WITH so many former MPs looking for a job, you’d think there would be a long queue to challenge the little-known Liberal Democrat president Sal Brinton later this year. But some of the party’s big names are apparently reluctant. Baroness Brinton uses a wheelchair and potential rivals fear they will look heartless if they try to oust her.
A senior party source reveals: “There are two or three high-profile candidates who’d love to throw their hat into the ring, but they know they’ll be portrayed in a bad light.
“It’s a shame because, as nice a woman as she is, a higher-profile president would help us get our message across more effectively, which is desperately important.”
Ouch! Not that reluctant to stick in the knife then.
Titbits
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•Ministers like nothing better than posing in a hard hat. But they ignore traditional factories because hi-tech looks better on TV, complains Emma Bridgewater, who produces pottery from a factory in Stoke-on-Trent.
“Potteries don’t make the minister look groovy enough,” she says, “so these dirty but busy trades are always bottom of the visiting list. I think ministers believe they’ll seem more modern in hi-tech environments.” Or perhaps visiting a collection of mugs reminds them too much of the Commons?
•The Speaker John Bercow has rebuked the Tory Greg Hands for being “long-winded”. This same Bercow once told a Labour MP: “Moderately vivid imagination though I possess, a fact to which I made reference in responding to someone last week, I really cannot imagine a colleague whom it is more impolitic or foolish to fail timeously to answer than the honourable gentleman.”
Those who are impolitic or foolish enough to take residence in fixed hereditaments of a glazed nature would be well advised to desist from the precipitate delivery of stones.
•At the age of 82, Dame Joan Bakewell still sets male pulses racing. The broadcaster and Labour peer says of her favourite red heels: “God, do men like them. I’ve even been stopped in the Lords by old gentlemen who were deeply moved.” This effect on the blood pressure of elderly peers is presumably why they are called “killer” heels.
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•The Conservative MP Gavin Barwell has written a book, How to Win a Marginal Seat, in which he recalls canvassing in his Croydon Central constituency (majority: 165). A voter had slammed the door after telling him: “Doomsday would come before anyone in this house votes Conservative.” Moments later, the man’s wife tiptoed down the road to reveal that she had been a Tory for 50 years but had never told her husband. Every little helps.
• Alun Cairns, the Tory MP for Vale of Glamorgan, has been told he can’t hold surgeries in a Barry Island beach hut, so he has decided to use a branch of McDonald’s instead. Vote Conservative for extra fries.