A senior Tory tells me, over a cup of Earl Grey, that 30 Labour/Lib Dem councillors have defected to the Conservatives in the last 12 months.

Only one Tory councillor has quit the party during the same period.

Boris Johnson told the Sun’s website today that he would like an online referendum in London about giving boroughs the power to bring back smoking in pubs and clubs.

It’s a curious idea. Not least because most of us - even some smokers - have got used to being able to breathe fresh air during a night out.  

It’s the second clear policy idea which seems to diverge from Conservative central office. The other was Boris backing an amnesty for illegal immigrants in the UK capital.

Not that Ken Livingstone ever suffered from distancing himself from some Labour policies in the past. 

 (Boris: “What is the point of having local democracy if we don’t leave decisions like this to a local level? If I had my way, we would have an online referendum in London about whether to give boroughs back the power to give discretion over smoking to pubs and clubs.”)

Update: Boris believes his quotes have been misinterpreted. Not sure I believe him for one.

All three parties are playing down their prospects at the May 1 local elections. Even the Tories, who seem most likely to come out with more council seats.

But Labour and the Conservatives are both claiming to be fielding more candidates - according to press releases that came out this afternoon.

Eh?

The difference, apparently, is that Labour is counting England and Wales and the Tories - bizarrely - are ignoring the Welsh.  

Lots of follow-up in the other papers today after the FT’s story on Thursday about the House of Lords being replaced by a “senate” with half the number of occupants. Here is the background article.

Not sure about the idea of “senators”, which is either very old-fashioned (think ancient Rome) or a bit futuristic (think Star Wars, below).

The transfer from the current system to the new one will be intensely complicated.

One of the big unresolved issues  is what to do with the 26 bishops. They sit in the Lords because the Church is/was a major landowner in the UK rather than because of their spiritual influence over Parliament.

But to remove them all would provoke accusations from some quarters - not necessarily from the bishops themselves - that some kind of “disestablishment” is taking place.

Cutting their numbers to a small rump is the current plan. Even that would spark further questions though, such as: why is only the Church of England represented in cosmopolitan UK?

I suspect this one won’t go away for a while.

Nice bit of point-scoring at PMQ’s when David Cameron revealed the favourite book of David Muir, new Number 10 strategist, is: “The Unstoppable Power Of Leaderless Organisations”.

The full name of the book appears to be

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations (Hardcover)  

By the sound of it, the book’s lessons seem hard to reconcile with Gordon Brown’s “Stalinist” tendencies to control everything himself.

Here is the review by Amazon.co.uk.

“His work provides an understanding of the amazing force that links some of today’s most successful companies. If you cut off a spider’s leg, it’s crippled; if you cut off it’s head, it dies. But if you cut off a starfish’s leg it grows a new one, and the old leg can grow into an entirely new starfish.

“Some organisations are just as decentralised as starfish, with no control centre or grand strategy. Think of craigslist and the original Napster, run totally by their own customers. Or Alcoholics Anonymous, which has thrived for decades as a loose network of small groups. Or even al Qaeda, which is so hard to destroy because its cells function independently.

“The Starfish and the Spider”, based on groundbreaking research into decentralised organisations, proves that this type of leadership is primed to change the world. Major companies like eBay, IBM, Sun, and GE are starting to decentralise, with great results. Decentralisation isn’t easy for people who are used to the classic chain of commence organisation. But as readers will learn through this book’s fascinating stories - ranging from the music business to geopolitics - it can be a very dangerous trend to ignore.

Jimmy Cayne, the cigar-chomping, bridge & golf loving boss of Bear Sterns, had a pay packet of $34m last year.

The US bank, which was worth $140bn last summer, has just been bought by JP Morgan for $236m in a desperate rescue mission.

British MPs are getting a lot of stick right now for their remuneration. By my rough calculation you could employ 300 of them for the price of one Mr Cayne (pictured below).

That isn’t going to avert the mother of all rows, however, when MPs’ pay comes to a head in July.

We revealed in Saturday’s paper that members may be asked to vote on a 50 per cent pay rise which would take their salaries to £94,000 in return for foresaking their expenses.

In case you missed the story, here it is.

Political gamblers appear to be unimpressed with Gordon Brown. They believe the likelihood of the prime minister winning the most seats at the next election has never been lower — in spite of improved Labour polls, a makeover at Downing Street, a budget and an apparent conversion to Blairite reform.

Take a look at this graph showing the odds on Labour winning the most seats at the next general election. The data is from Betfair, the online betting exchange (think of a stock market rather than a bookie offering odds), covering a period of about three years in a market worth about £600,000.

Here is a quick run through of the Labour peaks and troughs since 2005. After the 2005 election victory, the betting market settled on there being a 65 per cent chance they would win the most seats at the next election.

This fell to under 40 per cent at the height of Tony Blair’s unpopularity.

