But nobody has died nobody has been born although I bet a few have been conceived
But nobody has died, nobody has been born, although I bet a few have been conceived.Back home, Rosie and I finish the jigsaw. There is a piece missing.Edward Gillespie is managing director of Cheltenham racecourse. Douglas Hogg has capped another disastrous week by refusing to kick at an open goal Maybe he kicks with the foot he has broken. Channel 4's distinguished programme The Goldring Audit offered him an interview about the farming industry on the show going out next Saturday. It would have been a prime slot to restore his flagging political credibility, and C4 insiders believed they had won the Agriculture Minister's agreement to be interviewed by Mary Goldring, the veteran current affairs journalist. Not only is Goldring's standing in the business high, but she also actually agrees with the broad thrust of the Government's agricultural policy.
Here was an opportunity to Hogg the limelight without all those horrid MPs shouting at him.So, in the week of the first anniversary of the Great BSE Cock-Up, does he take it up? No, he does not. Presumably he is too busy not reading food hygiene reports that nobody sent to him.n GUESS who was at Tony Blair's pounds 500-a-head fund-raising dinner the other night? Why, none other than the bulky figure of John Taylor, the deputy leader of the Ulster Unionists, whose nine MPs are all that stands between Blair and Downing Street. Was he just eating for Ulster, or is there a new rapprochement with Labour?Mind you, it isn't very likely that the antiques-loving Member for Strangford paid for his own seat at the table Many of the diners were sponsored by business. John Spellar, the shadow Defence minister, was there at the expense of the arms manufacturers. What Creevey would like to know is, who paid for Frank "The Appetite" Dobson's dinner?The Conservatives' recent fund-raising Winter Ball cost only pounds 150 And you got Shirley Bassey. No contest, really.JOHN Major may be planning a long general election campaign, but his ever-loyal(-ish) back-benchers are not. A random trawl of Tory MPs in the bars of Westminster last week produced near-unanimity On this, at any rate "Don't want to bore them y'know.
I shall be having a three- week campaign, whatever the Prime Minister says," harrumphed a Conservative with a safe seat in the North-west. There won't be many of those on 2 May.Not that there are many MPs about to ask Most appear to have started their Easter holidays already. Westminster is a ghost town.n SIGNS of nervous tension in the Tory camp. Sheila Gunn, Central Office's answer to media hit-man Alastair Campbell, was seen berating a hapless lobby correspondent after Prime Minister's Questions.