PETERBOROUGH

The Mogg isn’t Shakin’

Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, below, led the dad dancing as a choir belted out modern Christmas classics at the switch-on of the lights on the parliamentary Christmas tree. Not everyone joined in. Jacob Rees-mogg, with two of his six children, remained rooted to the spot as Shakin Stevens’ Merry Christmas Everyone started up. Union baron Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe had a great time. “I’m only here because I can’t get my car out of the car park,” he told me, as he jigged along.

A light for Queen Elizabeth

King Charles makes his first visit to the Palace of Westminster since his mother’s funeral next week to unveil a plaque in Westminster Hall where the late Queen lay in state, and to switch on two glorious lamps erected to mark the her Platinum jubilee.

Sadly, Queen Elizabeth never saw the lamps, the brainchild of Michael Ellis MP, and funded privately by hundreds of MPS and peers. The York stone step below the lamps has been engraved diplomatically. It reads: “Her Majesty the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee 1952-2022”, because mentioning “Elizabeth II” might offend the Scots.

Wiggy goes to pot

Andy Wigmore made a welcome return to Westminster this week, attending the annual Parliamentary carol service at St Margaret’s Church in Westminster with DUP MP Ian Paisley Jnr. “Wiggy” – one of the “Bad Boys of Brexit” with Arron Banks and Nigel Farage – has since packed in politics and reinvented himself as an arable farmer, growing hemp in Buckinghamshire.

He plans to use his first crop to make bricks (for hemp-made houses), cannabis oil and T-shirts. But he can’t escape politics. Wiggy grew the hemp this year on 25 acres of land rented from the nearby Chequers estate, the PM’S country home. No one tell Rishi Sunak.

Taxing carol service

There was a ripple of laughter in the congregation for the Christian Responsibility in Public Affairs’ carol service at St Michael‘s Church, in Chester Square, Belgravia, when one of Rishi Sunak’s aides at No10 gave a reading.

“And it came to pass in those days, that there was a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all of the world should be taxed,” she began. “And all went to be taxed, everyone into his own city.”

Don’t remind us!

‘Plumpy’ still loves Love Actually

Actress Martine Mccutcheon, left, has stood up for Richard Curtis’ 20-year-old festive film Love Actually, which has been under fire from woke warriors. Mccutcheon – who plays a No10 tea lady who gets together with the PM, played by Hugh Grant – told BBC Radio Solent that the film “is really, really lovely”. Critics have said Mccutcheon was fat-shamed because her character in the film is described as “chubby” and is nicknamed “Plumpy”. But Mccutcheon said: “I absolutely love Love Actually, because it is funny as well. It has got this snowball phenomenon that just keeps going on year after year and it just reminds people of you. People remember you and you get to do all these different and amazing projects.”

Boris and his yucca muse

More on Boris Johnson, below, and his yucca plant, which he would shout at when he was the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “At 4pm he would start yelling swear words at this yucca plant which was at one end of his desk. All the most Anglo-saxon words that you can think of,” Sonia Purnell (who was his deputy) told the British Scandal podcast.

Purnell added: “It was a bit like Superman going into a telephone kiosk. He would go into that 4pm rant and come out as a swivel-eyed Eurosceptic or Europhobe in the way that he hadn’t been half an hour earlier.”

Skinner stews

Comedian Frank Skinner, who was told not to “give up your day job” by the Countess of Wessex after an indifferent Royal Variety Show performance due to a sore throat, is not letting it lie. “I think the Earl and Countess of Wessex & Forfar is their official title,” he tells his podcast. “They’d given all the older siblings all the good places like Wales, and then said ‘Right, so we’ll have an Anglo-saxon kingdom that doesn’t exist anymore, and a Scottish League Division Two football club – that’s for you two!’” Offside!