Westminster wars...

HOW sensible of Theresa May to choose hiking in the Swiss Alps for her summer break. No woman, let alone our Prime Minister, wants to be snapped red as a lobster on a sunshine holiday, with her wobbly bits showing in unflattering swimmers. Leave that to David Cameron.

The Kew literary festival is excited to have Paddy Ashdown promoting his new book Game Of Spies, about the French resistance. I’d rather read an honest account of Paddy Pantsdown’s lurid affair with Tricia howard. he could call it Game Of (Unzipped) Flies.

WHEN he was PM, Tony Blair ‘didn’t do God’. Now he’s snapped barechested on the beach wearing a large crucifix around his neck. Is this to protect him from demonic spirits, or just from the rightly furious families of the soldiers killed in the Iraq war, who are magnificently fighting to bring a court action against him.

MORE than 6,000 elderly bed-blockers stuck in hospitals are costing the NHS £6 billion a year. This is not just because social services and care homes can’t look after them, but also because their families don’t. Of course, there are cases where children are unable to care for their aged parents, but in many situations it’s not that they can’t, just that they won’t.

A REPORT by the plainspeaking Eric Pickles claims the authorities turned a blind eye to electoral fraud in Muslim communities for fear of appearing racist. It is not racist to acknowledge the biggest area of electoral fraud is postal voting, nor that there are more than 800,000 Muslims in England and Wales who have little or no English. Most of them are Asian women. If you can’t even speak the language, how can you fill out a postal vote?