Rory can fill the yawning gap

FORMER Tory cabinet minister Rory Stewart’s eccentric idea of sleeping in voters’ houses during his campaign to be Independent Mayor of London has — perhaps inevitably — provoked ridicule. Tory MP Tom Tugendhat tweets: ‘Rory, it’s my wife’s birthday and the babysitter has let us down. Can you sleep on the sofa? The kids will hardly disturb you. If you explain your housing policies, I’m sure they’ll drop off like angels.’

In the latest list of donations to the Labour leadership campaigns, Lisa nandy was top with £91,755, Rebecca Long-Bailey second with £54,493, and Sir Keir Starmer in third with £10,321. Shadow foreign secretary emily thornberry, meanwhile, raised precisely £0. With a bank balance like that, it’s no wonder she was eliminated from the race at the weekend.

More on John Bercow’s terribly written autobiography, Unspeakable, the title of which is an apt description of the ex-Speaker’s appalling behaviour over Brexit. Sainsbury’s is offering it at half-price — just one week after it was published.

ALAS, newly elected Labour MP Tahir Ali will not be able to channel all his energies into helping the good people of his constituency, Birmingham Hall Green. The latest Commons register of interests reveals he’s spending 36½ hours a month as a Royal Mail engineer — earning him an extra £42,000, almost half as much again as his £82,000 MP’s salary. Even more brazenly, Ali plans to continue taking this cash ‘until further notice’. One suspects his letterbox will soon be inundated with furious messages from understandably irate constituents. Or, perhaps, they’ll be lost in the post?