Nicola Sturgeon's memoir rewrites history with confidence
It's three strikes and you're out for Jeremy Hunt as he insists he will not seek the Tory leadership again. The former chancellor told The Rest Is Politics that his wife 'would have something to say' if he ran a fourth time, which left one of his hosts very upset. 'I'll encourage you to think again,' said the banished Conservative Rory Stewart. 'You're the one person who would make me rejoin the Conservative Party and come in behind you.' Good news for Mrs Hunt — the Stewart endorsement is more fatal than hemlock.
Among the cast of The Thick of It, the actor Alex Macqueen was a politics nerd sans pareil. The man who played the blue-skies thinker Julius Nicholson once worked as a tour guide in the Houses of Parliament, which he said was 'a Disney cruise liner for politicos'. However, this analogy only works if Mickey Mouse's ship was a little unseaworthy. 'It was a luxurious place to work,' Macqueen told Times Radio. 'But I know there are regular fires that break out and it needs a bit of TLC.' Oh, it all shambles along — the nice thing about the fires in Westminster is that they're soon put out by the leaks.
The comedian Jimmy Carr is still paying for past mistakes. Carr, who is the Ken Dodd of his generation, though not when it comes to the comedy, is doing two shows a night on his current tour. 'One show at 7pm and one at 9.30pm,' he explained. 'One for me and one for HMRC.' Carr's career survived revelations about his tax affairs, which is good for him as he loves the work. Asked by an audience member in Bath if he would do his job free, he said: 'Probably. In fact, I think that effectively happened once when the tax bill came in.'
The chat show presenter Graham Norton spends an awful lot of time saying nice things about people, and this can come back to bite him. He recalls that a friend was once raving to him about a book so much that she promised to get Norton a copy. He was excited, but when the book was delivered the friend informed Norton that he'd already read it. 'No, I haven't,' he said. 'I don't remember anything about this book at all.' When he then picked up the novel, he saw his name on the cover. It was beneath the quote 'Unforgettable characters'.
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