Guido understands that tomorrow’s Spectator diary won’t make for comfortable reading for Tom Baldwin. Lord Ashcroft has his claws out:

“Westminster is exhilarated by the appointment of Tom Baldwin, Ed Miliband’s exciting new media adviser. As deputy political editor of the Times, Mr Baldwin wrote some quite spectacular untruths as part of a campaign to discredit me in general and, in particular, to implicate me in a drug-running scandal. This was somewhat ironic, given what he was later witnessed snorting in his paper’s hotel suite at the 2001 Conservative conference. The whole business (including the retraction I received from the paper) is detailed in my 2005 book Dirty Politics Dirty Times. But now that Mr Baldwin is back in the news, perhaps it is time to dust off some of the morsels I didn’t publish at the time. Meanwhile, let us hope for the sake of civilised political discourse that he has found an alternative way to deal with the pressures of his job.

Morsels eh…