Just when you think the Jeremy Thorpe scandal scam has been exhausted, you hit fresh pay dirt. Quite literally. The former Liberal Party leader, now a very old man with advanced Parkinson's disease, agreed to co-operate with the historian Michael Bloch on a semi-official biography, on the understanding that the book would not be published until after his death. On that basis, he and his friends have been very frank, including the sex bits. It has taken five years to complete, and those who have read it say the book is alarmingly explicit. Norman Scott, bite your pillow.
But Bloch changed publishers, and his new company, Little, Brown, has deemed the gentleman's agreement null and void. It intends to publish in January. Thorpe, who still has all his marbles despite his illness, is understandably distraught, especially when he hears that the word at Little, Brown is "he shouldn't have lived so long". Bloch's best-known work is a biography of Ribbentrop. Maybe that's where he learnt about pact-breaking.
Ben Bevington, a hitherto unheard-of teenage vanity merchant on the Wolverhampton Express & Star, has sold his memoirs for £200 to the gullible Guardian after only one trip with the Prime Minister. The Shropshire starlet claims to have scooped the entire Westminster lobby five times before lunch, although political correspondents clearly remember him telling his newsdesk to take one story from Reuters. He also enhanced his career prospects (not by very much) by quoting old lobby hands on things they said in private. Perhaps he could now turn his talents to persuading the real story of the week, Paul Marsden, to talk to his paper. By all accounts, the anti-war MP for Shrewsbury hasn't spoken to the E&S since it stitched up his private life a couple of years ago.
Is this the first Tory cabinet, real or fantome (as Alan Watkins would say), not to include an Old Etonian? Claret-swilling Nick Wood, the newly confirmed head spin-doctor at Central Office, thinks it probably is. His toff sidekick, Henry McCrory, late of the Daily Star, insists that his baby-faced boss Oliver Letwin, the shadow home secretary, was at Eton. Funny, most people think OIly is still at school and just gets an exeat to do the politics thing.
Unsporting behaviour in the Westminster All-Party Football Group. A lads' coup engineered by the House of Commons goalie, Gerry Sutcliffe, deprived hapless Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent Rovers) of the chairmanship after 12 years serving as vice-chair. Alan Keen, a Brentford supporter, was installed amid charges of game-fixing. The guest of honour, Garth Crooks of Spurs fame, found himself drafted as independent scrutineer of the poll. Walley was near to tears, and took her ball away. Meanwhile, Clive Soley MP made a cameo appearance in A Kick Up the R's, the fanzine of his team, Queen's Park Rangers. "He knows f*** all about football, but he's been good to QPR," observed the writer.
Lord (Bill) Rodgers has given up the struggle to contain the outrageous behaviour of the Liberal Democrat peers. Sources in the other place suggest that Baroness (Shirley) Williams will take over as chairman of the party's group in the Upper House. Brilliant gel and all that but, given her notorious disorganisation, Shirley shome mishtake.
Stephen Pound, the excitable ultra-Blairite backbencher, is being groomed as a successor to Fraser Kemp, the unofficial minister for the Today programme. Kemp was a persuasive seller of the government line, but his elevation to the whips' office has stopped his mouth. Generally speaking. Pound's defence of Jo Moore, the spin-doctor and author of the sick "bury the bad news on disaster day" memo, had the entire BBC staff in Millbank rolling on the floor and kicking their legs in the air with laughter. The upshot was that Moore went on trial in a special Commons debate.
Paul Routledge is chief political commentator for the Mirror
