• Dale Departs the Blogosphere
• How to Get Ahead in the Labour Party
• On WikiLeaks Hacktivism
• Another Godless Christmas Card

You’re either in front of Guido, or you are behind…

Back in those heady days of June as the government were getting their grip on Whitehall, Guido highlighted a strange move in the Downing Street comms department:

“Interesting to note that Mark Flanagan, a Brown-era hire, brought in from the private sector by Stephen Carter, hasn’t been dumped but instead booted upstairs to a “strategic role”…”

Well Mark didn’t last long upstairs. He ended up at Portland PR after it was discovered he had been leaking sensitive information out via email. Funnily enough Mark isn’t returning Guido’s calls.  It isn’t clear why he was allowed the dignity to “resign” instead of being sacked outright…