To lose the plot once, Mr Evans, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose it twice looks like carelessness.
The first time was April Fools' Day, which may offer some explanation. It's hard to think of an excuse for today's effort.
When the Daily Star drops the bikini-clad women and the Express the quack cures in recognition of the importance of the Nepal earthquake and avalanche, why is the Daily Telegraph filling its splash space with propaganda and reducing the news to a puff?
This isn't journalism.

19.00 Update Alex Sturdy has done some splendid work on the history of this letter, which he says can be traced back to Karen Brady and Conservative Central Office. He reports that many signatories have asked to have their names removed. 
This is journalism. And you can read it here.
Hats off, too, to Andy Hicks for posting this .pdf properties screenshot, showing the author of the letter as CCHQ (Conservative campaign headquarters).

Voters don't want to know about politicians' domestic arrangements. They have no interest in their wives or their kitchens, according to a ComRes poll published in the Daily Mail today.
We have certainly had a lot of kitchens in this campaign. So maybe it's time to give them a rest. 
The wives are less likely to be left in peace. Newspapers would struggle if they couldn't report on their dress sense, their eating habits and even their opinions. Yesterday, for example, we had Miriam González Durántez accusing the Prime Minister of living in a bubble, and Justin Thornton describing how she fell in love with Ed Miliband.

They had been leafleting together, she told the Mirror. She had put her hand through a letterbox and had it bitten by a dog on the other side. "Ed bandaged me up and I fell in love with him."
This isn't, however, the story that the Mail and Telegraph have focused on today. They are far more interested in Thornton's first encounter with Miliband the previous year.  Here's how she described it to the Mirror's Ros Wynne Jones:

Who is this friend Adrian? Had he been her partner at this dinner party?  What is the point of him to this story?
Why was she furious? Because a man she had never met before - a man who didn't seem particularly interested in her or her choice of conversation - was involved with her hostess friend?
Was she furious with him because he didn't interrupt a conversation about economics to say "by the way, I'm going out with Stephanie". Was she furious with Stephanie for not mentioning the secret relationship? 
Or was she perhaps furious because she thought she might have made a fool of herself by making a play for a man who wasn't available?

The dinner party hostess was, as John Rentoul tweeted yesterday, Stephanie Flanders, who was at that time Newsnight's economics editor. This is dynamite for the Telegraph, which points out that Miliband was then working at the Treasury as a special adviser to Gordon Brown. 
But, rather like that dinner party conversation, the paper finds itself going down a cul-de-sac.  Flanders declines to comment. The Cabinet Office says there is no requirement for special advisers to declare their relationships with journalists [as opposed to ministers and soldiers who must now seek permission before consorting with people practising our grubby trade - but that's another matter]. So that just leaves the BBC guidelines on how it is sometimes  a good idea to declare the political activities of close personal contacts. But the BBC won't tell the Telegraph whether Flanders disclosed her relationship with Miliband, so the story comes to a dead end.

For Andrew Pierce in the Mail, there is a much juicier trail to follow. To him, that West London dinner party in March 2004 "offers a fascinating insight into the somewhat caddish character of the Labour leader".

Who knew (apart from Michael Fallon, of course) that the Labour party leadership was in the gift of Mrs Miliband senior? 
And I may be thick, but I'm struggling to see what is caddish about having a dinner party conversation. There is no evidence that Miliband was flirting with Thornton. Rather, her own description suggests that she was the one who was smitten - a perception reinforced by a biography extract quoted by Pierce:

Pierce is not to be deflected, however. He notes that the "Labour-supporting" Mirror,  "perhaps glossing over what may be seen as caddish behaviour, omitted to mention that the hostess was then Miliband's girlfriend". 
In giving the interview - which appeared under a "simpering" headline - Thornton had clearly been guided by Labour spin-doctors "who wanted to give the impression to voters that her husband was a touchy-feely human being, rather than the soulless nerd that his awkward image conveys on TV". 
Miliband is further attacked as being "ungallant" for having "blurted out" two years ago that Ed Balls had also once been involved with Flanders.  
Pierce then goes on to list three other women with whom he says Miliband had been linked romantically: the daughter of a political economist, an aide to Gordon Brown and a former Times journalist. 
Miliband would have been 36 at the time of that dinner party. Does having three ex-girlfriends by that age constitute a "tangled love life"? 
Of course not. Nor can Pierce really think that. What interests him is the Labour network.  Ed Balls met Flanders at Harvard, when he was 22. His future wife Yvette Cooper was, like Flanders, a Kennedy scholar there. Miliband also went to Harvard. All four had been to Oxford. 
The former Times journalist who once "briefly" dated Miliband also "had a fling" with her then colleague, Tom Baldwin, who is now the Labour leader's chief spin-doctor.
The way the relationships intertwine shows, according to Pierce, "the deeply incestuous and narrow world of the Labour high command". This, he argues, is further demonstrated by links between the other women mentioned and the Labour party, leading him to conclude: 

A deeply incestuous and narrow world, indeed.
Nothing like the Eton old boy network.
Nothing like Cameron's world of "country suppers" with Rebekah Brooks, who once had a relationship with Andy Coulson, who went on to become the Conservative leader's chief spin-doctor. 
Nothing like the Bullingdon Club set of Cameron, Osborne, Boris, Nat Rothschild et al.
Not to mention their fellow Oxford alumnus Michael Gove, who is married to Mail columnist Sarah Vine.
We can all play this game. People tend to mix with like-minded people, to form strong friendships and relationships at university, and to marry within their set. It's called life.
As to tangled love lives: glass houses; stones.

