Like the England men’s rugby team, the Commons and Lords XV head to Paris this weekend for what is billed locally as “le crunch parlementaire”. The Westminster team lost 22-10 to the Irish parliament last week, after a 20-10 defeat by the Welsh Senedd and a 12-5 win in blizzard conditions over Holyrood. France’s politicians have played only once this season, a 15-15 draw in Edinburgh. “We play ‘golden oldies’ rules,” explains Mark Pawsey, MP for Rugby and chairman of the club, “which enables old men to keep playing long after they should have hung up their boots. The principle is that ‘the beer tastes better when your knees are muddy’.” Though since the French team play on an artificial pitch they expect there will be more bière than boue. “Whatever the result,” Pawsey adds, “the post-match hospitality will ensure it’s soon forgotten.”
Several MPs have played international rugby, most recently Tonia Antoniazzi, who was capped nine times at prop by Wales and is now a shadow Northern Ireland minister. One that got away from Westminster was Carwyn James, who stood in Llanelli for Plaid Cymru in the 1970 general election. Fortunately, he came a distant second, meaning he was free to coach the Lions to a famous series win in New Zealand the next year.
Caught napping
The Lords has been sitting very late recently so some sympathy is owed to Lord Young of Norwood Green, whose question at 10pm on Monday in a debate on genetically modified organisms was rejected by a government whip because he’d been asleep during the minister’s speech earlier. When Young protested that he had merely been thinking deeply, Baroness Bloomfield remarked that she’d had to send a doorkeeper to wake him. It reminded me of when Sir Desmond Swayne, a Tory MP, was mocked for nodding off in a Brexit debate in 2018. Swayne had the humour to allude to this the next day when he bounced up in PMQs and declared: “A question keeps me awake at night. . .”
Spectacular key change
Before journalism, Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, had a talent for pounding away at a different keyboard for which he earned £50 an hour in Glasgow shopping centres. “You came very close to being a piano player in a brothel,” observed Sir Simon Wessely as he interviewed Nelson at the Royal Society of Medicine. “How did you get out of that?” “By not being a particularly good piano player,” Nelson replied.
A fine mixed metaphor emerged in the Commons yesterday from Helen Whately, a Treasury minister, who declared that “now is the moment for us to go full steam ahead with our transition away from fossil fuels”. Bet she was chuff-chuff-chuffed with that one.
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Grunge vocabulary
Even hard rockers try to watch their language around their mothers. Dave Grohl, frontman for Foo Fighters, tells Empire he didn’t swear in front of his mother — “the most wonderful, loving, kind woman of all time” — until he was in his twenties. Once the tap was turned on, though, he admits it was hard to stop but his mother still saw the best in him. “Because she’s so sweet,” says Grohl, inset, “she once complimented me on how many swear words I could fit into one sentence while still being grammatically correct.”