Pandora: Hold the front page! Brown gets a break

Here's something you don't see every day: a bit of good news for Gordon Brown. We hear that performance dates for the forthcoming theatre adaptation of that seminal 1980s television programme Yes, Prime Minister have been delayed.

The original writers of the political satire, Peter Jay and Jonathan Lynn, have penned a new script especially for the theatre, which had been due for its debut before the country went to the polls.

Now, however, the cast is to wait until the end of summer to begin their nationwide tour before embarking on a planned West End appearance in the autumn. "We wanted to get it on before the election because it is about a government at the end of its days – but it was not to be," explains David Haig, who has the task of playing the Prime Minister.

"I suspect Gordon will be quite relieved because the scripts are all about a government which is on its way out, and everybody always thinks the Prime Minister is the current one.

"The TV series was first written during the time of Callaghan but was on air when Mrs Thatcher came to power. Everyone thought it was about her but in reality she wasn't the model for it at all!"

Never too early to start planning

*With the ink still wet on the Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth's informal declaration of the 6 May election date, Labour employees are being asked to sign up for September's party conference in Manchester. Handily, they are offered a chance to apply for possible ex-officio passes ... just in case they don't make it back to Westminster. "We have streamlined the process," explains the invitation. "We no longer require you to complete a full security application in order to apply for your pass." No better way to drown one's sorrows, eh?

Matthews sees how the other half live

Following in the well-heeled footsteps of Sarah Ferguson and, ahem, Lindsay Lohan, ex-Britpop WAG Meg Matthews has become the latest famous "face" to try her hand at documentary making.

"I am doing something for the BBC called Rich, Famous and Jobless," she tells Pandora. The title is a little close to the bone; it has long been wondered what Matthews, ex-wife of Noel Gallagher, actually does. Still it's not Matthews' employment that we'll be getting a look at.

"They drop me at night to this place that has the highest suicide rates and I swapped lives with this woman my age," she explains. "These people only have £5 a day to live on. It was scary."

A timely review by the boys in blue?

*Congratulations to Sally Murrer, the journalist accused of obtaining leaked information from the police in 2007, and forced to endure a strip search and 30-hour stint in a cell. Murrer is to release her crime novel According To Bella, the manuscript of which was confiscated by officers during the 19-month investigation, before the case was eventually thrown out of court. "We assume Thames Valley Police had to plough through all 94,000 words of it," she says. "Perhaps I ought to ask them to do a review." Why not?

Lineker keeps his life well balanced

*Ohhmmm. The enduringly ubiquitous footballer-turned-Walkers crisps poster boy Gary Lineker is acquainting himself with his spiritual side. He has, apparently, been taking private Pilates lessons alongside his glossy new wife, the Welsh lingerie model and television presenter Danielle Bux.

"We do it once a week," Lineker, 49, boasts in an interview with this week's New magazine. "She's not really into the gym so that's all she does really."

Care for a demonstration?