Footnote: All in it together  Pierce, Baldwin, Gove, Vine and Miliband's journalist ex-girlfriend all worked at The Times. So did I. A Blair speech-writer also mentioned in the Mail article still does.

They're off!  Cameron has been to the Palace. Parliament has dissolved. We have a government and a Prime Minister but no MPs. After months of phoney war, the general election campaign proper is finally upon us.
It was tempting to declare SubScribe an election-free zone, but that seemed like abdication of duty, so this is a blog page for occasional random thoughts.
Any parent of a teenager with upcoming exams would recognise my behaviour of the past week: much skimming of source material and even more displacement activity. 
Just as the teenager needs a colour-coded revision timetable, so a blogger needs a logo. There were rosettes to find and fashion. Was the Labour one too big, the Ukip one too low? If the SNP were to be included, what about Plaid Cymru? Oh yes, playing with the Paint tools to extend ribbons, crop and overlay took care of three days, and not a word written. 
Then there were brambles outside to be cut down before their host trees started sprouting, and neglected wooden floors to be polished before the family descends for Easter Sunday lunch. And then, joy of joys, the lovely sticker on the telephone exchange at the end of the road pronouncing the arrival of fibre broadband - which meant a whole afternoon of package comparisons and a for-once welcome conversation with a lady from the call centre.
It's all the Daily Mail's fault. As GameoldGirl has noted elsewhere, it has been in full cry this week and when you add its election coverage into the mix, it's been enough to make any media observer want to shut up shop.

Time was that newspapers reported what the candidates had to say on their news pages and offered opinions on the opinion pages. How old-fashioned can you get? I clearly remember a not-so distant general election campaign where The Times's news coverage was masterminded by one Michael Gove. It would, he declared, be driven by events. Various set-pieces would be prepared, but he would be ever-willing to kill his babies. It was the first time I had heard that expression. That is not the only aspect of the campaign that I remember: another was the establishment in a side office of a little unit whose task was to monitor and audit published news stories to ensure that coverage was balanced.
So there we had a highly political news editor in charge of determinedly fair and open-minded campaign reporting. All sides were also represented in the comment pages. The paper eventually made its thoughts about who would make the best Prime Minister known in a leading article in the closing days of the campaign.
Nostalgia, eh?

This time round most papers had made up their minds long before MPs packed up their pencil cases for the end of term, and five weeks of hustings are unlikely to change any of their opinions. The Telegraph, Mail, Mirror and Sun seem to think their role is not to tell their readers what the politicians are saying, but to tell them what is wrong (or, occasionally, right) with what the politicians are saying.
If Labour wins the election, or comes to an accommodation with one or more minority parties, Ed Miliband will represent Britain in the world. Some - most - of our national newspapers would prefer that that did not happen, but they risk our future international standing by treating any potential Prime Minister so contemptuously. "Red Ed" splash headlines are not a good idea. Nor, indeed, is it wise to call Cameron "Dave" in a straight news story.
SubScribe has been looking most closely at the Mail this week, initially driven by Stephen Glover's "conundrum" that  "so far in the election campaign" no party except for Ukip had mentioned immigration. That was on day two - well into the campaign.

For the first part of the week, the Mail was focused on its "sale of private information" investigation, but it still found time to smear Miliband through Martin Freeman and, unforgiveably, Isis. There was a lot of hypocrisy to be confronted - from Red Ed (zero hours), Freeman (tax avoidance) and Hampstead socialists (everything really). The Labour leader was mocked for shedding a tear over a film about the miners' strike ("mawkish Leftie propaganda") and for suggesting that a future 007 might be a woman ("PC Galore" - which, you have to concede, is a great headline).
The most outrageous bit of innuendo came with yesterday's front-page heading "Runaway Jihadi's father is Labour activist", accompanied by a photograph taken in December of Miliband with Rochdale councillor Shakil Ahmed. Another screaming example of a newspaper reporting something that is true, yet conveying a message that could hardly be described as the truth. 
The story describes Ahmed as a well-respected councillor and there is nothing in the copy to suggest that he has done anything wrong. Yet the presentation encourages the reader to think jihad=bad, Labour=bad, activist=bad, ergo Miliband=bad.  
Miliband is not the only enemy. There have been a couple of pops at the Liberals and the leaders' debate threw up a new villain. A woman who dares to succeed at something beyond home-making and motherhoold, Nicola Sturgeon has now been anointed as the most dangerous woman in Britain.

Nor is the Mail alone in its partisan approach. We have to assume that the Telegraph's front on Wednesday was not intended as an April Fool. But nor was it journalism; it was blatant propaganda. And, like the Mail, the Telegraph has since homed in on Sturgeon as the bogeywoman.
The Express meanwhile produced a series of "Tories good, Labour bad" puffs,  the Sun ran spreads on how Miliband was bad for business, and the Times had "panic" in the markets driving down sterling. Naughty. The markets don't like uncertainty and election campaigns by definition breed uncertainty. Financial experts were predicting in the middle of last year that the pound would fall against the dollar through 2015, and the movement this week had more to do with Andrew Haldane's talk about even lower interest rates than with any fear of Ed Miliband in No 10. Or Ed Balls in No 11.
And don't think there's any less partisanship on the other side of the battle, just fewer papers. But more on that another day.