Gavin Williamson appears to be on manoeuvres. The defence secretary who always makes me think of a young Albert Steptoe, told the Daily Mail yesterday about a rather tame “affair” with a colleague when he was a fireplace salesman. She was an old flame, you might say. His memoirs will be called Grate Expectations. Puns aside, many feel that Williamson, below, leaked this information to clear his cupboard of skeletons before a leadership campaign. If so, he is following the wisdom of Lanny Davis, Bill Clinton’s special counsel, who wrote a book subtitled Tell it Early, Tell it All, Tell it Yourself. Not that his most famous client ever took that advice.
Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former spin doctor, has co-written a dire novel about football. To judge by the first chapter, old grievances have not died. The book begins with an under-pressure manager called Charlie Gordon and as early as the second paragraph Campbell has written such lines as “Gordon out” and “how long has Gordon got?” I suspect Mr Brown will not be rushing to buy a copy.
CLEGG A JAMMY DODGER
I wrote on Tuesday about Boris Johnson sending lackeys to buy him coffee without giving them enough money. He is not the only politician to pull this trick. One of Nick Clegg’s former special advisers reports that his old boss used to turn to his staff “in horror” before any tour of a market or fête and admit that he had not been to the bank. “I’ve lost count of how much of my money he spent on jam,” the flunkey says.
My series on sarcastic comments from teachers has drawn a large postbag. David Robson writes to say that in the 1960s Hubert Hoffmann, who went on to be a judge, said of one of his students at Oxford: “He has taken to law like a cat to water.”
LASER IN YOUR POCKET?
Among the tales in Fighters and Quitters, a new book on political resignations by Theo Barclay, is that of Lord Lambton, who stood down as a minister in 1973 after revelations involving prostitutes and drugs. The usual reason. In justification, he claimed that the tedium of his job had driven him to the hobbies of “gardening and whores”. He denied that it was a security risk, though, protesting: “If the call girl had suddenly said to me ‘Please tell me about the laser ray’, I would have known that something was up.”
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The book also features John Stonehouse, an MP who faked his own death by drowning in Miami in 1974. When Stonehouse washed up in Australia, newspapers had to muster ad-hoc reporting staff. These included the cricket correspondent of the Daily Express, in Melbourne for a Test match, who for the first and last time in his career found himself competing for a scoop with The Times’s opera correspondent, who had been at the Sydney Opera House.
CASE FOR PUNISHMENT
Justin Welby addressed the Pilgrims Society, which fosters friendship with America, and told them of the air miles he is totting up. Recently he was queueing for a flight to Paris behind a very obnoxious man, who gave the check-in woman a hard time. When he had moved on, the Archbishop of Canterbury gave this woman a sympathetic smile and apologised for the rudeness of his fellow traveller. “It’s OK,” she told him. “I just sent his luggage on to Tokyo.”
