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Today’s tell-all wants you to join it, to form a new kind of government for Britain

With just one day to go before polling begins, the Rumour Mill has finally launched its manifesto, which is critical to persuading a wavering readership that we should remain the go-to source of daily football speculation for discerning football fans, despite our occasional tardiness, that controversial decision to do away with the comments section and an occasional over-reliance on spurious hearsay linking Bordeaux’s Marouane Chamakh with a big-money move to assorted high profile English clubs.

We appreciate that a football transfer rumour column is at its best when the bonds between speculation-purveyor and reader are strong and when the sense of purpose is clear. Today the challenges facing those who round-up and regurgitate the world’s football transfer tittle-tattle five mornings a week are immense. Liverpool are in turmoil, Manchester City’s financial resources are bottomless and Hull City are potless. But these problems can be overcome if we pull together and work together. If we remember that we are all in this together.

Some football transfer news columns say: ‘read us and we’ll reveal that Chelsea are on the verge of sticking it to Manchester City by launching a £70m bid for Liverpool striker Fernando Torres. We say: relations between Torres and Rafael Benitez are at such a low ebb that the only slight chance Liverpool have of holding on to their striker is if their manager leaves, at which point he could be temporarily replaced by a Kenny Dalglish and Ian Rush dream-ticket.

Yes this is ambitious. Yes it is optimistic. But in the end all the talk linking Manchester City striker Valeri Bojinov with a permanent £4m move to Parma after his successful loan spell, 25-year-old Sampdoria striker Giampaolo Pazzini with Arsenal and West Brom midfielder Graham Dorrans with a £5-10m move to West Ham is just that: talk, without you and your involvement.

How will we deal with the debt crisis unless Rafa Benitez brings Ajax’s well-travelled Serbian striker Marko Pantelic to whatever club he’s managing at later this summer? How will we raise responsible children unless Bolton manager Owen Coyle quickly decides whether or not to make on-loan-from-Bordeaux striker Ivan Klasnic a permanent fixture at the Reebok Stadium before his recently relegated French owners Nantes flog him elsewhere? How will we revitalise communities unless people stop asking ‘Is Steve Bruce really prepared to give Wigan Athletic £9m for Chris Kirkland and Maynor Figueroa?’ and start asking ‘Is Ipswich Town captain and midfielder Jon Walters worth the £4m Stoke manager Tony Pulis is ready to pay for him?’ Britain will change for the better when we all elect to take part, to take responsibility – if we all come together. Collective strength will overpower our problems and possibly result in watercooler gossip linking Tottenham outcast Robbie Keane with a move to Everton in exchange for Steven Pienaar.

Only together can we can get rid of this government and ease the passage of 20-year-old Icelandic goal-getting midfielder and dead-ball specialist Gylfi Sigurdsson from Reading to Newcastle United. Only together can we get the economy moving. Only together can we encourage pub chit-chat linking Manchester United with bids for CSKA Moscow midfielder Milos Krasic or Tottenham’s Croatian dynamo Luka Modric. Improve the chances of Benfica winger Angel Di Maria agreeing to move to Real Madrid, leaving Sir Alex Ferguson and Carlo Ancelotti feeling rejected. Mend our broken society. Together we can even convince goalkeeping legend Gianluigi Buffon to move to Arsenal if their move for Joe Hart falls through, because his own club Juventus has failed to qualify for the Champions League. And if we can do that, we can do anything. Yes, together we can do anything.

So the Rumour Mill’s invitation today is this: join us, to form a new kind of government for Britain.

ChelseaLiverpoolSunderlandArsenalWigan AthleticTottenham HotspurReadingNewcastle UnitedIpswich TownStoke CityWest BromBarry Glendenningguardian.co.uk

Please consider today’s tell-all before printing the environment

Contrary to what many would have you believe, the rumour-mongering trade is not all fast cars, loose women and big creamy slices of moist fruit-cake covered in marzipan, then icing with garish bits of fruit clinging to the sides like rogue pubic hairs on a bathroom tile. Oh no.

