**EXCLUSIVE** Izzet McBride or not?

Whether or not disgraced peddler of vile smears, Damian McBride, is back advising the government, it seems that his ghost lives on in Whitehall.

This week, Tory frontbencher Greg Hands MP raised a bizarre tale of civil service impropriety that arose when Ed Balls and Gordon Brown visited Hands' Hammersmith & Fulham constituency. Having failed to adhere to the established parliamentary convention of informing an MP of their intention to visit his constituency, Balls and Brown were protected by a rottweiler of a civil servant called Balshen Izzet.

Izzet's modus operandi of dealing with Greg Hands' unwanted arrival at Brown and Balls' planned photo call at a Fulham school was to imperiously tell him he was not invited, to snarl that his presence would make the school visit "political", to seek to dupe Hands by misleading him as to the entrance Brown and Balls would arrive through and, in essence, to act in a manner that was self-evidently improper for a civil servant to act.

Where did Balshen Izzet learn this tricks of the trade - the bullying and underhand approach that comes straight from the Damian McBride playbook?

Was it as a result of pillow talk - given that Izzet was revealed by The Daily Mail in April as being McBride's "long-suffering girlfriend"?