Joanna scents Crazy Horses in Commons

A WHIFF of Crazy Horses could be detected in the Commons last week when Osmond brothers Merrill, pictured, and Jay paid a visit to the Mother of Parliaments during Prime Minister’s Questions. Among those whose nostrils quivered when Speaker John Bercow welcomed the Seventies heart-throbs to the public gallery was starry-eyed Nationalist MP Joanna Cherry, 52. The normally hard-boiled QC and MP for Edinburgh South West was rubber-necking with the rest, noting breathlessly: ‘Cue much squirming and peering up from female MPs of a certain age.’ THERE’S no shortage of snakes in politics – Peter Mandelson was even transformed into one by satirical puppet show Spitting Image – but Sir Edward Mountain can’t abide the slippery creatures. The Tory MSP and baronet revealed last week that during his military days with the Blues and Royals in Africa he once shot an 18-and-a-half foot python that had wrapped itself around a fellow soldier: ‘I put the rifle on his shoulder and fired through the coils of the snake – I still have the skin, just to remind me of that.’