More Prezza sex allegations that may only be groping in the dark

It’s time for amateur cowboy John Prescott to strap on his gunbelt and saddle up because High Noon is fast approaching. A former Labour aide and journalist is suing him in a writ that claims he kept a dossier on the sexual activities of senior colleagues, including Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Tricia McDaid told The Sunday Times earlier this year that the deputy prime minister was a serial groper who sexually harassed her over two years. Now, in a 50-paragraph writ that claims he was negligent, she says he demanded sex in exchange for a dossier that could make her name as a journalist.

According to McDaid, he even said the dossier contained the laughable allegation that Blair and Brown had a gay fling while in opposition because they shared a hotel bedroom — as a cost-cutting measure — on a US trip.

Prescott is still recovering from claims about his stay on the ranch of casino tycoon Philip Anschutz, and gifts of a cowboy belt and Stetson. So he’ll have to hope this court action has more to do with McDaid’s current bedfellow. All she would say yesterday was the hurried confession: “I’ve done a deal with the Mail on Sunday.”

Just who is being taken for a ride here, Austin?

What a courageous act by Labour MP Austin Mitchell, who has sprung to the defence of John Prescott. “Leave the lad alone,” he says, referring to allegations about the deputy prime minister’s active love life. “The new journalism feeds on titbits in Tory websites and amplifies them into facts.”

Of course, not all papers rely on website titbits. The Sunday Times recently interviewed a woman who recalled meeting Prescott for the first time in 1978. “He pushed me quite forcefully against the wall and put his hand up my skirt,” said Linda McDougall, who is also known as Mrs Mitchell.

Should we make you up a bed in the spare room, Austin?

• Praise the Lord! The Methodists have discovered marketing. Free copies of the Methodist Recorder went out with The Guardian last week, but if the church wanted to sell a bright new image they unfortunately picked the wrong edition of their newspaper.

  It led with the story: Methodist worship “often dull”.

  Ming the merciful saves us from his memoirs — for now

• Ming Campbell has shelved his memoirs, and for the unlikeliest of reasons — he fears they could prove too interesting. The Lib Dem leader’s book, due out on the eve of the party’s conference, apparently explains his role in the downfall of former leader Charles Kennedy. But friends of Campbell, who is interviewed in this week’s News Review, are already worried that an imminent biography of Kennedy will open old wounds.

  “The memoirs would have opened up divisions at a time when Menzies wants to calm things down,” says one supporter. “We’ve already got the Kennedy biography to contend with.” Ming’s book has been rescheduled to appear in the relative political safety of autumn 2009.
  

• Gordon Brown has been criticised for keeping a low profile as the cash-for-gongs investigation closed in on No 10, but he’s actually been in Scotland waiting for his wife to give birth. It’s a handy excuse, but surely nobody could think the chancellor capable of planning it in advance. Could they?

  • As the winds of change blow through the Conservative party, David Cameron’s policy-lite style has received the posthumous support of Harold Macmillan.

    The Earl of Stockton, Supermac’s grandson, recalls a meeting at the family home, Birch Grove in Sussex, when cabinet colleague “Rab” Butler produced a pile of papers. “What are those?” asked Macmillan. “Policies,” said Butler, cheerily. “Oh, I beg you, not policies,” the prime minister retorted. “They come back to haunt you. Give them broad sunlit uplands, dear boy.”
    

  • Cameron’s strategy is beginning to see the Heineken effect: he is reaching the parts other Tory leaders can’t. So much so that hard-as-nails author Irvine Welsh has come out as an admirer — even if he can’t quite bring himself to say he’ll vote Conservative.

    The author of Trainspotting is not only Scottish, usually a synonym for Toryphobe, but he’s an ex-smackhead who spent the 1980s on the dole in squats. Yet in an interview today the so-called chronicler of the chemical generation admits: “I’m a product of Thatcherism. I’ve benefited from everything I detested.”

    Welsh, 47, who comes from a working-class background, goes on: “My dislike of Thatcherism is very much a class-based thing. Basically, I thought how can a Tory be nice? Now, some of the nicest people I have met have been middle and upper-middle class and some of them, I suppose, must be Tories.”
    

  • It required someone with a sure diplomatic touch to become the first Catholic to join an Orange order parade. But as no such person was available, the job went to Labour MP Stephen Pound who once declared: “The people have spoken, the bastards.”

    Pound was a platform guest for the rally, now rebranded as the Orangefest carnival (imagine The Sash My Father Wore played on steel drums). “I was probably the first Roman Catholic on the platform,” says Pound, “certainly the first to get down unscathed.”