Parliament is still full of surprises for Michael Heseltine despite his half-century in the Mock-Gothic Fun Palace. The former deputy prime minister spent more than 35 years in the building as an MP and has clocked up another 14 as a peer. Yet he made his first trip to the Strangers’ Bar when the milkman’s son Greg Clark – who, as Communities Secretary, holds Hezza’s old job of reviving cities – invited him for a drink on the terrace.
Standing bemused as MPs jostled for service at the bar, the patrician Tory was overheard muttering, “I have never been in here in my life,” with the air of a chap who intends never to return. Had he mixed with Conservative hoi polloi in his heyday, Hezza might have become prime minister.
The streetwise Michael Dugher – campaign manager of the Labour leadership front-runner, Andy Burnham – listed Ed Miliband on his phone under the code name “Sam Adams” in case it was stolen. Samuel is Mili’s middle name and Samuel Adams is a beer in the home city of his favourite baseball team, the Boston Red Sox. Ingenious!
The Tory dirty tricks department is preparing an onslaught in case Burnham is crowned leader. At CCHQ, muttered a snout, they call him “the Butcher of Mid Staffs” and “Minister for Murder”. Behind David Cameron’s choirboy act is a nasty machine.
Labour’s new women Holly Walker-Lynch and Cat Smith join Tristram Hunt/Zac Goldsmith and Chuka Umunna/Sajid Javid in the separated-at-birth club. I hear parliamentary colleagues mistake the Halifax MP for the one for Lancaster and Fleetwood. Determined to be her own woman is Birmingham Yardley’s Jess Phillips. At a reception, the new Labour member was heard informing a male guest, “I am not like other MPs. I use the word ‘c***’.” Believe me, that isn’t as rare as she thinks.
Does Essex’s answer to Sarah Palin, Hang ’Em High Priti Patel, possess a softer side? The latest unemployment minister has, I gather, written letters of condolence to Labour MPs who lost their seats in May: either the magnanimity of victory or rubbing salt in the wound. I’ll give Priti Palin the benefit of the doubt. For now.
The spinner James Stewart was a Labourite with a sense of humour. He dressed as a monk to present a birthday cake to Ed Miliband’s former chief of staff, Tim Livesey, who had been recruited from the archbishop of Canterbury. The word is that Stewart has landed a job with the tour operator Thomson. Any job must be a holiday after Ed.
The PR PM blew his “back me or I’ll sack you” EU referendum briefing in Bavaria at the G7 meeting. Cameron was doubly miffed when a press trip up Mount Wank was cancelled.
Kevin Maguire is the associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror
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