Steerpike

Westminster and Fleet Street are all a flutter about An Unexpected MP: Confessions of a Political Gossip, the memoirs of former Tory MP, Jerry Hayes. It’s a fun, naughty read. As a fellow diarist, Mr S particularly enjoyed Hayes’s tales from his days at Punch. Hayes joined the magazine in the late nineties during its revival under the proprietorship of Mohamed Al Fayed and the editorship of James Steen, the man who Piers Morgan once called ‘the world’s most mischievous journalist.’ ‘James had a particularly mischievous side,’ Hayes writes. ‘He was also a fantastic mimic who used to love to wind up the rich and pompous. One of his favourite targets was the Daily Mail's gossip king, Nigel Dempster.

The Budget has, in recent years, been more tears than laughter, more pain than gain. Yet the upturn in Britain’s economic fortunes has put the Chancellor, whose ‘5 and 2’ diet has had a dramatic effect on his waistline, in a buoyant mood. Osborne's wit – famously sharp in private – shone through in public this afternoon. He began slowly, by teasing Ed Balls. He reminded the chamber of Labour’s dire financial record, which elicited his first laugh: 'Or, as the Shadow Chancellor put it: "some mistakes were made".' Boom-tish.

Game over: Eddie Izzard has cursed the union. The comedian who once championed equal clothing rights has waded into the debate over Scottish independence, to the horror of supporters of the union. You might imagine that we unionists would welcome a celebrity endorsement – even from a c-lister like Izzard. But he has a dreadful track record when it comes to these things. He was a devout Europhile who campaigned for us to join the single currency. He supported Gordon Brown and Labour at the last election. He backed Ken Livingstone last time round in London. And who can forget Izzard’s deathless contribution to the Yes2AV campaign?

Owen Jones has denied that Newsnight's appointment of former Labour adviser and TUC official Duncan Weldon as economics correspondent is more evidence of 'left wing bias' at the BBC. On the contrary, Jones says that complaints about Weldon arise from 'myths and deception' and that the 'BBC is stacked full of right wingers'. Now, now, no laughing at the back please – we ought to take the Guardian's star columnist seriously. Jones names 10 people who are connected to the right (some of them very tenuously so): Chris Patten, Nick Robinson, Robbie Gibb, Thea Rogers, Guto Harri, Will Walden, Andrew Neil, Kamal Ahmed, John Humphrys and Craig Oliver.

Jovial Lib Dem Scottish Secretary Alistair Carmichael addressed lobby journalists over lunch today. Speaking from his experience as the party's former chief whip, he managed to praise the discipline of his party in the Coalition. But he also recalled a rather tense episode with Chris Huhne refusing to return to the UK to vote: 'One thing which I was thinking about recently was that Chris Huhne, in the interests of tackling climate change, had managed to be at some big summit in Cancun, so was not available to take part in the division on the day and it was one of the features of Chris's political operation that when the really difficult days would arrive, somehow or other he always seemed to be somewhere else.

Labour says it is tough on welfare policy. And today, the party launched its tough compulsory jobs guarantee funding pledge by looking tough too. Ed Balls, Ed Miliband and Rachel Reeves would have made a stronger Mr Steerpike quail in these hard-hitting outfits.

David Cameron spoke to Barack Obama on the phone last night. That's pretty difficult to imagine, isn't it? A man on the phone. Screw up your eyes and furrow your brow all you like: you'll never quite make that mental leap to imagining what a chap on the phone really does look like. So thank goodness that the Prime Minister is there to help you out. Last night he didn't just tell us that he'd been on the phone, he tweeted out a photo of him on the phone with a Serious Phone Face. Still a bit difficult to imagine, though, isn't it? He should have added an audioboo of him talking in his Special Phone Voice. It's not the first time Cameron has helped us imagine what he looks like on the phone, though.

‘The cyber-nat activity is disgraceful. They will trash anyone who disagrees with them. Their intention is to make people keep their heads down. Salmond could stop it, but he doesn't choose to,’ said Alistair Darling, leader of the Better Together campaign, last month. Supporters of Scottish nationalism have dominated the web for the last five years, slinging abuse and hatred at anyone who dares to speak in favour of the Union. They began in the Scottish newspapers’ online comment sections, honed their craft via email and found full voice with the advent of social media. Twitter is the cesspool of choice for the ‘cyber-nat’ community.