Delving beneath the surface of t'Great Revolt over Commons select committees, it seems that the authorities had good and sufficient reasons to get rid of both Donald Anderson and Gwyneth Dunwoody. Anderson, it is argued, could not control the foreign affairs committee he chaired. And Dunwoody, the chair of transport, was fingered for her alleged role in a secretive group that wants to usurp ministers' powers in the Commons. That, not her noisy advocacy of the railways, lay behind the lamentably handled bid to dismiss her.

But the identity of the chairmen matters less than the rules under which committees operate. MPs have supinely accepted the Armstrong doctrine for nigh on 20 years. Introduced by the then cabinet secretary, Sir Robert "Economical with the Truth" Armstrong, it says that backbenchers may question ministers (though not the PM), but cannot require them to divulge civil service advice.

The peerage beckons for Margaret McDonagh, Labour's general secretary, but who will replace her? The front- runners are Maggie Jones, the party chair (which explains her unctuous flattery, reported here last week, of her rival, the Blair-appointed chairman, Charles Clarke), Chris Lennie, a former Unison official and now a Labour regional organiser, and David Triesman, the genial general secretary of the Association of University Teachers, who began his political career on the extreme left of the Essex University barricades in the 1960s.

The job is a poisoned chalice, because Blair and Clarke intend to sack 43 party full-timers. Many victims will receive only statutory redundancy pay, because the staff foolishly sold out their severance agreement for higher salaries. Some party functions will be outsourced or (in old money) privatised.

An internal Tory circular from Sir Robert Atkins says that he and other Tory MEPs want the same nominating rights for party leader as Westminster MPs. They also want the election taken out of the hands of the 1922 Committee, which has not exactly covered itself in glory. Atkins's own straw poll among consti-tuency officers and councillors yielded this result: Clarke, 103; Ancram, 33; Davis, 28; Portillo, 26; Duncan Smith, 22.

It must be true that Peter Mandelson, the self-disgracing ex-minister, went to Dublin the other day to make a speech. Sometimes, politicians have to go a long way to find an audience. But can it also be true that he is house-hunting in County Wexford? This would make a nonsense of having a round-the-clock Special Branch guard in the UK, costing the taxpayer hundreds of thousands of pounds a year.

Party time in Whitehall. The end-of-term hospitality for the parliamentary lobby was greater than in previous years, pointing to budget underspending. On one memorable night, the Scottish Secretary, Helen Liddell, the Health Secretary, Alan Milburn, and Patricia Hewitt at the DTI were competing to see how much damage they could do to hacks' livers. In a fetid den at DTI headquarters, a booze-fuelled row broke out over a ban on smoking, a fine piece of irony, as new Labour was willing to waive a planned ban on tobacco advertising in return for Bernie Ecclestone's million quid. At Margaret Beckett's bash at Defra, which is Maff in a caravan setting, I spilt a glass of red wine over Channel 4's Elinor Goodman while opening a bottle of perfectly decent plonk. My, was she cross. "That's my working suit!" she wailed.

Shaun Woodward may have won the St Helens North constituency with the discreet help of Sir Ken Jackson, general secretary of the engineering union AEEU, but he has been blackballed from the union's group at Westminster. Such disloyalty! How can Sir Ken get his peerage with these Luddites around? Incidentally, I do hope that the former Labour MP Tom Pendry, who was cross with me for suggesting he was "pining for a peerage", is happier now he is Lord Pendry.

Paul Routledge is chief political commentator for the Mirror

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