Scribblers and telly hacks in the lobby plan to ape US journalists with a British version of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The unholy trinity of Cameron, Clegg and Miliband will attend the inaugural annual shindig on 16 January next year.
Holding a Westminster correspondents’ dinner inevitably invites accusations of self-aggrandisement and cosiness with the political class. British reporters sneer at their US counterparts for standing when a president enters the room; remaining seated as a prime minister walks in is an act of passive defiance. The event may be enlivened by a bunfight, with only 70 places available for hacks plus partners, though there are close on 300 journalists with passes to the Mock-Gothic Fun Palace. Your columnist shall be otherwise engaged.
Oh dear. Two lawyers wrote to Diane Abbott asking their local MP to attend a backbench debate on the destruction of legal aid as we know it by the In-Justice Secretary, Chris “the Jackal” Grayling. The MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington told the first that she was unable to attend “due to prior commitments in my constituency”. The second was informed: “My son graduates that day from Trinity College, Cambridge . . . and I will be with him for most of the day.” You wouldn’t need to be Rumpole of the Bailey to spot the contradiction.
Sticking with Abbott, I hear she’s sounding out trade union support for a potential tilt at the London mayoralty. Tottenham’s David Lammy, who thought he’d secured Abbott’s backing, is unimpressed. With Alan Johnson, Sadiq Khan and Tessa Jowell also mentioned in despatches, soon we may reach the point where it would be easier to ask which Londonborn Labour MPs aren’t interested in the City Hall job.
How the other 1 per cent lives: George Osborne’s baronetcy, his Buller past and the fee-charging schools of his children would, by the standards of most Britons, mark him out as “posh”, no matter how many times he might recite the untruthful mantra “we’re all in this together”. But not, it transpires, in the eyes of his father-in-law. A snout recounted a conversation in which Baron Howell of Guildford, a one-time minister under the Thatcher and Cameron regimes, sprang to the defence of Osborne: “He’s not posh – he lives in Notting Hill.” By the noble lord’s reckoning, perhaps, to be posh in today’s Con Party one needs to own a grouse moor and country pile.
Many apologies to the thrifty MP Paul Flynn, who informs me that when he went to Strasbourg on Council of Europe business he would drive, and never went first class by train as I was wrongly told. I’m delighted to set the record straight and regret upsetting Paul last week in a tale about the Labour frontbenchers Sadiq Khan and Wayne David. I salute Flynn for his integrity and his refusal to let a disability, which he says makes it difficult to travel by train or plane, get in the way of his duties.
Kevin Maguire is the associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror
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