Clare proves just the ticket
A starry turnout in honour of Doris Lessing’s Nobel prize at the HarperCollins party at the Wallace Collection. Look, there’s George Osborne, Germaine Greer, Tom Stoppard. It was, said our spy, “the kind of do where you recognise every second person”. Including the coat-check girl. Clare Short.
“I wasn’t working in the cloakroom per se,” says the former Cabinet minister, when we call, a touch incredulously, to check. “I’d given my ticket to the man. Nothing happened. So I went to get it myself. Everyone started to do it and they tried to buzz everyone off so I said, ‘No, I know where her coat is, his coat is and showed the staff where things were’.” Alas, no tips.
Don’t they age gracefully on the Continent? Above, at the Santa Cruz de Tenerife carnival in Tenerife, we have Gerard Depardieu and Sophia Loren, neither of them looking more than a century or two over 16.
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Drawing to a close our extracts from the student days of Ruth Kelly (Ents Officer, The Queen’s College, Oxford, 1987), we spot that our Ruth was late to a meeting on February 1, during which one Stephen Twigg popped up to urge the JCR to support “Gay Week”.
Since 1998, as an MP, Kelly has missed three votes on the age of gay consent, three on civil partnerships, four on gay adoption and one on Section 28. Seat of learning, indeed.
Two stints on Radio 4’s Today in as many days from Jack “He is the Law” Straw, leading many to wonder what has become of Jacqui Smith, who is, technically, Home Secretary. Aren’t they letting her out? Indeed, is she afraid to go out? Yesterday, we are told, she was on GMTV and then at a lunch at the Embassy of Norway. So, still a heavyweight . . .
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Many pointy elbows employed in preparation for the Macmillan Cancer Support Parliamentary Variety Show, on February 7. Those without the effortless comic timing of Lembit ?pik (thb) have found that Parliament only has the one usable piano, in the Speaker’s chambers. Cue fierce fighting for places on the practice rota.
Headline of the year, probably, is the report on one American website that “Kate Moss Buys A Unique Breast Piece For Her Home”. The model, they say, “recently bought the sculpture of a blue boob sleeping on a prayer book”. Oh dear. It’s actually To Every Seed His Own Body, by the artist and bird taxidermist Polly Morgan. Can you spot their mistake?
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Postscript
George Galloway was ladling out his trademark demagoguery this week, as he gave a talk at Oxford Town Hall. “ Gordon Brown and David Cameron!” he roared. “Two cheeks of the same backside!”
One can only hope that he caught the voice from the back, which speculated as to whether he was the bit in-between.
Regret from J.G. Ballard on Radio 4 as he reassessed his “psychopathic hymn” of a novel, Crash. “Now and again I open it and think, ‘My God, this man is mad.’ I have to put it down and take a few deep breaths.”