Trump makes his G7 exit, pursued by a Carney
Donald Trump's early departure from the G7 robbed us of a truly tense political meeting. Bilaterals between the president and the Canadian PM Mark Carney are already fraught affairs, but there was a possibility that they were going to throw a grizzly bear into the mix.
Carney wanted to play golf with Trump at Kananaskis, which would have been a brilliant diplomatic move if the course was not a hot spot for bears. Journalists covering the summit have even spotted 'The Boss', a beloved grizzly who roams the course (no word on his handicap, but the water hazards pose no problem for him).
Weighing in at more than 200lb and posing a genuine threat to people's safety, Trump passed up on the opportunity to golf with the bear and returned to Washington.
As he launched his new biography of Margaret Thatcher, the broadcaster Iain Dale revealed that he'd once had a clinch with the lady herself but, alas, this was not a scene from a Westminster romance. It was at a dinner Dale organised, shortly after Mrs T had suffered a stroke and her doctors said she could no longer speak in public.
On the night, therefore, Dale's job was to keep her from the microphone but, when the evening ended and he said goodbye to Mr Thatcher, he let his guard slip. 'I ran after her,' Dale said. 'I had my arm around her waist pulling her away from the microphone but she grabbed it.' He needn't have worried for her: she was responding to left-wing journalists who were mocking her downfall. 'Thank you for that reception,' she boomed at them. 'It's the kind of reception only an ex-prime minister can get!'
The former culture secretary Nadine Dorries has become a bikini model after taking the weight-loss drug Mounjaro, but she blames parliament for the previously piled-on pounds. 'Endless' dinners were a problem, while it seems that some Westminster residents were keen to put her off the healthy options. 'One night I walked into the members' tea room,' she tells Table Talk, 'and there was a mouse eating the lettuce which looked up at me as I approached the salad bar.' This forced Dorries to abandon the greens agenda.
Good news for George Osborne. After yesterday's story on him wanting to read Boris Johnson's memoirs without giving his old colleague some money, TMS has now received an offer of a second-hand copy for the former chancellor to peruse, so he need only get in touch. The generous donor, a Westminster hack, says: 'I was sent two review copies of the Boris book and I've been unable to give away the second one.' It had never occurred to him that friends of the author would be such a fertile market.
MI6 has its first female head as Blaise Metreweli becomes C, a letter which has been passed down from the very first 'chief', Mansfield Cumming. What has not been passed down (one hopes) is his idiosyncratic interviewing technique. He had a wooden leg and, in the course of talking to potential recruits, would take a knife and stab it through his trousers. If the applicant winced, Cumming would say: 'Well, I'm afraid you won't do.'
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