From my Notebook column in today’s FT:

Shaun Woodward: Our new secret formula is a great success. The public love it.

Gordon Brown: Higher spending and investment until the end of time.

Ed Balls: Unlike the Tories’ 10 per cent spending cuts.

Alistair Darling: Aren’t they Labour cuts?

Gordon Brown: Not since our rebranding exercise. Now it is the Conservatives who will wrest vital funding from the hands of policemen and lollipop ladies.

Alistair Darling: Surely if we win the general election this will come back to haunt us?

Cabinet ( together ): We won’t.

Shaun Woodward: I still think we need something stronger.

Peter Hain: The Tories will institute compulsory Morris dancing?

Andy Burnham: They will murder the first-born of every household?

Peter Hain: They’ll ban Britain’s got Talent .

Gordon Brown: That’s more like it.

One of the riddles of Gordon Brown’s regime is the exact role played by Shaun Woodward, Northern Ireland secretary. Some sense Woodward’s hand in the crude claim that Labour will increase investment while the Tories will cut spending. After all, he was John Major’s head of press during the - successful - “Labour Tax Bombshell” campaign in 1992.

Is Woodward now a crucial adviser to Brown? Lord Mandelson waspishly told the FT on Monday: “I don’t know. What is the advice being dispensed by Mr Woodward?” The former Tory MP has been regularly tipped in the media for promotion to higher office - wrongly.

Yet Woodward is not short of ambition. Alastair Campbell wrote in his diaries of Woodward’s defection in 1999: “He made clear again, less subtly than before, that he felt he was seen by some in the Tory party as a possible future leader.”

Incidentally, Woodward used to work on That’s Life with Esther Rantzen, who sang a song at his stag party, having gate-crashed it. “Do not in any circumstances ask what I was wearing,” she says. “Although a close friend was a gorilla.”

I ask Rantzen if her old friend was annoyed with her proposal to stand in Labour-held Luton. “It’s really unfortunate because the sleaze is evenly distributed,” she admits.

July 2, 2009 4:22pm in Banks, Whitehall | Comment