PETERBOROUGH

Alastair Stewart has had enough

Veteran newscaster Alastair Stewart says he has identified a clear “conscious desire on the part of the mainstream public service broadcasters to oust” Boris Johnson.

Stewart – now at GB News after four decades at ITN News – tells me on Chopper’s Politics podcast there is a barely disguised “glee when things turn out badly for the Prime Minister”.

Blaming Twitter, he says former colleagues Alastair Burnet, left, and Michael Brunson would never “sink” to being controversial on social media just to build a profile. Stewart is too polite to name names but says that it “doesn’t take a rocket scientist” to work it out. Who can he mean?

Mick finally hugs Cilla Sir Mick Jagger might have slept with thousands of women, but he never got close to Liverpool singer Cilla Black.

The Rolling Stones frontman told a crowd on the first night of the band’s tour at Liverpool FC’S Anfield ground this week that it was his first time in the city since 1971. He had gone on a tour of the sites and came across the statue of Black, who also conquered the charts in the 1960s.

“I hugged Cilla Black in Mathew Street,” Jagger said (right, with the statue). “Which is a lot closer than I ever got to her in real life.” Perhaps even Jagger can’t always get what he wants?

Triple-booked Harry Evans

Authors Jilly Cooper, Robert Harris and Anthony Holden joined actor Jeremy Irons and historian Sir Simon Schama to pay tribute to legendary Fleet Street editor Sir Harry Evans this week. His widow Tina Brown told a memorial service at London’s Mansion House how Evans had a “tendency to double book himself then disappear”.

She said: “One summer day I came downstairs at our house in a bathrobe to find three different guests in different rooms awaiting his appearance.”

There was “a middle-aged Kentucky socialite in a huge hat” in the sitting room, a journalism student in the dining room and US civil rights activist Reverend Al Sharpton in the garden, wanting tips on a memoir. “Unfortunately, Harry was nowhere to be seen,” Brown said. “He was out playing table tennis.”

MCC caps stay on for the Queen

More evidence of poor form at Lord’s. I disclosed last month how an MCC boss had reportedly joked that members had had to “empty all those colostomy bags” during its annual meeting. Now I hear that some members in the pavilion failed to remove their red and yellow caps for the national anthem during the Platinum Jubilee test match against New Zealand. “How disappointing to see the majority of MCC members in the pavilion, with their hats on during the singing of the national anthems, on the Thursday of the Queen’s Jubilee,” one member tells me, blaming a “paucity of manners”.

The MCC says no rules were broken and no one has complained. Do they let in anyone these days?

Rayner’s tug o’ war

Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner and Tory foreign minister James Cleverly helped MPS trounce peers in the Commons vs Lords tug o’ war, above right, in Westminster Abbey College Garden this week. Rayner inspired the MPS with the rallying cry: “We are not here to take part, we are here to win.”

It was the first time the event, which raised thousands of pounds for Macmillan Cancer Support, had been held for three years because of Covid.

“The Lords used to win years ago but since hereditary peers lost their sitting rights we’ve been doing a lot better,” one MP said. Hereditaries tend to be younger and fitter. Progress of sorts, I suppose.

Tony’s dodgy dossier

Harry Hill’s musical satire Tony! The Tony Blair Rock Opera, which opened this week at the Park Theatre in north London, sounds fun. Jez Bond, the Park’s artistic director, says he wants Blair and other New Labour top brass like Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson to come. Comedian Alexei Sayle – who once said he hated Blair more than Margaret Thatcher – was spotted there on the first night.

Bond even called in the lawyers to check the script for libel. How else to explain one of the best jokes about the infamous “dodgy dossier” which led to Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war?

“Nothing in the dossier has been made up,” says the character of Blair. “Who told you to say that?”, replies Robin Cook. “The theatre’s legal team,” says Blair. Boom, boom!