All the gossip from the Westminster village

Spied queuing in the Portobello Road outside Notting Hell’s Electric Cinema to see Armando Iannucci’s spinflick In the Loop was Peter Mandelson. Curiously, he was with his one-time little helper Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, last heard of earning roubles as an internet type in Moscow. Curiouser still, they were engaged in deep conversation with the lefty poster boy Jon Cruddas. My nosy snout observed that Cruddas didn’t sit with Mandy and Benji, the Dagenham MP’s cackle suggesting he enjoyed the lampooning of spinners considerably more than the practitioners of the dark arts. To Mandy it may all have seemed rather tame.

To GMTV, where your correspondent was greeted with a friendlyish, “Ah, the email man” from a smiley “Sir” George Osborne. It was, after all, the morning after Alistair “Nobody’s” Darling’s borrowing binge Budget. I replied to the overshadowed chancellor that I knew of a website but not the smearmail – but then an assurance I would continue openly to chart his stately progress proved a red rag to this Tory. Sir George turned on his heels and was gone in a trice before I could shout, “Corfu capers.”

Hard-up former MPs are in line for “one-off” payments of up to £5,000 after being pushed off the gravy train. The money comes courtesy of the Rt Hon Peter Lilley, chairman of trustees of the little-known Members’ Fund, which has assets of £3.4m. Lilley infamously once did a Gilbert and Sullivan turn at Tory conference, singing, “I’ve got a little list” of social security scroungers in his sights. Former travellers on the Bisto Express are clearly more equal than the masses he judged to be the undeserving poor.

To an anti-BNP gathering at Congress House, where a routine by the NS’s delightful Shazia Mirza raised eyebrows among some of the sisters. A crack about “taking it up the arse”, plus another one about the disappointment when an illegal minicab driver didn’t try to rape her, were met with fixed stares. Unlike her very funny line about the annoying inaccuracy of racists these days: “A racist shouted, ‘Hey, Paki, go back to India . . .’ It was Prince Harry.”

Quite how far “Sir” George is overshadowed since Ken Clarke’s return is open to question. During Darling’s Budget funeral oration, ongoing analysis by Tory pointyheads was passed along the front bench to the trio advising Druggie Dave: Oli Letwin, Philip Hammond and Sir George himself. Reduced to the role of Postman Ken was Clarke, seated next to Hammond. The only one to have delivered an actual Budget, yet cold-shouldered on the big day.

MPs are muttering about potential resignations when July’s publication of 700,000 pages of expenses receipts will leave Jacqui Smith and her 88p bath plug looking like Old Mother Hubbard. A whip floated the idea of party leaders agreeing to hold by-elections on the same day.

It could be called Super Sleaze Thursday.

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

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