Starmer, Starmer, pensioner-harmer

Keir Starmer & Boris Johnson pass a statue of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
Forever in Maggie’s shadow: Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson pass the Iron Lady in bronze form - Toby Melville

Comedian Geoff Norcott questions whether there will be long lasting damage from Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to axe millions of pensioners’ winter fuel payments. He says: “Margaret Thatcher took away free milk in 1971. People were still shouting ‘milk snatcher’ at her funeral 42 years later. Luckily for Labour hardly anything rhymes with ‘winter fuel allowance’.” Or does it?


Kitchen McCabinet

Labour minister Pat McFadden has known the SNP First Minister John Swinney for decades. “Almost 40 years ago we shared the same dishwashing job in a Mexican restaurant in Edinburgh – Viva Mexico,” he said this week. Swinney’s spokesman added: “The First Minister fondly remembers his time washing dishes. It is a huge compliment to the magnificent Viva Mexico that it proved to be such a great training ground for a successful career in national politics.”

It’s a kitchen sink McDrama!


Non-nepo Jay

TV foodie Jay Rayner is tired of people saying he owes his career to being the son of agony aunt Claire Rayner. “Claire has been dead 14 years, and still people suggest that I got where I am through nepotism,” he tells Waitrose Weekend magazine. “Why having a mother who was an expert in sexual dysfunction should get me a job on MasterChef, I do not know.”


Jenrick takes the biscuit

Robert Jenrick has shed light on one of his most contentious decisions as a Cabinet minister: putting custard creams in the food parcels sent to 1.5 million vulnerable people during the Covid pandemic. He told me on GB News this week that he chose custard creams because they were “the people’s biscuit”, adding: “I think there were probably more important things that I worked on than that.” I’m not sure I agree.


Growing old gracefully

Veteran BBC Radio 2 DJ Tony Blackburn says we need lessons on ageing. He told the Full Disclosure podcast: “I don’t think they teach us how to grow old anymore. When you get up in the morning, you ache a little bit and it’s more difficult to put your socks on, and when you’re putting your trousers on you have to balance! You think ‘What’s wrong with me now?’ ”


Speaking up for Nigel

Sir Lindsay Hoyle’s former deputy speakers Rosie Winterton and Eleanor Laing are on the way to the Lords, but so far no invitation has been extended to the other ex-deputy speaker, Nigel Evans, despite him serving seven years in the chair. His friends are appalled at what looks like “institutionalised homophobia”. One tells me: “Nigel is the first openly gay person to occupy that chair – it sends all the wrong signals.” Evans’s last hope is Rishi Sunak’s resignation honours, expected in November.


Why Rachel flew the flag

Perhaps Labour needs an emergency Union flag? When Kwasi Kwarteng was sacked as chancellor by Liz Truss on his way back from a Washington summit, Rachel Reeves, who was also at the summit, was desperate to respond on camera. The only issue was a Labour decree that all televised statements must take place in front of a Union flag. Officials had to scramble to find one in the US capital before she could comment.


Reed’s unfinished business

DJ Mike Read has some weighty reading for his visits to the lavatory. “Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire sat on the window sill of the upstairs loo for years. I’ve never finished it,” he tells Sussex Life. The magnum opus by Gibbon is 4,000 pages long. I would stick to The Telegraph.


Cat’s common sense

“Are you feeling bombarded with WhatsApps?” asked Labour MP Cat Smith this week of her fellow MPs in a Commons election to be chairman of the procedure committee. “Have all these diary invites clogged up your Outlook? Have you slipped on all the leaflets under your office door? Let’s stop this nonsense.” If elected, she pledged to limit MPs’ electioneering emails and calls at weekends to each other, and ban leaflets being shoved under MPs’ office doors. Unsurprisingly, she stormed to victory.


Hope hoist by own petard

Thanks to the many readers who enjoyed telling me that the teachers’ union advertising an event to discuss “Liberal Democrat’s priorities on education” was a grammatical error, not a spelling error, as I said. It’s detention for me.


Peterborough, published every Friday at 7pm, is edited by Christopher Hope. You can reach him at peterborough@telegraph.co.uk