Ephraim Hardcastle
REFERRING piously to politicians with murky pasts in the wake of her Labour colleague Jared o’mara’s suspension for alleged sexist, racist and homophobic remarks, shadow treasury minister Anneliese Dodds remarks on TV: ‘We’ve got to turn our backs on them.’ Her host, BBC2 Daily Politics presenter Andrew Neil, points out: ‘only when it’s a Tory. That’s the Labour attitude. When it’s Tories, they should be hung, drawn and quartered. When it’s Jared o’mara, a fellow Labour MP, you say, “oh, he’s on a journey!”’
KIRSTIE (Location, Location, Location) Allsopp, 46, quit Twitter (and her 410,000 followers) in July after being called a snob for saying that having a washing machine in the kitchen was ‘disgusting’. She referred to her critics elegantly as **** wits’ but, like a moth to the flame, the well-nourished bossyboots is back, tweeting: ‘If Megan Markle is in the slightest bit like Rachel in #Suits [her US TV series] Prince Harry really is onto a winner.’ Perhaps house-hunting Harry will ask Kirstie for advice.
DURING her visit to the Household Cavalry, the Queen officially names Perseus, a drum horse, pictured, to whom she has sanctioned the rank of major. I hope Hm won’t consider it lese-majesty if I remind readers that emperor Caligula was considered insane for threatening to give his horse, Incitatus, the rank of consul, just to annoy the Senate, although he didn’t carry out his threat.
PRINCE Charles summoned the SNP’s land reform secretary, Roseanna Cunningham, on the last day of his extended Scottish break at Birkhall. He’ll inherit the 50,000 acres of Balmoral – bought by Prince Albert in 1852 for £31,500 (about £2million in today’s money) – and wants to hold onto it. In 2008, he was reported to have offered it to the people of Scotland in a conversation with then SNP leader Alex Salmond, meaning Scotland would have paid the running costs. Nothing came of it. Is Salmond’s successor, Nicola Sturgeon, likely to be more pliable?
FORMER Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, a know-it-all anxious to lecture us arrogantly about the benefits of the EU, clearly didn’t do his homework in Sheffield Hallam, the seat he lost to Labour candidate Jared o’mara at the last election. How, we’re entitled to wonder, did the so-called former deputy prime minister fail to do his homework on o’mara, which might have brought to light earlier the extraordinarily offensive remarks which have now resulted in o’mara’s suspension by Labour?
CHOSEN as Britain’s ‘most influential black person’ for her campaign against Brexit, businesswoman Gina Miller is introduced on the BBC’s News at Ten as ‘the entrepreneur who took on this Government’ – the prefix ‘this’ indicating the Corporation’s distinctive disapproval of the Tory administration. Interviewed deferentially, Ms Miller said black writer Maya Angelou and former First Lady Michelle Obama are her role models.