Another day and more ridiculous lines for government spinners to push:

TOP MESSAGES FOR THE DAY

1.       The South West has provided the perfect start for the Torch
Relay. Hundreds of thousands of people have lined the streets to
welcome the flame, creating remarkable scenes and providing a great
advert for the region, the country and the Games.

2.       The Torch will briefly enter the West Midlands for the first
time today, before arriving in Wales on Friday. Both parts of the UK
are making a huge contribution to the Games, and will add their own
distinctive magic to the Torch Relay.

Pyongyang 2012…

For a couple of years Guido used to report his financial market trading in a box in the blog’s right hand column. It was popular with a few readers, nowadays Guido trades occasionally and just tweets about it. Readers still ask how the market trading is going, the above chart shows how it has been going this year so far, each data point is a closed trade. For the first couple of months Guido was long and wrong on gold, which hurts when you are over-leveraged. Since March Guido has been trying to sell a break in the Euro, as the chart shows it wasn’t really going anywhere until a couple of weeks ago when it dipped below 1.30 to the US dollar before hitting new lows for the year yesterday. Making back all losses for the year and some…

The CityAm Active Trader conference saw 650 traders gathered in the City. Guido spoke to them about the pros and cons of trading on the back of your political analysis. If you are interested in that kind of thing (and why the tooth fairy made 7 year-old Miss Fawkes cry) the speaking notes are here. Just don’t tell Mrs Fawkes…

Painful watching for team Hunt this morning as News Corp lobbyist Fred Michel took a battering from Mr Jay QC at the Leveson Inquiry. He’s coughed that the impression he was given was that Adam Smith was talking on behalf of Hunt and thus feedback was given to News Corp from the Secretary of State, via Hunt’s SpAd’s personal email address.

He also confirmed he was in text contact with Hunt – painful extracts were read out in court and the whole batch are due to be published today. It seems former Hunt SpAd Adam Smith will try to paint Michel as a fantasist, but the paper trail is not looking good…

UPDATE:

Michel to Hunt: "You were great at commons today". Hunt reply: "Merci, large drink tonight" #Leveson—
ian katz (@iankatz1000) May 24, 2012

UPDATE: The texts are here.

“PRIME Minister David Cameron yesterday denied he was too chilled out” wrote Tom Newton Dunn on Monday. It would seem the Sun’s Political Editor is a bit of an expert on chill-axing, at least if his personal portrait is anything to go by:

This one has been doing the rounds this morning… 

UPDATE: Sun sources say it was a wedding present rather than egotistically commissioned.

Carina Trimingham has lost her case against the Mail and Mail on Sunday. A judge has ruled that acccurately describing Huhne’s then mistress as bi-sexual is not a misuse of private information. As you were…

UPDATE: Sky are reporting that Trimingham has to pay a quarter of a million in costs within fourteen days. Ouch…

The Telegraph is reporting this morning that any vote on gay marriage will be a free vote – something Guido told you months ago. Tory Chief Whip Patrick McLoughlin told a meeting in Parliament back in March that the vote would have to be free, and he would know. Owen Paterson’s intervention against the idea seems to have forced Cameron’s hand further and will do the Northern Ireland Secretary’s growing reputation on the right no harm…

Right – that's the last time I'm inviting Jeremy Paxman to lunch. Ungrateful little wretch.—
Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) May 23, 2012

What a remarkable similarity between Bill Swanson’s letter published in the Telegraph on the 16th and Andrew Pierce’s column four days later.

UPDATE: This is not the first time Andrew Pierce has done this.

See also: Andrew Pierce Goes All Hari On Us and An Open Letter to Paul Dacre.

Paxman has twisted the knife on the stand today:

I was really struck by something Piers Morgan said, I was sat between him on my left and editor of Sunday Mirror on my right. Ulrika Jonsson was sat opposite. Morgan said, teasing Ulrika, that he knew what had happened in conversations between her and Sven Goran Eriksson and he went into this mock Swedish accent. Now I don’t know whether he was repeating a conversation that he had heard, or he was imagining this conversation … It was a rather bad parody. I was struck by it because I am wet behind the ears, I didn’t know this sort of thing went on. He turned to me and said have you got a mobile phone I said yes. He said, have you got a security setting on the message bit of it …. I didn’t know what he was talking about. He then explained that the way to get access to people’s messages was to go to the factory default setting and press 0000 and 1234 and if you didn’t put your own code in, his words were, ‘you are a fool’ I don’t know whether he was making this up, making up the conversation, but it was clearly something that he was familiar with and I wasn’t. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that this went on.”

Perhaps Lord Leveson will insist that Morgan actually attends when he is recalled…