Hoots, mon! The Scottish Nationalists are lining up behind Welsh Labour’s Chris Bryant to replace John Bercow when the Speaker vacates the big chair. The deputy speaker Lindsay Hoyle remains the favourite to succeed Bercow, who is expected to survive the uprising by Donald Trump’s Tory Taliban though he is due to hand back the gown in 2018 or 2019, before the next election. But the Rhondda Roisterer isn’t hiding his ambition under a thistle, and is emphasising his Scottish links to court SNP MPs’ votes.
McBryant’s mother was from Glasgow, and one of his grannies was a Gorbals GP during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The clinchers may be the ownership of a kilt and his boasts that he once played the bagpipes.
So my snout predicts that unless Chorley Chortler Hoyle learns to toss the caber or replaces the mace with a skean-dhu, McBryant will have most Scottish votes in the sporran.
The Leave vote is strong among the Farages, as Nigel and his wife have opted to live “separate lives”. This has required Farrago to tweak his moneymaking repertoire. His stock jokes are “In the City, I worked hard every day . . . until lunchtime” and “Do you want to be dominated by Germans? I am!” – but since he parted from Mrs Farage (or “Kirsten the Kraut”, as she was called by Ukip’s Kipperosaurus), the German quip has been redundant. Perhaps Farage could recycle it with a French theme?
Tommy “Two Dinners” Watson loves his meat, but Labour’s deputy leader boasted that he made the ultimate sacrifice after encountering his teenage crush Chrissie Hynde on Andrew Marr’s Sunday sofa. The frontwoman of the Pretenders is a vegan and a supporter of the hardline animal rights group Peta. In deference to the rock legend sitting by him at breakfast, Watson ordered vegetarian sausages. I hear he counted them as two of his five a day.
In the lead-up to Ed Balls hosting his 50th birthday bash, I was instructed by a long-time friend of the former shadow chancellor on the code adopted to signify whether fans are pre- or post-Strictly. Foes jumping on the popularity bandwagon call him “a friend”, while comrades who stood by Balls in difficult days use “old friend” to describe themselves.
The junior defence honcho Harriett Baldwin, a product of the £35,280-a-year Marlborough College and the merchant bank JPMorgan Chase, raised MPs’ eyebrows when she described the Royal Navy’s proposed Type 31 frigate as being “in its pre-concept phase”. My matelot snout translated that as: “HMS Baldwin hasn’t a clue what it’ll look like.” Let’s hope this warship isn’t another navy equivalent of the Samsung Galaxy Note7 – some Type 45 destroyers overheat and stop working.
Kevin Maguire is the associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror
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This article appears in the 22 Feb 2017 issue of the New Statesman, The world after Brexit