The Mail on Sunday suggested that the Queen was less than thrilled that Lord Chancellor Jack Straw didn’t come high enough up the steps in front of the throne as he presented her with the speech last Wednesday, forcing Her Majesty to have to lean forward.

That reminded me of a puzzling glare that I thought I saw the Queen direct at Mr Straw on the day. You can watch it here and judge for yourself. 

Related: A party political broadcast or the Queen’s speech?
Labour values on display in the Queen’s speech

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There would have been few political career trajectories to match it! But that could turn out to be the story of Baroness (Cathy) Ashton, former Labour Leader in the Lords, if things pan out as some hope tonight.

Gordon Brown appears to have dropped the Blair candidacy for president in return for a Brit in the foreign affairs job. And what a job.

A paper from the Swedes who hold the EU Presidency issued yesterday made it clear that they thought the foreign affairs rep would have THE single voice on foreign affairs for the EU.

Cathy Ashton succeeded Peter Mandelson as trade commissioner – his influence is everywhere! – and has, it is said, hugely impressed the EU Commission President Manuel Barroso.

She is, it is worth mentioning, a woman, and the EU has been woefully short of them in top offices for some time. This could all change… there are other pieces of the jigsaw that must fit in with it.

Van Rompuy could, I hear, make way for Balkenende. But Cathy Ashton is now the nominee for the high rep job of the socialist group and stands a good chance.

Tony Blair’s hopes of a job are officially dead but by staying a (non) candidate this long he may have helped the UK secure this other job.

Related: Will you be the President of Europe, Gordon?
Carving up the top EU jobs – should you care?

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I hear that the Spanish Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, last week asked Gordon Brown if HE would be the new President of Europe (do you think Charles Clarke put him up to it?). Anyway, Mr Brown said no thanks.

It gives you an idea how very fluid this whole thing has been and still is.I hear the Dutch are furious with the Germans for backing a Belgian but as of this moment there is a blocking minority against the Belgian PM, Mr Van Rompuy though it’s not quite clear whether the UK is part of that blocking majority.

(My thanks to diligent – idle? – colleagues at Channel 4 News who tell me that Mr Van Rompuy hasn’t even made it on to the 263-strong list on the Famous Belgians website.)

There have been requests for Tony Blair to consider the Foreign Affairs High Rep job – no word yet on whether he has definitely turned that down but it’s hard to imagine him cheerfully serving as second fiddle to a Belgian PM.

The Dutch are furious with the Germans for backing a Belgian – or so I am told.

And to add to all the mist the EU Commission President Manuel Barroso, whose Commission jobs may hold the key to brokering the deal on the Presidency and High Rep jobs, is said to be not playing ball and refusing to show his cards on who he wants where in the Commission.

Related: Carving up the EU top jobs – should you care?
A 50-50 chance Blair’s EU bid folds before Thursday

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Word last night from the Blair camp was that their man has pretty much given up on getting the presidency of the European Council.

Word from Paris and Berlin that they see the job as an internal affairs post dealing with issues like the EU budget makes it easier to handle – that was never the job TB was interested in.

So after 5pm, 27 of, by definition, the most power-crazed and crafty individuals in all Europe will begin an arduous multi-handed game of multi-dimensional chess.

They want to dish out the president and foreign policy jobs plus the new Commission. There will be some reserve card surprise names in some leaders’ back pockets, but if the leaders don’t see the presidency as anything more than a chairing role should you care?

The French and the Germans have made it clear they do not want this to drag on beyond this summit and add a final sorry chapter to the history of a treaty that has been years in the making and unmaking.

The UK is after a major economic portfolio in the Commission and can be expected to wave that as a diplomatic triumph when all this concludes.

I wonder if she’s aware that the government has put a loud hailer on the roof and plastered the carriage with election stickers? And I think they may have hooked up one of those road marking machines to the back so she paints battle lines in her wake.

The Queen is expected to announce a whole load of legal guarantees which opposition parties claim are election hoardings masquerading as draft laws.

Laws to guarantee deficit reduction, to guarantee an end to child poverty, and a law guaranteeing everything you’d wish for your child at school.

There are not enough days to get this lot through parliament before a general election, but that’s not the point. It’s a time for a cash-strapped political party to get some free political advertising.

I hope someone takes that bumper sticker off the back of the royal carriage before Her Majesty goes back home.

Peter Mandelson is giving us an off-camera briefing at Labour’s HQ near Victoria Station on what the Queen’s speech really means. (Actually, he hasn’t changed into his noble robes but admits he is looking forward to it.)

He says the programme of government to be read out by the Queen at 11.30 proves that it has not run out of ideas.

He says this Queen’s speech is not about “dividing lines” but about “the people”.

He says the Tories are behaving as if they’ve already won the election. Yvette Cooper, John Healey and Andy Burnham are also speaking. A lot of the briefing is about the government’s record in managing the recession and minimising the pain, less about the forward offer beyond 2010.

Peter Mandelson says the electorate should look at the Labour values on display in the Queen’s speech.

He says Ed Balls – reported to be putting in for a 4 per cent real-terms budget increase – is on the record talking about being focused on re-prioritising spending in his department making efficiencies to put frontline services first (a swipe?).

It sounded like the Business Secretary just signalled an end or scaling back of the trade credit guarantee scheme (not much used) to be announced in the PBR.

He says he’s “not the Minister for Information” and has “quite enough titles” as it is.

They are now showing us a party political broadcast to be transmitted tonight… Labour’s role in the history of social justice from Keir Hardie to Gordon Brown.

