'Zip' dictionary of lists in Python

Question

I have a dictionary of lists, and I want to merge them into a single list of namedtuples. I want the first element of all the lists in the first tuple, the second in the second and so on.

Example:

{'key1': [1, 2, 3], 'key2': [4, 5, 6], 'key3': [7, 8, 9]}

And I want the resulting list to be like this:

[('key1': 1, 'key2': 4, 'key3': 7), 
('key1': 2, 'key2': 5, 'key3': 8), 
('key1': 3, 'key2': 6, 'key3': 9)]

I assume there is an elegant way of doing this?

Edit:

I have compared running times of @Steve Jessop's namedtuple answer to the dictionary version by @Ashwini Chaudhary, and the former is somewhat faster:

d = {key: numpy.random.random_integers(0, 10000, 100000) 
        for key in ['key1', 'key2', 'key3']}

Avg. of 100 runs:

namedtuple and map: 0.093583753109
namedtuple and zip: 0.119455988407
dictionary and zip: 0.159063346386

Answer 1

>>> d = {'key1': [1, 2, 3], 'key2': [4, 5, 6], 'key3': [7, 8, 9]}
>>> keys = d.keys()
>>> [dict(zip(keys, vals)) for vals in zip(*(d[k] for k in keys))]
[{'key3': 7, 'key2': 4, 'key1': 1},
 {'key3': 8, 'key2': 5, 'key1': 2},
 {'key3': 9, 'key2': 6, 'key1': 3}]