Pick of the week’s Gossip

Penny Mordaunt and Philip Hammond often clashed during their time together in government. And at The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year Awards, Mordaunt seemed in no mood to bury the hatchet. “I have it on good authority that he is in line for a very important job,” she said of her former Cabinet colleague. “Given his reputation for being able to rain on any parade, suck the oxygen out of the room, and put a dampener on things, civil contingencies are about to deploy him to Australia.”

Brian Blessed was taken by surprise when he was invited to audition for the Cats musical ahead of its first stage run in 1981. “Cats?” he exclaimed. “F***ing gorillas maybe! Bears!” But on a later trip to the North Pole, the sheer scale of the show’s popularity became clear to him. “I came across an igloo and there was an Inuit inside, playing Memory on a banjo. Now that is success!”

When David Baddiel arrived at the BBC’s Salford studio to be interviewed about Holocaust denial last week, he found he’d been the victim of a rather regrettable mix-up. On announcing himself at reception, the comic – whose Twitter bio reads simply “Jew” – discovered that he had been named on the BBC’s visitor list as David Irving. “Do you know who that is?” Baddiel asked the puzzled receptionist. He found a photo of the Holocaust denier on Google, and showed her his phone. “If he turns up claiming to be David Baddiel,” he told her, “don’t let him in.”