Don’t let Hugh Grant near a barbecue
Father of five, Hugh Grant, tells Vogue he has started to cook for the first time in 64 years: “I can’t stop barbecuing. Can’t stop buying barbecue equipment. And now that it’s winter, I’ve moved indoors.” Alarmingly, he adds: “I’ve poisoned my family twice... undercooked chicken. It was dark, you see. It was on the barbecue and I stuck my prod into it. I couldn’t quite read it. So I served it out – worms all round. And the children now beg me not to cook.”
Ageist Link
Breakfast TV presenter Eamonn Holmes, 65, made it through a couple of rounds on a celebrity version of the BBC’s Weakest Link last week. When asked if he’d had fun, he told GB News viewers: “No.” Holmes explained: “It’s amazing – all the young people vote for each other and all the old people vote for each other; and there are more young people than old people.” You are the oldest link – goodbye!
Reformed Emily?
Looking ahead to this May’s local elections, podcaster Emily Maitlis reflects on the “huge slate of Reform candidates to be published”, before revealing Nigel Farage has been in touch. Having clashed with Reform’s leader in the past, Maitlis announces: “I got my little message from Nigel Farage, saying: ‘Emily, we need you, would you like to stand for Reform?’” She jokes: “I’m thinking about it.”
Gray unseated
The “Sue Gray bench”, in a garden next to No 10, is no more. Sir Keir Starmer’s then chief of staff was snapped by photographer Steve Back in an apparently heated conversation with a civil servant on the bench days before she quit last October. Three months later, the bench has now been removed and a yellow bush has been planted to obscure photographers’ view of the spot from the press pen on Downing Street. “The bench has gone. They probably gave it to her as a leaving present,” says Back.
Follow the paws
Most unusual political donation registered by MPs in 2024 goes to the Conservative MP Lewis Cocking. “Name of donor – Hertfordshire Zoo. Amount of donation: Feeding of big cats, value £199.” He explains: “I was invited to open their new gibbon habitat, and have a go at feeding Siberia the tiger. As a new MP this was pretty good training for entering the Commons.” He is not wrong.
Labour, er, women
Does the women’s minister have a woman problem? I only ask because when Sir John Hayes asked Anneliese Dodds, the minister for Women and Equalities, in the Commons this week “what her department’s definition of gender identity is”, she replied: “The Office for Equality and Opportunity does not have its own definition of gender identity.”
Moon’s greeting
Perran Moon, Labour MP for Camborne and Redruth, is causing disquiet among the Commons authorities. Moon prefaces his Commons contributions with a burst of what everyone presumes is Cornish. Hansard’s skilled stenographers are recording it as “Meur ras ha myttin da”, which means “Thank you and good morning”, but no one is quite sure including Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle. One source in Speaker’s House says: “No one has the heart to ask him to translate it. We hope it’s not libellous!”
Annie get your sword
By convention, female High Sheriffs wear court dress – two-piece jacket and skirt suit – and ask others to hold their ceremonial swords. But Annie Brewster the current High Sheriff of Hertfordshire, has broken with tradition by commissioning her own specially tailored knee-length velvet breeches and tailcoat jacket, which she wears with a faux waistcoat, antique lace neck jabot and wrist cuffs, beneath a tricorn hat with an ostrich feather. Brewster’s forward thinking has paid off. Following confirmation from the King’s Privy Council representative, she can now wear her dress sword with her breeches, rather than have someone else carry it.
Hitchens’ unhappy New Year
Peterborough readers are mystified by Peter Hitchens’ claim that the idea of New Year was “forced on” Britons by Tory PM Edward Heath in 1972. Shirley Elomari says Tar Bar’l in Allendale – when men carry burning tar barrels on their heads at New Year – dates back at least 140 years. Ian Rolland, born in 1942, says he can remember “listening to the peals of church bells and the sounds of ship’s hooters and sirens coming through the air from ships moored in Barking Reach” in Essex.
Peterborough, published every Friday at 7pm, is edited by Christopher Hope. You can reach him at peterborough@telegraph.co.uk