In the contest to find Britain’s stuffiest historian, Andrew Roberts takes an early lead by complaining in The Spectator about Twitter and MPs. “Twitter is fast destroying whatever respect or admiration one might once have felt for politicians,” he rages.
One MP under scrutiny is the Tory Tracey Crouch, who recently revealed how she ripped her shirt in three places “playing Ultimate Frisbee”. To be fair to Andrew, that sort of detail is remarkably absent from the diaries of, say, Harold Macmillan or Alan Clark.
But Tracey is unrepentant. “Twitter shows MPs to be human,” she says. “So I shall keep tweeting my spider crushing, Super Noodle eating, football playing, sad little life.”
■ Nimbly scrambling aboard two bandwagons, Thomas Cook has launched a series of jubilee-themed Olympic breaks. On a racy Prince Harry holiday, for example, you’ll watch the women’s beach volleyball and stay at the Waldorf Hilton. And on a Prince Edward break? That’s a night in a Travelodge.
Revealed: what left a worse taste than David Mellor’s toes
Who says the Conservative party hasn’t modernised? The former MP Jerry Hayes recalls an encounter in the early 1990s with a disgruntled knight of the shires after the revelation that David Mellor, then national heritage secretary, had been having an affair with an actress called Antonia de Sancha.
Advertisement
“What on earth was the bloody man thinking of?” he told Hayes, producing a newspaper picture of the couple’s love nest, complete with mattress and a bottle of sherry. “How can he live with the shame?”
What had so upset the old gent? Was it the lurid reports that Antonia had been sucking David’s toes? Or the claim — false, as it turned out — that a member of the cabinet sported a Chelsea football strip to spice up his more intimate moments?
No, apparently it was a far more serious lapse of taste.
“The party will never forgive him,” raged the unnamed MP. “The sherry is from Cyprus.”
Show dopeheads the erratum of their ways
Here’s an unlikely weapon in the war on drugs: punishments in Latin. After all, it’s what put David Cameron on the straight and narrow.
Advertisement
The idea is suggested by Professor David Nutt, who was famously sacked in 2009 as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs after suggesting, among other things, that ecstasy and LSD were less dangerous than alcohol.
Interviewed by the Times Higher Education magazine, he now claims punishments for soft drug use are too harsh. “When David Cameron was caught at Eton in possession of cannabis, he was given hundreds of lines of Latin to copy out,” he says. “Perfect. Let’s give every schoolboy 500 lines for smoking cannabis rather than kick them into the street so they start selling the stuff.”
It might not solve Britain’s drug problem but it’ll certainly make life easier for the police. To identify a habitual user, just see if a suspect can quote Virgil from memory.
Hands up, I’ve got a handbag and I’m not afraid to use it
The trouble with modern policing is that it doesn’t give villains a fair chance. Things were so much better when Cressida Dick, above, the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police, was a young constable. Giving a lecture at Windsor Castle, she recalls how female firearms officers had to conceal their weapons in handbags.
“At the vital moment when the armed robbers arrived, they would be scrabbling around trying to find the wretched thing.” Not exactly The Sweeney, was it?
Points
Advertisement
■ Now the News of the World is no longer with us, I have agreed to take up the solemn burden of reporting on saucy bishops. Nick Baines, the Bishop of Bradford and a man briefly touted as the next Archbishop of Canterbury, recalls a recent meeting of his reverend colleagues to discuss — what else? — the church’s stance on sex and women bishops. Just to be clear, these are two quite separate issues.
According to Bishop Nick, one unnamed colleague was so frustrated at being kept inside a stuffy room during the first spell of good weather for weeks that he made the slightly unwise appeal: “Can’t we do sex outside?”
He’s lucky he wasn’t addressing the General Synod — he’d have been trampled in the rush.
■ David Cameron plays Fruit Ninja in his spare time, but at Liberal Democrat headquarters they prefer traditional guessing games. Officials at the party’s base are currently playing a round of “How many seats will the Lib Dems win at the next general election?” — a game popularly marketed as Absolutely No Cluedo. Optimists say 50, down from 57 at the last election, but more gloomy apparatchiks predict just 30.
“It’s great fun,” says a party source.
Advertisement
Yes, how the long summer afternoons must fly.
Little Britain
■ Tim Price has added an extra nine Ps to his name in a desperate attempt to deter cold-calling salesmen. Tim, 49, pictured above, has changed his name by deed poll to Tim Pppppppppprice. “It’s pronounced Tim Per-per-per-per-per-per-per-per-per-price,” he said. “My theory is that when salesmen see my name they’ll think: ‘Blow that — I can’t even pronounce it, so I won’t call him’.”
Leicester Mercury
Advertisement
■ A retired nurse has made a 7,000-mile pilgrimage from Canada to Hampshire every year for the past five years to visit a tree. During her annual visits to the oak in Brockenhurst in the New Forest, Val Theroux, 64, gets up early in the morning so she can be alone with it and hug it.
Bournemouth Echo
■ Antony Gormley’s iron men sculptures have long stood naked on Crosby beach, but two have received the protection of woolly all-in-ones to shield them from the winds. Polish-born Agata Oleksiak gave one a pink, purple and green crocheted jumpsuit [and] the other a white, grey and black number. The artist, famous for dressing a bull sculpture on New York’s Wall Street, is travelling around the UK in a crocheted taxi.
Metro