If Tony Blair wants to know what drives young vandals to cover walls with graffiti, he won’t have far to look. His own grandmother would have been a target of the respect agenda that he launched last week.

Friends of Mary Blair say she helped to daub Communist party slogans on walls in Govan, Glasgow. She did no actual daubing, it was her job to mix the whitewash.

The revelation is particularly embarrassing because young Tony went out of his way to praise the respectful attitudes of 1930s Govan. “They didn’t have as much money as we did,” he recalled, “but people behaved more respectfully to one another.”

But Alex Morrison, 86, once a neighbour of Mary Blair and fellow Communist party activist, poured scorn on that idea. “I’m sure Mary would have been laughing her head off at her grandson’s description of Govan as some kind of idyllic community,” he says. “The reality was that Govan was a terrible place to live.”

Mary, who died in 1976, was foster mother to Tony’s father Leo. He had been given away by his real mother, who gave birth after an affair with a fellow travelling entertainer.

Garrick club sends TV shrink back to the waiting room

Who could blame Raj Persaud, psychiatric consultant to the Richard and Judy audience, for wanting a little rest on his consulting couch? Because after the accusations of plagiarism reported in The Sunday Times last week, he faces more bad news. The adverse publicity has been noted at the Garrick club, where Persaud has been up for membership since 2002. He was expecting to be admitted last week, but a decision has now been put off.

A Garrick insider says: “He was about to sail through when somebody pointed out the recent publicity about his alleged plagiarism. His application has been postponed, but I don’t think he has a chance of ever being elected now.”

• Civil servants at the Department of Health ran up a £335,000 taxi bill last year, the Commons has just learnt. Would a volunteer step forward, please, to advise them on the marvellous benefits of walking or cycling.

  Camilla’s palace bedroom becomes a no-go area

  A delicate instruction has gone out to the Prince of Wales’s staff: they are no longer to talk about “Camilla’s bedroom” in that naughty, familiar manner.

  Officials at St James’s Palace habitually refer to rooms by their previous function — Camilla’s bedroom, William’s bedroom, etc — even though Charles’s family now live at Clarence House.

  Camilla’s old room was turned into the office of a senior courtier and now staff have been ordered to stop saying, for example, “Don’t you get a lovely view from Camilla’s bedroom?” So will the practice stop?

  “Of course not,” says a palace insider.

• UKIP has abandoned plans to take a fancy dress ostrich to the European parliament. The Eurosceptic party wanted to protest about this week’s debate on the European constitution, but was perhaps deterred by new moves to improve the behaviour of members.

  Under the plan, also to be debated this week, MEPs who misbehave (for example, by dressing up as ostriches) could face the ultimate penalty: having their allowances withdrawn for up to 10 days. UKIP insists it did not cave in under this threat. A crestfallen spokesman admits: “We couldn’t find an ostrich costume.”

• As the nation quietly recovers from the sight of George Galloway, the honourable member for Channel 4, nestling his head in Rula Lenska’s lap and pretending to be a cat, Labour’s Martin Linton has tabled a Commons motion condemning his fellow MP’s behaviour on Celebrity Big Brother. Early day motions like this are not usually debated, but why not make an exception? With the ratings it would attract, you might even get George to take part.