Want to know about debt? Ask the government's man on £350,000 a year
• Shocks aplenty for MPs as they consider the scandal of the vulnerable being targeted by payday loans companies. This is something we must get to grips with, they said. There are poor people suffering and rich people raking it in. And they're not wrong. For one of the shocks that confronted them had less to do with the loans companies themselves than with the salary being paid to Tony Hobman, boss of the government-funded Money Advice Service. Its role is to help the poor deal with debt. But with his earnings of £350,000 a year, including bonuses and perks, Hobman should be able to keep the wolf from the door – in the short term, at least. It makes me "hugely incentivised", he told the Commons business committee. It's an "extravagance", said MPs. But he should care. With that sort of money, who needs friends?
• The public finances are a mess, but credit's due to George Osborne. He's not the sort to stand idly by and do nothing. And so breaking, perhaps, with long-established protocol, we can reveal what he plans to do to raise money with his budget. He's privatising the budget process itself. Since for ever and a day, the budget papers, containing press releases and data, have been available free of charge as soon as the chancellor sits down. Hacks queue up and take them away from the Treasury. This year the chancellor is charging £45 per copy for anyone who wants to read the fine print. Should raise a few thousand quid, and it might deter a good many from scrutinising the details. Clever Gideon. What is that, if not a win-win?
• And these are heady days for Ukip, following two high-profile defections from the Tories. And now the best news of all: the return of Paul Wiffen. Paul who? You know Paul Wiffen. The musician. The one who played with Stevie Wonder and Jean Michel Jarre and had this strange double life as London chairman of Ukip. Contributed a few thoughts to communitycare.co.uk late one night, at which point his political career went a bit pear-shaped. "You leftwing scum are all the same," he posted. "Wanting to hand our birthright to Romanian gypsies who beat their wives and children into begging and stealing money they can gamble with, Muslim nutters who want to kill us and put us all under medieval Sharia law, the same Africans who sold their Afro-Caribbean brothers into a slavery that Britain was the first to abolish (but you still want to apologise for!). Worry about where we are going to live and grow food, you wanker," he said. He was suspended for a bit (for which he blamed this diary). But now he's back as Ukip's London North East candidate for the London assembly. Shows anything is possible. Quite comforting, really.
• Here's to the survivors. Here's to Mark Thompson, now the BBC's longest serving director general since Charles Curran, in the 1960s. And unusually for that cohort, he is leaving at a time of his own choosing – after the anticipated glory of the London Olympics. But he has learned so much, and there is so much to pass on, so next Thursday Thompson pitches up at Oxford Brookes University to deliver a lecture. His topic: "Disaster management and organisation continuity planning at the BBC: How to respond to disaster." Will the warm-up man be Jonathan Ross?
• To the National Liberal Club, where some fear they are operating a secret colour bar. The spare tie tray at the club – ties are obligatory – may boast a nice selection of orangey gold, purple and pink ties, but there's no red or blue; nothing that might reference Labour or the Tories. "We're not allowed those," confides an official sporting a gold tie. "Only good Liberal ones." Perhaps a blueish cravat for Nick Clegg.
• Finally, a football manager is sacked. Times readers demand the details. "When are we going to get some in-depth analysis of the situation at Chelsea," asks Steve Dobell from London. "Only five pages yesterday and no leading article since Monday; there is growing concern that you're not taking it seriously." Behold, the Wapping spring.
Twitter: @hugh_muir