SO WHICH PM’S THE REAL ARFUR DALEY, SIR JOHN?

BY TOMORROW at the latest we will learn the Supreme Court’s judgment on the claim that the Prime Minister had unlawfully misled the Queen when advising her to prorogue Parliament.

The most remarkable aspect of the case was that a previous Tory PM, Sir John Major, had joined the case against Boris Johnson.

Major’s characteristically down-to-earth argument to the court was that Johnson’s behaviour evoked a spivvy estate agent misleading a customer — that, in effect, we had an Arthur Daley in Downing Street.

This immediately brought to my mind a story told by Major’s friend Gyles Brandreth — one which regularly brought the house down when Brandreth used it on tours of his oneman show.

He recalled how when he was a Whip in Major’s 1992-97 administration the PM had come across him in the Commons tea-room looking a bit down in the dumps.

And when Major asked what the matter was, Brandreth explained that his wallet was being too repeatedly emptied by the endless raffles he was expected to enter as guest of honour at fund-raisers by Conservative Party constituency associations.

Brandreth continued: ‘He said: “You do not need to buy tickets at every raffle you attend.” I said: “I do.” He said: “You don’t.”

‘And there and then, in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland fished into his top, left-hand jacket pocket, and there were one, two, three, four, five strips of different coloured tickets.

‘He said: “Gyles, as you arrive at any function, all you do as you walk through that door, you pull out your raffle tickets on display, and they think, oh, that nice Mr Major, that nice Mr Brandreth, he’s already bought his raffle tickets.”

‘Then John Major turned to me and said: “I bought these tickets in 1982.” ’ So which PM more resembles Arthur Daley: Boris Johnson or John Major?