Ephraim Hardcastle

REFLECTING on Westminster’s current, socalled sex scandal, Lord Prescott muses in his Sunday Mirror column: ‘For 40 years as an MP, I saw the heavy drinking culture in the Commons and the Lords. Late-night sessions and bars created the toxic environment for harassment to flourish.’ Isn’t this dangerous territory for the old bruiser? Recalling an encounter with him at her home in 1978, writer Linda McDougall, whose husband Austin Mitchell had just become a Labour MP, claimed: ‘As he came through the door, he pushed me quite forcefully against the wall and put his hand up my skirt… There was no big fuss. I just rebuffed him politely. He shrugged and winked and we all carried on. But from that day I knew what sort of man he was.’ Prescott denied her claims in 2015, saying: ‘This [Mitchell] is the man whose wife accused me of putting my hand up her skirt bloody 30 years ago,’ adding chivalrously: ‘Have you seen his wife? Built like a bloody barn door. If I threw her against the wall, the f****** house would fall down.’ ALTHOUGH the Prime Minister promises to make sure the Honours List ‘commands public confidence’, our bewigged brethren continue disproportionately to collect gongs. Last week the Queen received 12 new High Court justices and was obliged to make them knights or dames. Last month, Theresa May sent the new Lord Chief Justice – Sir Ian Burnett, now Baron Burnett of Maldon – to the Lords, although there is no longer a need for him to sit there. JOANNA Lumley, 71, lends her la-di-da voice to Joey, the colt at the centre of Michael Morpurgo’s play War Horse, pictured with her, for a new concert recording. She found it ‘unbelievably easy because I used to be one!’, adding: ‘My friend Felicity and I would gallop about being both rider and animal. You’d buck and kick, tie yourself up at railings, and eat from your own hand.’ Multi-tasking, even as a child! ITV’S News at Ten presenter Tom Bradby, 50, has been providing viewers with regular updates of sexual misbehaviour by male MPs. When he was a junior ITV producer in 1992, the late Tory MP, frisky Teresa Gorman (who died in 2015 aged 83) took a fancy to charming Tom. She rang a woman colleague of his, saying: ‘Have that boy scrubbed and sent to my room.’ APPOINTED to succeed Peter Hunt as BBC royal correspondent, Jonny Dymond says he’ll do the job ‘from the bottom up’, concentrating on what ordinary people think of the royals. Incidentally, in 2008 Dymond was caught with cannabis in his luggage when flying out of Vilnius. He was fined £230 and banned from entering the Lithuanian presidential palace. Let’s hope he won’t be banned from Buck House. FORMER Tory MP Ann Widdecombe, 70, tells Russia Today – Vladimir Putin’s mysterious international broadcasting system – that she was never a victim of ‘inappropriate behaviour’ in the Commons. Interviewer Sam Delaney suggests, somewhat oleaginously: ‘People might have known what they might have got had they tried anything saucy with you.’ Ms Widdecombe ripostes: ‘They probably would have known what they wouldn’t get.’