Greg Narrowly Avoids a Boris Johnson Moment

Greg spends the day holding forth about how badly we are paid. (Some of us more than others, actually.) He has a theory that every pound he pays in taxes goes direct to Liverpool to be spent on shell-suits, but when I suggest he tests this on George Osborne at the Treasury, he doesn't seem to want to take it that far. Maybe he does retain at least a vestige of political-correctness, unless he's just worried about creating a Boris-type storm by insulting the Scousers in writing.

Honestly, if all Labour MPs' staffers are becoming reactionaries like Greg and I, what on earth are the Tory ones like? Are they even worse than us, spending their days wishing they could hang or flog everyone who makes contact with them? Or maybe they're our mirror-images, and nurture secret fantasies of becoming social workers while wearing cardigans knitted from lentils.

It'd be funny if all Tory staff were secret socialists and all New Labour's were covert Tories - although I guess the latter wouldn't really be that surprising post-Blair. Maybe I should work for a Conservative MP, but that would mean that my decades of Labour Party membership would have been wasted. Oh, but I forgot - I'm not a member any more. The world's my lobster.

Sometimes the knowledge that you have other options is very comforting, especially when you have to deal with someone like Mr Beales. He phones just before the office closes for the day, to ask whether The Boss has written his reference for the court yet.

"What reference?" I ask.

I wish I hadn't. It turns out that The Boss has agreed to write to the judge, confirming Mr Beales' excellence as a photographer. Andrew knows even less than Mr Beales about photography - but then lack of knowledge on any subject has never prevented him from voicing an opinion on it, preferably as publicly as possible.