Security is tight at the Liberal Democrats’ spring conference in case protesters get in and harass Nick Clegg. But it wasn’t tight enough yesterday to keep out a senior member of the Labour party. The shadow health secretary, John Healey, with his coat collar turned up in secret squirrel style, registered cheekily as the representative of “a non-profit organisation”.
The real threat to Clegg is actually from disgruntled Lib Dems, but at least they won’t burn the leader in effigy. Not without first offsetting the carbon emissions.
* As if rugby fans won’t have enough of a treat this afternoon as England face Scotland at Twickenham, campaigners for an alternative vote system will be on hand outside the stadium to offer leaflets and advice, just as they did during England v France.
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“A surprising number of French fans were stopping to find out more,” says one campaigner. “They invariably made a beeline for the lady leafletters.”
Watch out, the Tories have a new loose cannon
The colourful Tory MP Nadine Dorries has gone a bit quiet since embarking on an affair with a friend’s estranged husband. So I propose a vote of thanks to her fellow Tory MP Claire Perry, who has kindly agreed to carry on the good work of being more outspoken than is entirely wise.
Last week I mentioned Claire’s saucy remarks about a giant sausage. Now she’s written to the Speaker to apologise for a suggestion that sexual favours were the only way she might catch his eye during debates.
She recently surprised the Commons tea room by announcing: “What have I got to do to be called by the Speaker? Give him a blow job?”
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Somebody less dedicated to her calling might stay quiet for a couple of weeks, but not Claire.
“You would not believe some of the comments made in that tea room about women MPs and gay MPs,” she told her local paper. Whatever next?
Amanda shows who’s got the most mojo
We can apparently abandon the search for William Hague’s mojo. The woman who once took charge of his media image insists it’s not missing and that the foreign secretary hasn’t lost his taste for the job.
The former newspaper editor Amanda Platell, who was Hague’s press aide as Tory leader, has also given his critics in the party a kicking that makes Norman Tebbit look a bit soft in comparison.
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“When I was Hague’s press secretary, I saw first hand how Michael Portillo, Francis Maude and their axis of weevils connived at every turn,” she says.
She then turns her attention to David Cameron. “Like Blair before him, Cameron likes nothing better than to posture on the global stage. Now the rest of the world has responded with a mix of incredulity and indifference to his warmongering, he has allowed his foreign secretary to take the blame.”
Call her off, William, we surrender.
His opening line — what do you think of it so far?
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How the BBC must be kicking itself. A documentary on the history of light entertainment last week claimed that the above left picture was a snap of the young Eric Morecambe.
But surely it’s Michael “Bring Me Sunshine” Gove, the education secretary, during his early days in music hall.
What a turn that was. “Mr Gove,” hecklers would shout. “Your government is making the wrong cuts.”
“We are making the right cuts,” he would riposte. “But not necessarily in the right order.”
No NFZ for BHL
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As the world dithers about a no-fly zone over Libya, the French have decided to get really tough: they’re sending in the philosophers (motto: Who Thinks Wins). Bernard-Henri Lévy, France’s best-known intellectual, has met rebel leaders, but he’s undoubtedly just the spearhead of a crack team who will draw on arguments from Plato to prove that Gadaffi is an abstract concept who does not, in any meaningful sense, exist. Job done.
- Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, had his bottom pinched during a visit to Edinburgh on Thursday.
The culprit, May Wilson, 83, explained: “I was just trying to get his attention to give him a piece of lemon sponge cake.” If only saucy Silvio Berlusconi had thought of that one, wouldn’t he have saved himself a whole heap of trouble?
- With the Duchess of York back in the news to keep us entertained, a running enthusiast wonders whether she will be attempting the London marathon, as she promised faithfully last year.
“Next year I’m going to do it,” she told the BBC in 2010 after watching Princess Beatrice finish the course. “I’m going to definitely commit myself.”
A spokesman for the marathon says the duchess is not registered for next month’s race. Whoever would have thought it?
Little Britain
Each month The Lydiards Magazine, which covers the Wiltshire village of Lydiard Millicent, features an obituary, but its 87-year-old editor, Constance Reed, is finding it hard to keep up. “It would be useful to the rest of us left behind if people would prepare their own obituaries before they die,” she said.
Constance has yet to write her own obituary, although she does know what she would leave out. “My list of lovers,” she said. “Mind you, I don’t do too badly now because I’ve got one of those disabled parking badges. So I get a lot of people taking me out and I know jolly well it’s because I can park for nothing near the entrance.”
— BBC Wiltshire Online
- I’ll have a Colin Firth and a special Bangkok prawn rice, please. As well as being hot stuff in Hollywood, the actor has now been immortalised in food form at the Bangkok Brasserie restaurant in Winchester. The Colin Firth Thai Mango Chicken, dreamt up by the owner Abdul Kayum to support a charity close to Firth’s heart, tops the bill of house specials. It is a delicious yellow curry with slices of mango, and is proving such a hit that staff are taking around 100 orders a month.
— Hampshire Chronicle