I wondered whether a repeat so soon in the schedule was a sign money is really tight.

But I hear Labour has been focus-grouping it and that jaded voters, cynical about whether politicians ever achieve anything, said it reminded them – images of suffragettes, the end of apartheid, Northern Ireland – that they sometimes do.

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It acknowledges that Afghanistan works for the most part on “sub-national government” and will do for the foreseeable future. In one intriguing paragraph, which bears the hallmarks of much mandarin crafting, Mr Miliband says:

“Our role should not be to prescribe exactly how those (ancient) traditions (of sub-national governance) evolve, or how the systems which reflect them are implemented … but to provide the resources without which none of this (stability) would be possible, and which will be far less expensive than trying to suppress the insurgency by conventional military means.”

Got that? I think it means that where a Taliban-sympathiser or some other menacing chief is running an area they can get on with it as long as they are not exporting global Jihad or destabilising the entire country.

I think it means issues like women’s rights in Afghanistan, once talked about quite a bit in speeches by the leaders of combatant countries, are beyond our reach in many parts of the country.

It will probably only enhance Hilary Clinton’s high opinion of David Miliband, expressed in her “Vogue” magazine interview:

“Well, if you saw him it would be a big crush. I mean, he is so vibrant, vital, attractive, smart. He’s really a good guy. And he’s so young!”

(Thanks to Alex Barker in the FT/Westminster blog for spotting this.)

Gordon Brown’s team feel he must get across to ordinary folk a sense that the Afghanistan military mission does not just grind on forever but is governed by a plan and has an ending.

David Miliband will speak more about the political plan tomorrow. Bob Ainsworth will address Nato allies soon. The prime minister wants people to understand the purpose and sense the progress.

So he’ll talk about the blows inflicted on al-Qaida and the prospect of a “timetable for transfer starting in 2010″. That means transfer to Afghan lead in districts – it doesn’t mean withdrawal from districts. There would still be substantial military and civilian presence.

The timetable he hopes can be unveiled in January 2010 would not be a linear progression to a final withdrawal date but would give some indicative dates for the first few districts to transfer, starting mid-2010.

Before that we get the formal announcement of the additional 500 UK forces being deployed. That could come closely timed to President Obama’s extra troops announcement, and that now looks likely between his return from Asia and the Thanksgiving holiday.

Does that mean he is in with a serious chance? Is there a big player still pushing for him? I hear not.

The Prime Minister had been minded to hold on to the Blair candidacy and take it all the way to the EU special summit in Brussels in the hope that it might just work and even if it didn’t he would look like he tried… but that plan is now being reconsidered.

The Swedes who hold the EU presidency would like Thursday to be a rubber-stamping meeting with agreement reached beforehand not a barney.

It is “50-50″, I hear, whether the Blair candidacy folds before Thursday.

The odds are still that the EU leaders will (subject to Commission and European Parliament blessing) appoint a non-English speaking former communist from Italy to represent it on foreign affairs and a low-key Belgian Prime Minister as President.

If Mr Blair does let it be known that he is not going for the Presidency, the UK government is NOT expected to magic a high rep. candidate out of the air, even though other countries say they would welcome a UK appointment, but will focus instead on making sure they get one of the big economic European Commission posts.

Some in Brussels think the UK has missed a moment here, but with David Miliband’s refusal to be a candidate the field looked a bit thin (Peter Mandelson busy elsewhere, Baroness Ashton insufficient foreign affairs experience and other figures spoken of like George Robertson didn’t get off the ground).

RELATED: Brown still talking up Blair for EU president

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It’s currently Andrew MacKinlay’s seat. BNP leader Nick Griffin plans to stand here. Before we went, we spoke to Professor Richard Webber (the man who invented Experian’s Mosaic computer programme which all the main parties now use to track down voter types).

The parties’ private polling suggests there are millions of voters all over the country who put immigration amongst their top three concerns. We wanted to find the people who put it first and for whom it could change the way they vote.

Professor Webber’s map showed up red dots marking postcodes where we would find them. In the marketing jargon, they are areas dominated by a social group tagged “Clocking Off” – that’s a group of mainly white communities, often hit by unemployment in manufacturing or refinery work, often in relatively low-cost, owner-occupier housing.

We turned up at the postcode Professor Webber suggested and stopped folk at random in the street. It was uncanny. We found plenty of voters who had voted Labour but were thinking of voting for the BNP.

And we also found that toxic mix that worries Labour strategists – voters who are angry about immigration but are also alienated from the main parties by the expenses scandal.

On Gordon Brown’s announcement today on shutting the door on non-EU consultants and skilled workers, it’s far from clear what the impact on immigration numbers would be.

He’s said the 12,000 available consultants’ jobs should not be made available to non-EU would-be immigrants under the points system, but there are 7,416 non-EU consultants in total in the NHS. There was never going to be 12,000 new non-EU consultant arrivals.

A Home Office source said: “It could be that just two of the jobs” went to non-EU applicants. These are “available posts”, not expected inflows.

The pressure group MigrationWatch and others say this is a drop in the ocean because the real net immigration comes from non-EU immigrants given right to remain and then bringing in their families, not from individuals who enter under the skilled employment points system.

The Conservatives don’t intend to make as much of immigration in their general election campaign as they did under Michael Howard in 2005. Part of the point of Gordon Brown’s speech today was to “draw the sting” from the issue, a Number 10 aide told me.

But this issue will come into the debate in the 2010 election, and it has the power to shift some votes.

UPDATE: Apologies. Nick Griffin is NOT standing in Thurrock now but has decided to stand in Barking instead.

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