It’s on bleak mornings like this, when a bleary-eyed Rumour Mill has had to drag itself out of bed at ridiculous o’clock having spent a restless night tossing and turning like a pig on a spit, that we really earn our corn. After all, those snippets of transfer speculation won’t lift themselves out of assorted other websites and pitch up here on their own. (although it would be very nice if they would). So yes, that’s the Rumour Mill – trawling the Daily Mail website so that you don’t have to. And there was you thinking this gig was all about the stage-door groupies.

Despite yesterday’s comically straight-faced assurances from Harry Redknapp that he wouldn’t be putting a pony in his pocket or fetching the suitcase from the van during the forthcoming transfer window, the names of assorted Tottenham Hotspur players figure prominently in today’s back pages. Having noticed what a good touch Peter Crouch has for a big man, Zenit St Petersburg coach Luciano Spalletti will offer to double the striker’s wages if he’ll consider a move to the city formerly known as Leningrad. Meanwhile in Moscow, Spartak are interested in re-securing the scrawl of their former striker and Tottenham outcast Roman Pavlyuchenko, but are not prepared to pay the £15m Harry wants for the Russian. CSKA are also primed to bring one of their old boys, Jo, back to the Russian capital in the wake of the striker’s dismal failure to either score many goals or secure the much-coveted title of Newly Monied Manchester City’s Most Spectacular Brazilian Flop.

Crouchigol isn’t the only Premier League player getting the come-on from Zenit St Petersburg – the Russian club’s suits have been pouting suggestively at Andrea Dossena and Liverpool may well be prepared to ship a £5m loss on the Italian full-back in order to raise funds to cover the cost of Brann’s striker Erik Huseklepp. We know next to nothing about the Norwegian but have already decided unfairly, just from looking at his name, that he’s unlikely to become a Kop favourite and will probably be farmed out to Peterborough United on loan or sold on to AEK Athens for a substational loss within 18 months of arriving at Anfield. You mark our words. Of course it’s no secret that Liverpool manager Rafael Benítez also wants to get rid of Ryan Babel and Andriy Voronin in a bid to raise funds for Galatasaray winger Arda Turan.

This just in: “Nemanja Vidic se une a la lista de galácticos para 2010,” according to Spanish newspaper Marca. Now the Rumour Mill doesn’t speak Spanish very well, but we’re fairly sure this means that despite all the talk linking Nemanja Vidic with Barcelona, it is in fact Real Madrid who have decided to stop at nothing to sign the Manchester United centre-half in 2010 and Sir Alex Ferguson is so resigned to losing the Serbian that he’s already eyeballing Porto’s Bruno Alves as a replacement.

Big Sam Allardyce may be long gone from Bolton Wanderers but his transfer policy remains very much in place, if this morning’s rumours linking the Trotters with an ageing past-his-pomp Real Madrid midfielder is anything to go by. Guti is the man Gary Megson wants to go buy. His go-to Guti, as it were.

With Bayern Munich striker Luca Toni having limited his options and bargaining power by announcing that he will not sign for any club other than Roma, West Ham manager Gianfranco Zola has turned his gaze on Fiorentina striker and Chelsea old-boy Adrian Mutu, who could probably do with the signing-on fee. Zola may have to raise funds by selling Scott Parker, which shouldn’t be too difficult considering Stoke, Liverpool and Tottenham are all clamouring for the midfielder’s services. Well, sitting in the auction house with mobile phones glued to ears and table-tennis type paddle things poised for when the inevitable bidding war starts.

And while the news that Middlesbrough manager Gordon Strachan is hoping to bring Scott McDonald south of the border to Teesside would normally prompt the Rumour Mill to crack a lame gag about the gamble involved in seeing if Celtic’s Aussie striker would be able for the step up in class that such a move would entail, we’ll resist the urge today because the joke in question is becoming increasingly less wide of the mark and now seems tantamount to kicking a blind man’s stick. And kicking the sticks of blind men is not how the Rumour Mill rolls.

Tottenham HotspurZenit St PetersburgSpartak MoscowCSKA MoscowBolton WanderersLiverpoolManchester CityBarry Glendenningguardian.co.uk