Closing the stable door after the heating bill bolted, Nadhim Zahawi won’t be left short of a few bob after repaying a wrongly claimed spare groom subsidy. As well as a country estate with a hitherto taxpayer-fuelled riding school attached, Zahawi owns a £5m Putney home and three London flats he rents out. No wonder he’s hosting a parliamentary reception on 17 December so that the British Property Federation can extol the profits to be banked from letting to students.
Labour’s awkward squad punctuate barracking of Tories with pranks. Thus John Cryer found Ian Mearns’s hand in his pocket trying to hold him down when called at Prime Minister’s Questions. Cryer’s pockets have been used before against him. The ex-miner Ronnie Campbell once passed a packet of Fisherman’s Friends lozenges down the line of benches. When they didn’t reappear, Campbell, easygoing until riled, demanded their return. Ian Lavery, another former pitman, suggested he look in Cryer’s pocket where an MP had hidden Campbell’s sweets. Sometimes, the chamber is like a rowdy school assembly.
Ministers recall with a vengeance the smallest indignities when dumped or shuffled off to fresh pastures. Bath bon viveur Don Foster remembers with a curled lip a “Dear Donald” letter from a faceless bureaucrat when Nick Clegg flipped him to deputy chief whip from communities and town halls. The departed department’s uncivil servant warned the affable Lib Dem that he’d signed a confidentiality agreement so he must stay schtum, and that failure to return a laptop to the ministry could result in prosecution. A thank-you note from Eric Pickles might’ve been nice.
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An update on last week’s item that Yvette Cooper revealed a royal protection officer mistook her insignificant other, Ed Balls, for Nick Griffin of BNP notoriety. I’m told Ed B recounted a similar tale himself on the rubber chicken circuit. Except in the shadow chancellor’s version he is mistaken for Griffin at a dinner for the Chief Rabbi. That means the confusion must be kosher.
The right-whinge press will kick itself. The anti-union lot never miss an opportunity to portray Red Ed in the pocket of Red Len. So savour the disappointment of Tory editors at missing Miliband visiting Esher Place, the nothing’s-too-good-for-theworkers education centre of McCluskey’s Unite for a Labour NEC away day. The Milimites were mightily chuffed they slipped their man in and out undetected.
And finally . . .what may be my last word for a while on Miliband’s appearance. His office is split over whether the leader should button or unbutton his jacket when walking for TV cameras. I vote for openness.
Kevin Maguire is the associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror
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