A Labour of love for Tim Bell, favourite of the true blues

Forget the spin. Alastair Campbell will be replaced at Downing Street by David Hill, the bluff, no-nonsense former Labour spin-doctor.

Hill, 55, was sounded out by Tony Blair even before the row with the BBC over the sexed-up dossier. The moustachioed Hill, 55, an Aston Villa supporter who is fond of watching horror movies and going on holidays to Spain, has worked for senior Labour figures since 1973, when he started with Roy Hattersley.

His partner Hilary Coffman also works in the Downing Street press office. One of the last issues to be resolved was whether Hill could return to his public affairs post at Bell Pottinger, where he has worked since the 1997 general election. He can.

Lord Bell and Piers Pottinger, who run Bell Pottinger, will be in a unique position when Hill goes to No 10. Only a few months ago Paul Baverstock, one of their key lieutenants, quit to become head of communications at Conservative Central Office. Elizabeth Buchanan, another Bell Pottinger executive, is on secondment to St James’s Palace. Buchanan advises the Prince of Wales on farming issues.

Bell, a confidant of princes and prime ministers, sealed his reputation in the 1979 general election campaign when he devised with Maurice Saatchi the slogan “Labour isn’t working”, accompanied by a staged dole queue of actors and some Saatchi employees.

Bell was delighted at the prospect of Hill going to No 10. “It goes to show my people are the best,” he said.

TRINNY WOODALL and Susannah Constantine, who revamp the wardrobes of variously shaped subjects on What Not to Wear (BBC Two), have targeted the Countess of Wessex. Woodall told In Style: “I would get her out of middle-aged suits and sensible shoes. Imagine her in a beautiful Alexander McQueen suit.” When she is six months pregnant?

IT MUST be the ultimate marketing plot. For the first time people can buy Holy Water from Lourdes over the internet. “Miraculous Healing. Unique in the World. Holy Water from Lourdes is Drinkable and Good A Unique Opportunity For Christians All Over The World!” Is nothing sacred?

THEY were brawling in the stalls at the 1913 Paris premiere of The Rite of Spring because it was so radical for its time. Ballet historians will record that, when the Kirov revived Stravinsky’s masterpiece in London on Monday night, the Royal Opera House crowd, subjected to extreme provocation, mustered a militant ripple of disgruntled coughs. A dancer’s costume came unbuttoned at the back, the company was forced to restart the climactic second act after a front cloth jammed at head height and, later in the programme, an embarrassed stage hand was clearly glimpsed scuttling out of sight. Closer, then, to the anarchic spirit of the original than anyone had expected. But at least they were not fighting in the stalls.

No invention has attracted quite so much ridicule as Sir Clive Sinclair’s C5 tricycle, described by the AA as a “death trap”. Now the great man is working on a “new product designed at getting people around town”. The words “glutton” and “punishment” spring easily to mind.

PS...

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has blessed and made up with Canon Jeffrey John, whom he compelled to stand down as the next Bishop of Reading. They met for an hour at Lambeth Palace yesterday. To the astonishment of John, the Archbishop knelt down and sought a blessing from the gay cleric, who duly obliged. John would have been happier if he had at least been offered another job by the Archbishop.

Clint Eastwood is to follow Presidents Nixon, Carter and Reagan and Kermit the Frog and will address the Oxford Union in the autumn. Eastwood has asked for no special privileges, unlike Al Gore, mediocre former US Vice-President, who wanted a fee.

After yesterday’s burst of publicity in these pages, commiserations are due to the Edinburgh Rotary Club. The Army confirmed that last night’s £25-a-head dinner would proceed without its main speaker — Pauline Prescott’s long-lost son Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Watton. “He wanted to keep his mother out of the limelight,” it seems. “He has taken her on holiday and as a result has had to cancel this long-standing engagement.”

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