PETERBOROUGH
Dominic Raab, below, turned down reality TV offers when he was briefly out of government in September, the Justice Secretary has revealed. Raab told his staff this week that “one or two offers did come in” during his “six weeks’ sabbatical” when Liz Truss was PM.
His friends think it was Celebrity SAS – Who Dares Wins, which tantalisingly would have pitted Raab in the battle for TV viewers against his old Cabinet colleague Matt Hancock, currently in the Australian jungle filming I’m A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here! Action man Raab – a black belt in karate – in a two week military training programme designed to replicate the SAS selection going toe to toe with Hancock? Imagine the ratings!
Truss’s vocal other half
Liz Truss’s “blink and you missed it” premiership has robbed us of more appearances by her husband Hugh O’leary. It’s a shame, because a new biography of Truss – Out of the Blue, by Harry Cole and James Heale – recounts how he stood for the post of welfare and equal opportunities officer at the LSE in 1994, with an eyebrow-raising pitch to students.
“For too long we have been told that ‘equal opportunities’ means sacrificing our individuality to whichever Left-wing clique chooses to speak for us. We have allowed scrounging work-shy communists to set the agenda. We have sat idle as their ‘centrist’ fellow travellers kowtowed to their ridiculous demands in the name of political correctness.
“Well, enough is enough.
It’s time for a system that allows each individual to prosper on their own merits.
That rewards the true virtues: charity, courage, decency, honesty and good old-fashioned hard work. That’s equal opportunities and that is what I stand for. PS, Socialist Workers Party. More like Socialist Shirkers Party.”
Cole and Heale conclude: “With such outspoken views, it’s hardly a surprise that O’leary and Truss clicked so quickly.” Quite.
Lady Penning is not happy
Tory MP Sir Mike Penning is now sporting a natty moustache to raise awareness of prostate cancer in “Movember”. Looking around the Commons benches this week, he is one of the few MPS to have grown one. Penning’s wife Angela, however, is not happy. The MP for Hemel Hempstead tells me: “She hates it. Apparently even a kiss on the cheek is out of bounds until it’s off.”
A Berol just won’t do
Are standards slipping in the House of Lords? When new peer Lord Soames of Fletching, below, signed the introductions book on Monday, he used what looked like a Berol marker pen. It may reduce the danger of smudging but it doesn’t seem terribly dignified. Soames himself is not bothered, saying: “I didn’t really notice.” But another Tory peer confides: “Sadly, these are provided by the state so we use what is given to us. Maybe the last good one inadvertently
found its way to a peer’s pocket?”
Think of England
Forget the trend for “intimacy coaches”. Hollywood star Richard E Grant adopted a cheerfully English approach to get through his sole nude sex scene on screen, with Maria de Medeiros in the 1990 biographical drama film Henry & June (above, right). “The embarrassment is when you’re in a bed and they say, ‘Can you just lift your left bum-cheek to the left a little bit and then pump a little bit more like that’,” he told the Adam Buxton Podcast. “It was pre- the current situation where you have intimacy coaches, everything is plotted and planned out and supervised. Then it was 80 crew members in anoraks standing around while you have your kit off trying to look lusty in a bed. I’m not complaining!”
Post-traumatic PMQS
Ed Miliband paints a sad picture of life after being Labour Party leader. He tells me on today’s Chopper’s Politics podcast: “When you lose an election, your diary sort of empties. You’re glad for a call about your PPI claim.” He was not even asked to go on I’m A Celebrity ... when he lost the election in 2015, only the “after show”.
Miliband – who has forged a role as a green campaigner – has this advice to Liz Truss: you “don’t need to be a leader in order to make a difference”. He doesn’t even wish he were doing the job of Sir Keir Starmer. “Every week I go to PMQS, I think, ‘Thank God I’m not doing it’. I have PTSD when I’m at PMQS. It is a reminder of the 125 times I had to face David Cameron.”