Steerpike

The Labour party recently reached a stage where the only person in the entire country not giving Ed Miliband advice about how to lead was Ed Miliband himself. That has died down now, especially after another crowd-pleasing conference speech. But this evening Tessa Jowell offered a little bit more in the way of help. She told a fringe after her leader's speech that the party's job was now to take today's policy announcements to the country, saying: 'I think Ed should just go on travelling around the country, exposing himself to many people.' Crikey! But didn't the leader vow to keep his kit firmly on if he became Prime Minister (' if I become Prime Minister I won’t take my shirt off in public, I mean it is just not necessary is it?')?

As Mr Steerpike reported last week, the Archbishop of Canterbury has been seeking an apostle to spread the good news to the media. Today it has been announced that Alisa Anderson, the Queen’s press secretary, will join the staff at Lambeth Palace. As Royal watchers will know, Anderson was last seen pinning the announcement of the birth of Prince George of Cambridge to the golden easel outside Buckingham Palace. There’ll be no such glamour at Lambeth.

Lord Ashcroft’s Lunch Offensive continues, mercilessly. When he’s not entertaining Tom Watson and other animals, the former Tory donor can be spotted plotting with naughtier Cabinet ministers and loose-lipped journalists. Today’s luncheon companions would have had the PM choking into his packed lunch at the Tory away day: his lordship was clocked wooing Hugh Grant in Gran Paradiso, in Victoria. Grant was accompanied by Dr Evan Harris, with whom he fronts the anti-media lobbying group Hacked Off. As it happens, Lord Ashcroft has had more than a few run-ins with the press over the years, most notably with the Times. He recorded the details of that spat in his punchy tome Dirty Politics, Dirty Times. The billionaire denies that he has funded Hacked Off.

Nick Clegg always rails against the same old politics, identikit politicians and the like. So how will he cope now that tech whizzes have worked out how to print their own politician? This 3D model of the Deputy Prime Minister took seven and a half hours of printing on the Microsoft stand at the Liberal Democrat conference.

More adventures in television from new Newsnight boss Ian Katz. Fresh from his truthful-if-embarrassing slating of Labour’s Rachel Reeves, I hear that Katz has upset another Labour big-wig, Alistair Darling. Apparently, Katz wants to shoot a Scottish referendum debate on a real bridge (presumably the 130-metre Union Bridge in Berwick) between Scotland and England. After the debate, he proposed that members of the audience would ‘vote with their feet’ by walking to either end of the bridge. Darling, who is leading the pro-Union campaign, was not sold on the idea of unionists walking to the English side of river to show their support. PS: Another BBC source says that Katz 'wanted to set-dress it like Checkpoint Charlie!

Toby Young has rattled some Labour cages by publicly mooting a bid for the Tory nomination for Hammersmith. ‘Z List Toryboy celebrity Toby Young wants to be an MP’ spins a Labour adviser Imran Ahmed. Then came the hammer blow: ‘Think he's gotten House of Commons mixed up with Big Brother house.’ Oh, that one will hurt. Should have saved it for the leaflets! So who is Ahmed? Well he last hit the headlines after he was accused of ghost-writing tweets for his old boss Andy Slaughter - the Labour MP for Hammersmith. Could he be speaking with Slaughter’s voice again?