When Michael Sheen interviewed Tony Blair for this week’s New Statesman the first thing they discussed was cuts. Not to public services but their hair. Both had got rather shaggy in the pandemic. “You look younger!” exclaimed Blair as he admired the actor’s peroxide blond curls. “I used to be very hairy,” Sheen said, explaining that the look was for the new series of Good Omens. “I’m an angel, of course,” he added. Blair, who was played by Sheen three times, might think that a demotion. The former prime minister had also let his hair grow very long in lockdown, below. “I thought you were in the new Lord of the Rings TV series,” Sheen remarked. Now there’s an idea: they can get him to run Middle Earth’s national elf service.
Blair switches sides
A different Blair (I assume) played a star role in the latest big football match between MPs and the press lobby. Both sides were short on numbers when Rob Merrick, the press skipper, saw a lad loitering by the pitch and asked if he would like a game. “He said his name was Blair and claimed to be semi-pro,” Merrick said. Naturally, they played him in the centre, where he helped the press to take a 3-0 lead at which point they sportingly loaned him to the MPs, who gave him the No 10 shirt. Blair’s defection worked since the politicians scored three of their own before losing on penalties.
Clive Myrie’s reporting from Ukraine has won praise from Clive Anderson and not just for his courage. The Loose Ends host once asked Peter Cook why he and Dudley Moore called their foul-mouthed philosophers Derek and Clive. “It was the naffest name we could think of,” Cook said. “But now we’ve got Clive Myrie as a war reporter,” Anderson says. “He’s put Clives back on the map.”
Crime doesn’t pay
Liberated from HMP Westminster in 2019, Anna Soubry has returned to a life of crime as a barrister, where she says the pay for taking Legal Aid cases is dreadful. After expenses on one case, Soubry got £12 an hour. “No wonder so many have left the criminal bar,” she tweeted. It drew a reply from another barrister, Oliver Thorne, who said he recently made £46.50 on a rape case. “Same day my dog was an extra on Emmerdale,” he said. “He earned £50.” Ruff justice.
It is rare to talk about perfect timing in British transport but there was a fine moment of serendipity yesterday when a member of the transport select committee was asking about skills shortages and from the jacket pocket of the Network Rail chairman there came a sudden cry of “Mind the Gap!” Sir Peter Hendy, who once ran the London Tube, explained: “It’s a good ringtone.”
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Finders keepers
Eighteen prime ministers have been published in The Spectator, starting with William Gladstone who lamented in 1872 that the job didn’t allow much time to read Homer. The most recent, ignoring the ubiquitous Boris, had been Theresa May’s recipe for Christmas cake in 2020. Now David Cameron has got his first byline with a diary about a road trip delivering food supplies to Ukraine. “We came across a few national stereotypes,” he writes. There were 14 different types of sausage at a Polish service station for a start. The German autobahns were naturally spotless. And in a hotel room in Eindhoven they found someone had left a set of handcuffs and a long metal chain.
