Courtiers at Buckingham Palace tend to be unimpressed by snooty party officials. My man who hangs out at the equerries’ favourite pub reports that the joint Downing Street chiefs of staff have been given Palace nicknames. Nick Timothy is known as Solzhenitsyn, partly for his beard but mainly because his writing is hard to understand, while the Glaswegian Fiona Hill is called Lady Macbeth: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. These are not, I stress, the views of the Queen, whose literary interest tends not to go much farther than Dick Francis novels.
A colleague recently met a pathologist who was moaning about the courses he had to complete to keep his certificate to practise. Among them were “resuscitation” and “patient references”, neither of which usually concerns the corpses he deals with.
NAKED AMBITION
Should the election end with Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister, the question is whether El Gato, his revolutionary moggy, will supplant Larry as Downing Street mouser. Corbyn, however, already has a fine potential chief cat in his shadow chancellor. In 1984, John McDonnell played the role of Dick Whittington’s puss in a Greater London council panto just before he lost his job in a row over rate-capping. It turned out the streets of London weren’t paved with gold after all.
Mr Corbyn is fond of bank holidays, promising four more if he wins. How about a day off next year to mark the golden anniversary of the Corbyn beard, which is older than 11 members of the present cabinet? He started to grow it as a volunteer in Jamaica in 1968. “They called me Mr Beardman,” he said. That could be Beardman the prime minister soon.
SOUND THINKING
DJ Taylor, biographer of George Orwell, described the Tory manifesto in The Spectator as “agreeably sonorous”. Others may use another word associated with bell-ringing: “dung”. It led Lord Lexden to suggest a competition to find the least sonorous passage in a manifesto. He nominates this thriller from the Tory one in 1997: “We will continue to build on our record of improving safety on roll-on, roll-off ferries and cargo ships through higher standards of survivability.”
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John Bercow has broken his word about standing down as Commons Speaker next year and says he will stay to 2022. The words of Noël Coward come to mind. “Never trust a man with short legs,” he said. “His brains are too near his bottom.”
ANYTHING GOES
One of the stars of Labour’s campaign has been Barry Gardiner, the shadow trade secretary. He has been an MP for 20 years but hardly anyone had heard of him before now. “I’ve never been an anyista,” he tells the New Statesman. “I’ve never been a Corbynista, a Milibandite, a Brownite or a Blairist. That accounts for why I’ve been so obscure for so long.”
