I have discovered that Ed Miliband is involved in a major Labour cover-up. The party’s leader, an advocate of greater transparency in British politics, is mainly keeping his jacket on in public these days. The era of shirtsleeves is largely over. A mole disclosed that a focus group was consulted on the vitally important issue of whether Red Ed should be seen in or out of the top half of his £750 Spencer Hart suit. Men weren’t especially bothered either way but, muttered the Labour insider, women voters thought the young Milibrother looked more prime ministerial in a jacket. He’s all nicely decked out in knotted pastelcoloured ties, too. The Labour leader’s office calls it smart politics.
October’s edition of WI News, the official organ of the Women’s Institute, found its way to your correspondent via a Labour MP who sheepishly confessed that his mother is a stalwart of the jam-and-Jerusalem movement. The newsletter includes an account from Bicton & Oxon WI of an ill-starred visit to the historic Upton Cressett Hall, home for 40 years to the Tory anti-Europe bore Bill Cash and now the pride and joy of his son William. The WI is upset that Cash the Younger confused their august organisation with the Townswomen’s Guild, a rival group with Suffragette roots, in his own account of the fateful day for the Daily Mail.
Upton Cressett resembled Fawlty Towers on the day in question and I’ll let the WI correspondent recount several sorry episodes: “His [Cash the Younger’s] public toilets were locked and he did not have the key, and disaster struck when a desperate lady from the Townswomen’s Guild used the house toilet and shut the front door, locking out Mr Cash and his staff. After he lost his temper and threatened to call off the visit, he got in through a window and tea and a tour of the house followed.”
Strangers’ Bar in the House of Commons has reopened after a £15,000 makeover. The width of the green bar was doubled to put staff more than punching distance from MPs. The new panoramic mirror cracked after the first Westminster preening and a replacement was fitted.
Strangers’ is now included in Cask Marque, the scheme identifying watering holes for real-ale devotees. The listing is superfluous when members of the public, otherwise known as electors, are barred from popping in to enjoy a £2.85 pint of Midnight Walk.
Labour MPs still giggle after Nadine Dorries’s Scouse broadened as she pitched for opposition support in her failed bid for a deputy speakership and £36,360 subvention. My snout with the finely tuned accent detector thought the Tory from Liverpool, an endangered species if ever there was one, sounded like a cross between Cilla Black and Ricky Tomlinson. I reckon Esther McVey has honed her Scouse, too, since Dave Cameron appointed her to shout about strivers and skivers.
The Townswomen’s Guild’s brush with the keeper of Upton Cressett, by the way, ended badly. The WI correspondent reported: “While we were then looking at the garden he [Cash the Younger again] totally lost his temper again with ladies from the other group and frogmarched them off the premises.”
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