Pick of the week’s Gossip

John Mcdonnell, the Labour shadow chancellor, claimed this week that he simply can’t be friends with Tories – but his colleague Diane Abbott says she has no such qualms. She has been on friendly terms with Michael Portillo for years: they appeared in a joint production of Macbeth while at nearby schools, and later appeared as co-panellists on the BBC’S This Week. In 2003, he even invited her to his 50th birthday party, where she met his mother. “His mum came up and said, ‘I really like the way you keep Michael in his place,’ and then she leaned forward confidingly and said, ‘I’m a Lib Dem, you know.’”

Baroness Trumpington, who died this week, aged 96, became an online sensation in 2011, when she was filmed making a V sign in the House of Lords. She’d objected to Lord King referring to her as he noted that survivors of the Second World War were starting to look “pretty old”. But she’d by then had a long and varied career, from codebreaker at Bletchley Park to Tory minister. In the 1970s, she also served as a magistrate. In 1975, one Peter Cook was brought before her. He was accused of being the “Cambridge rapist” who’d terrorised the city, crimes for which he was later convicted. But Trumpington recognised him at once as her friendly delivery man from Mac Fisheries. “He would drop off my groceries and I would always say: ‘Must lock the door after you’ve gone in case the Cambridge Rapist comes’,” she recalled. “I had to leave the bench straight away, of course.”