It’s every young executive’s nightmare. You are on the verge of promotion and preparing for a crucial meeting when suddenly you are called up for jury service.

What do you do? Well, it seems that when you’re campaigning to become the Tory leader you wriggle out of it. David Cameron was summoned for jury service last year, it was confirmed yesterday, but was excused his stint in September. Of course, David would naturally liked to have played his part in moulding a modern, compassionate jury that’s about trusting people and sharing responsibility. Unfortunately, that would have disrupted his preparation for the party conference in October, which was his springboard to the leadership.

“There was an issue with jury service,” said a spokesman for Cameron, “but I can’t remember what the issues were.”

MPs used to be exempt from jury service, along with professionals such as doctors. But no more.

So was the Tory party a good enough reason to be excused? The court service says a juror can bunk off where “jury service conflicts with an applicant’s religious festival”. How else would you describe the Tory party conference?

Bloom steps from behind the fridge to defend prostitutes

Plain-speaking MEP Godfrey Bloom is back on championship form after a lean patch. Godders, the UKIP member for Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire, made a name for himself in Strasbourg by complaining that women “didn’t clean behind the fridge enough” but still managed to get a seat on the gender equality committee.

Now he has leapt to the defence of vice girls, saying that plans to outlaw prostitution throughout Europe are “unworldly”.

Writing in a Brussels magazine called The Sprout, Bloom attacks supporters of an outright ban as “heavily tufted lesbian Nordics”. And as for their fridges . . .

Senior Lib Dems have urged rising star Julia Goldsworthy to pull out of a Channel 4 reality show now she is deputy Treasury spokeswoman. Julia, 27, is due to take part in The Games, competing against models and soap stars in sports as “floor gymnastics” (apparently a Lib Dem speciality). One party figure warns: “She needs to look more serious if she’s going to be up against Gordon Brown.”

Who’s a little tinker? MPs’a biogs get mystery makeover

A political image war is being fought in Wikipedia, the web’s write-it-yourself encyclopaedia. Entries on MPs have been tinkered with to show them in a better light, and Wikipedia has now traced that tinkering to — surprise, surprise — parliament.

An entry about Labour minister Hazel Blears once complained she had “more in common with goats than homo sapiens”. That now reads: “She has proved to be an effective performer and is tipped to rise to the top of the Labour party.” Somebody has also edited Virginia Bottomley’s entry to hide the fact that the former Tory minister studied at — oh, the shame — Essex University. Wikipedia cannot track the 400-odd revisions to individual computers, so who’s going to own up first, then?

Following musicals about David Blunkett and Margaret Thatcher, brace yourself for Gadaffi – The Opera, which will bring the Libyan leader’s story to the English National Opera. Whatever next: Osama Bin Laden sings The Sound of Music?

Foreign Office minister Kim Howells dug himself into an embarrassing hole on the Today programme yesterday, and then not only kept on digging but hired himself a JCB.

First he described US neoconservatives — President George Bush’s main ideological powerbase — as “swivel-eyed right-wing Americans”. Then, just as the Foreign Office was struggling to get its breath back, he launched a defence of Iraq policy that was eccentric even by his own high standards.

“People describe Iraq as a mess but it’s a mess that can’t launch an attack on Iran, it’s a mess that won’t be able to march into Kuwait and it’s a mess that can’t launch nuclear weapons,” said Howells. “So, yes it’s a mess but it’s starting to look like the kind of mess that most of us live in.”

Most of us? Wow! Life is obviously tougher in his Pontypridd constituency than anybody imagined.

Charles Kennedy enjoyed a night at the opera last week, away from the outrageous divas and intrigue that once dogged him as the leader of the Liberal Democrats.

He and his wife Sarah saw Tosca at the Hackney Empire in London, and during a cigarette break he told fellow smokers it was his favourite work.

In one scene from Tosca a man is led out for a mock execution only to discover that he has been betrayed and is done for. Did that seem familiar at all, Charles?