The death of Sir Raymond Powell, MP for Ogmore in South Wales, has brought about some discreet speculation in Westminster bars. Powell was the backbencher with responsibility for gathering and authenticating proxy votes in shadow cabinet elections when Labour was in opposition.

Interest centres on what are known as "the Tippex votes", suggesting a little light orchestration to achieve the desired results. Naturally, this scandalous suggestion has nothing to do with Sir Ray being the only serving Labour MP to be knighted in recent years.

Cecil Parkinson, who scandalised the nation over his treatment of his disabled daughter, Flora, by his secretary Sara Keays, has lost none of his self-esteem down the years. A woman television researcher visiting the former Tory chairman's home was invited to admire a hideous portrait of old Smoothiechops. "My wife wanted to have it done," he smarmed. The picture shows the old seducer's head from five different angles. What other politician would have the faces for it?

John Cryer, the handsome but rather shy Decent Labour fellow, is the last person I would have expected to appear in a skin-flick. But there he was, naked as nature intended, in the festive season showing of The Railway Children - the traditional 1972 version, not the newfangled one. True, he was only two at the time, but it is not often that we get to see an Honourable Member's distinguished member on film. He appears as the infant son of Perks, the station porter. Cryer's father, the late Bob, MP for Keighley, saved the Worth Valley Railway where the movie was shot.

Tony Blair is undeniably a loyal royalist, but I am beginning to have my doubts about Cherie. I hear that, when the First Couple visited Balmoral recently, the Queen expressed a desire to see baby Leo in the nursery. No problem. Except that Cherie's nursery maid did not curtsy, or even rise from her seat. This show of bad manners is said to have Cherie's approval, which I find hard to believe. Unless she's a closet republican, or there's only room for one monarch.

While the Sergeant at Arms warns staff at Westminster of an anthrax scare, another malefactor is at work. He (or she) sent rat poison to John Bercow, the engaging, shoot-from-the-lip Tory frontbencher. Or perhaps it was simply a tribute to his rat-like cunning.

The hoi polloi of Millbank are off to Geordieland, but Labour's top brass will move only a few hundred yards. The pain of moving is being eased for the new general secretary, David Triesman, and a few close associates with salary rises of 30 per cent. Who's the fat cat now?

In Yorkshire, they call him the Scargill Pimpernel, on account of his invisibly low profile. Is King Arthur, 64 this month, grooming a successor for the £70,000-a-year presidency of the National Union of Mineworkers, a job he has held for 20 years? Not quite. Frank Cave, his second in command and also deputy leader of the Socialist Labour Party, Arthur's private political fiefdom, has just died. Scargill has now, well, let us say adjusted the situation, so that he becomes honorary president for life. This is a proper recognition of his remarkable achievement in reducing the strongest, most democratic and politically influential trade union to an effete laughing stock with only a few thousand paying members.

The answers to my Christmas quiz, which asked readers to complete the five Treasury football tests, were: Gordon Brown supports Raith Rovers; Ed Balls, Norwich; Ed Miliband, Leeds United; Dawn Primarolo, Bristol City; and Charlie Whelan, Spurs. Alas, no "lay" NS reader got the right answers, so the prize - Andy McSmith's novel, Innocent in the House - goes to Patrick Hennessy, political correspondent of the Evening Standard.

Paul Routledge is chief political commentator for the Mirror

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