Dobbo's frank talk with Mandela

Star turn of the tea room is the unlikely figure of Alistair "Now Everybody's" Darling. The country's bank manager has taken to boasting to the troops that he's halfway through implementing Labour's 1983 election manifesto. Hitherto known as "the longest suicide note in history", the nationalisation plan is suddenly regarded as a new Labour road map. Darling might cut the quips when he learns that the veteran lefty Ronnie Campbell was heard muttering that now's the time to restore Clause Four to the party's constitution.

The Tory martyr David Davis isn't having much luck with mobile phones. The victor of the Haltemprice and Howden by-election (sole major party candidate: D Davis) lost a third, this time in Afghanistan, after a pair were nicked during his party's Birmingham jamboree. The former SAS reservist's Nokia was "fried" in the war zone (Helmand, not Brum) by US electronic waves. David Cameron may be required to adopt similar techniques to silence backbench androids who increasingly mutter profanities about the lack of tax-cutting red meat as the chief Con slides in the polls.

Scratch a minister and the stories just keep on coming about Caroline "Heart of" Flint. A Downing Street snout whispers the Eurostar season-ticket holder was lucky to survive after directing a profanity of her own at Gordon Brown when the Supreme Leader demoted her in this month's reshuffle. The Europe minister clearly isn't as diplomatic as the foreign service may desire. Next week I'll set a matter straight involving her line manager, David Miliband.

The head of Labour's beardie tendency, plain-speaking Frank "Fooking" Dobson, displays a witty self-deprecation absent in Heart of Flint. Dobbo told a south-east Labour fundraiser he was thrilled a while back to be granted a second audience with Nelson Mandela. The tribune of Holborn and St Pancras was uncharacteristically struck dumb when Saint Nelson greeted him: "Hello Frank, lovely to see you again." As a surprised Dobson wondered if Mandela actually remembered him, the great man exploited Dobbo's evident bemusement by inquiring: "You do remember me, don't you Frank?"

One Miliband story for now comes from an encounter between a guest at Labour's Manchester shindig and the young Foreign Secretary, just after he'd slipped on that banana skin of a speech. At breakfast the following day in the Radisson hotel, the woman politely offered reassuring praise. "Are you telling the truth?" was the retort. When the lady insisted she was, Miliboy recovered his diplomatic poise to utter a plaintive, "Oh, I'm learning", before scuttling off for his muesli.

Kevin Maguire is associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror

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