You wouldn’t have to be Nostradamus, or even Mystic Meg to predict plausibly that Gordon Brown won’t be running the country next summer, nor Harriet, nor Jacqui, nor Milli, nor any other pretenders. The Murdochs have been reading the polls too, and they don’t think Labour will win the election. Nor do they like to back losers, so they’ve grandly told the world today, through the editorially independent Bore-away SUN that they think Gordon and Labour are a pair of busted flushes.

       Having, with customary irritating hubris, taken responsibility for getting New Labour elected in ’97, the Shag-Rag makes no apologies for having persuaded their readers to vote for a party who they now claim has done bugger all - listing their failures in a garbled, Sun-style, bullet-pointed rant, put out by its new young editor and World Big-Brother expert, Dominic Mohan.

To this was added specific support for David Cameron – not very surprising, given that young Dave’s head spinner (still disgracefully and dangerously in place at Central Office) is Andy Coulson, notorious purveyor of non-truth and serious amnesiac, who was a Screws editor as well as confidant and assistant to the Testarossa, Rebekah (Wade) Brooks, CEO of Murdoch’s British papers.

Even if the ‘readers’ of the daily ShagRag could be bothered to read its puerile piffling editorials, they’re not going to be swayed by anything it has to say. That’s not why they buy the Sun. And Young David should stop letting Andy persuade him otherwise. It’s like trying to bribe the voters with a pair of Page 3 tits, and it demeans a grown-up political party. And PS, Dave…… keeping Andy on the team may just make Rupert feel he’s lot more important than he is.

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Hackwatchers are busy guessing whose bum will replace Rebekah (Wade) Brooks’ in the editor’s chair at Britain’s leading daily Shag-Rag, the Sun when she slithers a few feet further up the greasy pole that is News International.

          Most think deputy Dominic Mohan, but the Murdochs (Rumplechops and Young James) haven’t said. An announcement is due next month when the Testarossa goes upstairs, and there is speculation that Mohan will soon be asked to join his (elder) boss in Miami, to paddle on Palm Beach and be told the great news (as Piers Morgan has said he was).

          Luckily for Mohan – former editor of the paper’s pathetic Bizarre showbiz page – journalistic quality matters very little at the Sun these days, as long as you have a hot line to the inmates of the Big Brother house, which seems so far to have provided Mohan’s journalistic vertex, and a lot of inaccurate and trivial twaddle for which anyone with even a small brain wouldn’t give a poodle’s pillock.  

          He’s hot favourite according to Paddy Power, who offer him at odds on 4/11.

Fifth in the betting, below Victoria Newton (Head of Features),  Chris Pharo (Head of News) and Richard Wallace (Editor of the Daily Mirror), is my favourite, ex-Screws editor, Andy Coulson. After his laughably unconvincing display of innocence in front of the Culture Media Sport select committee last month, in the wake of further revelations about the Screws’ phone-hacking, it’s unlikely that even the loyal David Cameron will feel it necessary to retain his services. Now that he’s been seen by millions on  TV, dissembling so vigorously and obviously, his credibility is surely too tainted for a serious contender for government to keep him on.

          So, Andy will need a job; Rupert likes him – he took the rap by resigning for something about which he says he knew nothing (bit odd?) – and, as his performance in front of the committee showed, he’s quick on his feet and Teflon coated (so far). And he’s always got on well with the Titian Tigress, who would become his immediate boss.

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It is a little shocking that a seasoned news consumer such as myself can read a broadsheet headline: “Jordan fears consequences of Israeli Wall”, and react to it by spluttering between clenched teeth, ‘Who gives a monkey’s what she thinks!’ before realising that they’re talking about the Hashemite Kingdom, not the witless, talentless, faux-poitrined ‘former glamour model’.

Because it is part of my function to peruse the front pages of the Red-Tops and Shag-Rags, it is with growing disgust that I have seen these papers leading every day for the last fortnight with the holiday antics of this sad, ridiculous person. I don’t (though I would like to) know if the editors or the punters are driving this incomprehensible obsession. Possibly, by some bizarre twist in the taste of the public who choose to buy these papers, the former glamour model has taken the place of the late Princess Diana, and is required to be on the front page, because if she isn’t, a red-top will lose out to its rivals in the way editors claimed they did in the heady days of Diana’s roller-coaster sex-life.  Much as I deplored the gross coverage given to the late Princess, for her privacy as well as my own boredom with her activities, at least there was some justification in that she was the mother of the future king.

But that Jordan, vapid nonentity, should justify any space at all could make you think either that the shag-rag editors or their punters are in the last throes of death by trivia. But this is the insidious nature of persistent coverage that seeps by osmosis from the tabloids e’en unto the Journaux serieux. I don’t know what excuses can be made for papers like the Guardian writing about her and her pointless husband. Of course, any reports (like the most recent, under the banner of television review) in that paper are loaded with appropriate irony. But that’s not enough and still produces more column inches. And was it irony that prompted them to give 2/3 of page to the obituary of the late St Jade Goody – if you can remember who she was?

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In what looks like a pretty odd pairing, old-Etonian, ex-racehorse trainer, lothario and aspiring scribbler Charlie Brooks has stepped into the shoes of alleged tough-guy actor Ross Kemp to become the second Mr Rebekah Wade. I hope for his sake he’s got himself a head protector; Ms Wade once laid into Kemp so vigorously that he had to call the police, who came and took her away and banged her up for the rest of the morning, while she missed a meeting with her boss, Rumple-Chops Murdoch.

The old boy forgave her though, and she is strongly tipped to move up to the top shelf at News International UK, although she has promised him she will stay on as editor of leading Shag-Rag, the Sun until after the general election. Maybe, if the Boy Dave gets in, he will, as I have previously predicted, feel he must ditch his tainted chief spinner, Andy Coulson, who will then be free to come back to Wapping and take over Rebekah’s chair. But will he be able to give up some of the nasty habits he learned from Stuart Kuttner while editing the News of the Screws?

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Even the Guardian gave Jade Goody a front page splash today: At peace – and finally out of the limelight they said. They gave her a full page obit, too. This is surprising, but doesn’t compete with the Sun’s 9 pages of coverage or the Daily Mirror’s absurdly sanctimonious front page:

“MUMMY’S IN HEAVEN NOW.”

What do they mean?

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