Labour’s prospects steadily improved after he announced he would leave in a year, rising to 60 per cent as Mr Brown became prime minister. His honeymoon and the snap-election speculation pushed his chances of winning the most seats to a remarkable 75 per cent.

This plummeted back towards 40 per cent after the non-election, the data loss and the donations scandal.

What is interesting is that this has stayed about the same since the end of last year. The great relaunch has apparently had no effect on the opinions of those gambling on his prospects.

So what are the punters telling us?

First, that Mr Brown is caught in a rut. He has more chance of beating David Cameron than Tony Blair at his most unpopular. But not much more.

Second, that the Tories have hit a ceiling (see the graph on the left showing the Tory chances of winning the most seats). There is about a 55 per cent chance that the Tories will win the most seats. But they had a better chance of beating Tony Blair.

In sum, we have hit a political impasse. Very little seems to move the odds. Tracking how punters are wagering their money is a good alternative to watching political polls, as it offers a longer term perspective, rather than a snapshot of opinion.

The lesson is that while the polls are moving towards Labour, the betting man still thinks the Tories will prevail.

Of all the people to fall foul of, Tory MP Bob Spink ended up with Bill Sharp, who is 6ft 5in and weighs 18 stone. Sharp is deputy chairman of Spink’s local Tory association at Castle Point, Essex.

It is the personal enmity between these two men which lies behind the departure of Spink from the Tory party today.

Patrick McLoughlin, chief whip, implies that he withdrew the whip from Spink. The MP says this is “brass-necked dishonesty” and “low-political deceit” and that he resigned.

Frankly, who cares whose idea it was for the former management consultant to quit the Tories?

Much more interesting is the bad blood behind the row.

Sharp was an ally of Spink and helped him win his seat at the last election. But the Mail on Sunday claimed three years ago that Mr Spink had a relationship with Gail Boland, former partner of Mr Sharp.

Relations between the two men went from bad to worse and at one point the pair ended up in a court battle.

Mr Sharp was not answering his phone this evening.  Spink told the FT today that his relationship with Ms Boland had nothing to do with the row.

In 2005 he issued a statement saying: “I categorically deny having any sexual relationship with Gail Boland prior to the end of either my marriage or her relationship with Bill Sharp.”

The 59-year old was first elected in 1992, lost his seat in 1997 and returned in 2001. He quit the party ahead of an attempt by his association - not for the first time - to deselect him.

Spink had urged the Conservative party to investigate the management of the association but the party’s year-long inquiry was inconclusive. Today he said he was angry not to have had enough support from Tory central office.

Spink’s last appearance in the news was when it emerged that he had been paying not only his ex-wife but also Ashleigh Sharp - the teenage daughter of Gail Boland and Bill Sharp - to work as his researcher. There was no suggestion of any wrongdoing.

The word from Tory HQ last night, incidentally, was that few tears were being shed for the departure of Spink, whose interests include pottery and marathon running.

This blog suggested last Friday that Labour was increasingly worried about Boris Johnson’s campaign to be mayor of London.

And now the blonde motormouth is ahead: at least, according to the betting odds.

When I spoke to William Hill last night, Boris and Ken Livingstone were both at 5/6.

This morning that had shifted. Boris is now 8/11 and Ken is evens.

My colleague Alex Barker, an amateur bookie, found this chart (above) on Betfair, showing Boris’s odds shortening. 

The latest shift in his favour could have something to do with the Evening Standard’s revelations last night about emails between Lee Jasper, Ken’s race advisor, and the female head of an organisation which received funding from the GLA.

Some of the best lines from the emails were cut out of the FT’s piece this morning, probably for reasons of space. This is my favourite: “I want to wisk (sic) you away to a deserted island beach, honey glase (sic) you, let you cook slowly before a torrid and passionate embrace.”

The recipient of the emails denies any impropriety. 

Why is David Cameron so keen to associate himself with a Jamaican ganster flick? As the Mail points out (scroll to the bottom of the piece), the “reggae anthem” chosen for his conference speech and the new Tory ad campaign has bloody and murderous associations. The tune — “You Can Get it if You Really Want” — is a Jimmy Cliff classic that plays at the beginning and the end of his shoot ‘em-up “The Harder they Come”.

The film’s tagline summarises the plot quite well: “dem a loot, dem a shoot, dem a wail in shanty town”. I seem to remember that Jimmy Cliff — who plays Ivanhoe Martin, a wannabe singer who turns to drug-dealing and mass-murder — goes on a cop-killing rampage to the sound of “”You Can Get it if You Really Want” near the end of the movie. David Cameron may have even watched it as a student while eating jerk-chicken from his favourite Jamaican food-joint in Oxford.

Anyway, if you’re intrigued, this video includes lots of shots from the film. You wonder whether this is the latest twist to the hug-a-hoodie theme. Does Dave want to hug-a-rudie?