Handbags over @Toryeducation

Crikey, these journalists are a thin-skinned bunch. Toby Helm's four (count them!) identikit stories about Michael Gove's Spads, in which a left-leaning journalist on a left-leaning paper reacted furiously to suggestions that he was a Labour stooge (here's fun - Journalisted contains the fact that "Toby Helm has written more about Labour than anything else"and "a lot about labour in the last month"), were a simply marvellous over-reaction. For the Observer to splash on a spat between an anonymous Twitter account and the paper's political editor was hilarious.

But clearly, the story has legs. We know this because the Independent is involved, with a truly fabulous display of pearl-clutching - an emailed aside about "speaking to Chris Cook about a good therapist" becomes an investigation-worthy breach of the civil service code. You'd think the Independent would have a higher tolerance for insult - this is how Matthew Norman described Ed Balls in the paper:

Cocky, fake, slimy, inelegant, ineloquent, charmless, witless, weird, sinister, glacially cold and luminescently remote, he may be the most chillingly repulsive politician of even this golden generation.

There's something rather touching about the vision of poor sensitive journalists being so deeply hurt by nasty things said to them by horrid Spads. They presumably see themselves as boldly speaking truth to power, and standing up against the Man. From here it looks a lot more like people used to dishing it out with impunity suddenly realising that they don't like it coming back at them.