Maggie’s old chancellor Nigel Lawson spends much of his time lounging in the south of France when he isn’t emitting hot air in London, denying the floods were linked to climate change. Fortuitously my spy was in the plush restaurant Roux, a short stroll from parliament, when Baron Lawson of Blaby, as he has grandly become, sauntered in. Lawson was a guest at a right-whinge soirée hosted by the chain-smoking Mark Littlewood, head of the Institute of Economic Affairs, a sort of free-market Taliban. Lord L ordered a glass of claret and revealed a striking disdain for a parliament in which he’s a member for life. Roux, Lawson opined grandly, was the best restaurant “within walking distance of the Palace of Shame”. Unelected lawmakers claiming £300 an appearance bring down the tone of the place, eh, Nige?
Gordon Brown, whispered one of his friends, is to step down as an MP at the 2015 general election. The announcement, when it comes, will be as unexpected as the Sun backing the Tories, but Brown’s departure will still excite headlines. The former PM will have clocked up 32 years in parliament, including three as prime minister and five since he left Downing Street. Thatcher and Major both quit as MPs at the next general election. Heath stayed for the longest sulk in history. I’ve come to the conclusion that Blair made the right call by disappearing immediately. Ex-premiers get in the way. Accused of back-seat driving if they utter a single word out of place in the Commons, they’re also called lazy if they avoid making speeches.
Esther McVey, Cameron’s ruthlessly ambitious pet Scouser, was disappointed to be passed over when Dave the Sexist put Sajid Javid, a male banker, into Maria Miller’s shoes. Newspapers regularly wrongly describe her as state-educated, the FT among the guilty. Javid was, although he sends his own kids to private schools. McVey was privately educated but her alma mater, Belvedere in Liverpool, joined the state sector as an academy long after she’d left. McVey is happy to leave the mistake uncorrected to give Cameron’s toffocracy a northern rough edge.
The next chair of the Labour Party, Ucatt’s follically challenged Jim Kennedy, who will sit in the hot seat during election year, is a dead ringer for the slaphead Harry Hill. Kennedy had difficulty persuading a couple in Cheltenham that he wasn’t the TV Burp presenter. When his profile rises as the Labour chair, I wonder if Hill will be mistaken for Kennedy? Perhaps not.
MPs are unhappy at the continued Disneyfication of the Palace of Shame (copyright Lord Lawson). Tour guides are doing fewer trips for constituents to show more ticket-buying tourists where Charles I was sentenced to death. One veteran MP, 20 years in harness, grumbled he’d have to buy an umbrella to hold aloft and chaperone voters himself, discovering for the first time parts of the building off his usual route: office to chamber to bar.
Kevin Maguire is the associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror
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