3 days ago
Does Wes need a jab?
Health secretary Wes Streeting wants fat jabs available on the NHS. When I asked him on GB News if he had tried one, he said: 'I have got a complex now. I am never coming on this channel again. Evidently, I have not been on the jabs.' He added: 'I want them to be available on the NHS. I am going to go away and look at my BMI. You have given me a complex.' After the interview, Streeting told his team: 'Cancel the pub – we are going to the gym!' I think he was joking.
Present and correct
Author Mark Twain once reacted to newspaper accounts that he had died by saying: 'The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.' Last week there was a Twain moment in London's clubland. Catherine Brumwell, the membership secretary at the Cavalry and Guards Club, wrote to members: 'I appear to have killed off a member who is still very much alive and well. For anyone who reads the In Memoriam, please know that Capt William Matthews, Coldstream Guards, has just called us and assured us that he is in fine fettle.' Surely Capt Matthews is now owed a life membership?
Heads won't roll
The House of Lords new front door now costs £9.6 million, £3.5 million over budget. 'It is a scandalous waste of public money,' exclaimed Tory peer Andrew Robathan in the Lords, turning to the hideous 10ft high security fence which was erected last month. 'Who gave the security advice on the useless door and the ridiculous and ineffective fence?' he asked. Former National Audit Office chief Amyas Morse has now been asked by Lord Speaker John McFall to find out what has gone wrong. Robathan added: 'Somebody accountable should be identified and should perhaps resign for this terrible waste of public money.' I doubt anyone will.
Gnome alone
TV personality Gyles Brandreth brushes off claims that the presence of garden gnomes outside a home can knock up to £12,000 off the value of a neighbour's property, telling ITV's This Morning: 'My garden is awash with gnomes – we probably do upset the neighbours.' Perhaps they deter burglars?
The history man
Historian Andrew Roberts complained in the House of Lords this week: 'The adjective 'historic' is bandied about far too often in politics, covering all sorts of things that are unlikely to detain historians of the future. Football matches, TV shows and any number of announcements in the other place [the Commons] are routinely described as historic when they simply are not. The other day I saw a hamburger described as historic.'
Lennon's last call
Julia Baird has been looking back on her last ever telephone conversation with her New York-based brother John Lennon on Nov 17, just weeks before his murder in 1980. 'It was nanny's birthday. I'd gone to see her and John phoned. He said, ''I'm looking forward to seeing you all at last.' Nanny had a big house [called Ardmore on the Wirral] and he said, 'It's going to have to be in Ardmore to get you all in at once!'' Julia movingly adds: 'I said, 'We're all waiting, John.'' Lennon was shot in the Big Apple on December 8.
Dance legend
Debbie Moore, the founder of the Pineapple Dance Studio in central London, is being celebrated with a plaque in Covent Garden where she set up her studios in a derelict pineapple warehouse in 1978. Freddie Mercury was one of the first members and used 'a Coca-Cola bottle for his microphone', she told me. Dancer Wayne Sleep, who lived at the end of the road, will be coming to the unveiling on Thursday. Moore organised a petition of dancers to keep the studio open at one point. She only took up dancing after her Indian guru told her it was 'the quickest way to lose weight'. 'They call me the accidental dancer. I was so inspired by how hard dancers worked,' she says. Moore's the merrier.
OJ Chris
A celebrity gossip website asked this week: 'Which politician was fined and suspended by the Oxford Union when they were at university in the 1990s – for secretly and illicitly recording a speech by O J Simpson and flogging it to the tabloids?' Step forward shadow home secretary Chris Philp. Philp tells me: 'This was an ingenious way to help make ends meet as an ordinary, struggling south London lad. It was outrageous that OJ was trying to avoid scrutiny by banning the press.'
Peterborough, published every Friday at 7pm, is edited by Christopher Hope. You can reach him at peterborough@
