The great Westminster lunch is in danger, with so many MPs now wanting to hear “still or sparkling” rather than “red or white”, and Tom Bradby, the ITN anchor and former political editor, misses the days of keeping a source on the sauce to get an indiscretion. “Lunching is critical,” he told the Petworth literary festival. “You don’t know what you are going to get.” His first political lunch was with Neil Kinnock. It lasted 4½ hours and required him sacrificing both liver and national pride. And what hot topic kept them at table so long? “We went through every Welsh rugby team in the 1970s,” Bradby said — and Kinnock was especially keen to recall the games when England were thrashed.
This year’s Christmas jumper in the parliamentary gift shop, pictured, has been designed with Cop26 in mind. It comprises 60 per cent recycled cotton and 40 per cent recycled polyester, with each jumper being made from 24 plastic bottles. Not to be confused with the cabinet, where two dozen empty vessels are used to produce something more woolly.
ABOVE THEIR STATION
Les Dennis tries to stay on the same stave as the orchestra in the ENO’s new HMS Pinafore, in which he plays the hopelessly overpromoted cabinet minister Sir Joseph Porter KCB. “I always voted at my party’s call and I never thought of thinking for myself at all,” he sings. “I thought so little they rewarded me by making me the ruler of the Queen’s Navee.” It brought back happy memories of Gavin Williamson as defence secretary. WS Gilbert’s original target was WH Smith, whom Disraeli made First Lord of the Admiralty because of his talent for flogging, albeit books not sailors. The mockery caught on and when Smith arrived in Plymouth to launch a ship he was greeted by the Royal Marines Band playing When I Was a Lad from Pinafore. He must have upset the top brass.
AYES ON THE PRIZE
Speaking of unqualified legislators, there’s a by-election for hereditary peers next week, caused by the death of Viscount Simon. Three have entered to win a seat in the upper chamber, one of four traditionally kept for Labour peers after the expulsion of all but 92 hereditaries in 1999: Lord Kennet, who topically makes a big thing of his environmental credentials; Lord Hacking, a stripling of 83; and Lord Biddulph, oddly a Tory, whose pitch for returning to the Lords runs to “I have many happy memories of the House”. Bless.
The Labour MP Kevin Brennan launched his first solo folk album, The Clown and the Cigarette Girl, with a gig at London’s 100 Club last week. Since Brennan is a fine musician, and the record is very enjoyable, one can only assume that the earplugs being given out on the door by UK Music were for his MP friends to use in the Commons.
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LET DOWN AT OXFORD
Two years after he gave away his manuscript of Kane and Abel to the Bodleian Library, Lord Archer says he could have sold it for a lot of money. The University of Texas and Brown University had a bidding war for the draft of his novel and offered a cheque with many zeros, but Archer chose Oxford. “It’s a matter of pride,” he says. And what did he get in return? “They gave me lunch,” he says. “And fairly inferior red wine.”
