• The sports minister Gerry Sutcliffe has received a royal seal of approval, his breeding enabling him to get along famously with the Queen. He’s a bookie’s son and she’s a race horse owner who prefers the company of gee-gees to that of Princess Anne, despite the alleged resemblance. And Sutcliffe learned how to address little old dears while a floor walker in Bradford’s old Brown Muffs department store, directing the blue-rinse brigade to the trinket counter. Your correspondent’s snout recalled the pair deep in conversation over lunch at Cheltenham. When a titled trainer politely asked Betty about the future of racing, she was overheard responding: “Ask the sports minister, he was speaking knowledgeably of it on TV.” Move over, Simon Cowell: in Buck House, it’s Sutcliffe who’s big on the box.

  • Half a dozen parliamentarians are trembling over personal friendships with a youngish lady labelled a “curvy brunette” by the hacks-in-macs. MPs studying a pair of legs in stockings and suspenders, pictured in the News of the Screws for the past two weekends, believe they’ve identified the owner. She hasn’t been spied in person since the exposure of a side of Nigel Griffiths that the Big Gordie idolator had hitherto mercifully kept fully clothed. Wee Nigel may not be the last to blush and, in no particular order, the beer brigade named two Labour MPs, a peer, one Tory, a Lib Dem and a prominent SNPer. Labour whips hope wee Nigel didn’t take a snap of his female acquaintance smoking a cigar within the precincts of the Palace of Westminster. House authorities take a tolerant view of cavorting, but the No Smoking policy is strictly enforced.

  • Showbiz sorts at a glitzy bash to celebrate Spandau Ballet re-forming were intrigued by a large chap in a fedora, with a red hankie flapping out of his breast pocket, man-marking Tony Hadley. Was he a pop promoter? Perhaps a roadie? The member of the group sent to find out enquired: “Do I know you?” “Might do,” shot back the chap. “Are you with the group?”

    “Sort of.” “Are you in the music industry?” “Kind of.” To spare you the full 20 questions, the big fan was Tommy-Gun Watson. The Cabinet Office minister had slipped away to an “important meeting” to recapture his lost youth. The 42-year-old teenager’s face dropped when he returned to the Commons to discover that comrades were cruelly indifferent to his Spandau Ballet wristband.

  • The Commons pool champion Shahid Malik has hung up his cue to give someone else a pot at the £1,500 prize. In a moment of uncharacteristic self-awareness, the justice minister realised he courted unpopularity after winning three years on the trot. It’s either a generous move, or the first shot in a campaign to win votes for a shadow cabinet seat in opposition.

  • Ed Balls’s admission in last week’s magazine that he’d love Alistair Darling’s and Gordon Brown’s jobs prompted an informant to mutter how he’d once told the Kiddies’ Secretary he’d need to beat Miliband. “Yes,” replied Balls, “but which one?” Try heads it’s Ed, tails it’s David.

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