Pick of the week’s Gossip

A 79-year-old Labour peer was reprimanded in the House of Lords chamber last week for nodding off during a debate on genetically modified crops. When Lord Young rose to his feet to add his thoughts to the discussion, Baroness Bloomfield, a Tory frontbencher, interrupted to say that he shouldn’t be allowed to speak, having been unable “to take advantage of the ability to hear” an earlier speech because he’d been “fast asleep”. Young pointed out that he was “not now” asleep.

And later he said he had not been asleep at all. He had, he said, been listening to the debate with his ear against one of the speakers embedded in the House’s benches.

Alan Johnson accidentally ate dog biscuits at lunch with the Queen in 2008. Johnson, who was then the Labour health secretary, was going over the highlights of the meal with fellow cabinet member Paul Murphy, who had been there too, when he said that he had “particularly enjoyed the cheese and the unusual dark biscuits”. Murphy pointed out those had been “for the corgis”.

The actor Adrien Brody has claimed that a female chimpanzee “fell in love” with him 17 years ago during a photoshoot to promote his film King Kong. “She would slap me in the face, laugh at my reaction and do backflips,” Brody told The Sunday Times. “Then [she would] slap me again. I liked it.” When a handler tried to take the chimpanzee away from Brody, she refused to be parted from him and he ended up leading her back to the car hand-inhand. The pair did not stay in touch, however. “I swore I would but I didn’t,” Brody admitted. ”It’s terrible.”