YOUNG Conservatives are up to their old tricks again, and it’s still not big, funny or clever. It has nothing to do with posh girls being sick on their dresses, or snooty public school boys being rude to staff and trying to snog the wives of disgraced former MPs (although there is still plenty of that), it is about blue plaques containing imprinted crowns that one or two of them have been seen wearing to their ghastly hoolies. A terrible fashion gaffe, in itself. But know this: these plaques are, in fact, seals used by the police to mark every drain and manhole in the restricted zone after it has been checked for bombs. A blue crown on the pavement is apparently irresistible to the buck-toothed hardcore of the party’s youth group, who have been chipping them off the pavement in the dead of night and dangling them round their necks (on their “Save The Pound” lanyards). Being made, I think, of paint, they do not lend themselves to removal and generally look like nothing more than a flaky lump of blue grot (rather like their owners).

The result is a possible security mix-up over which drains have and have not been checked. Being young, these proto-Tories probably do not remember the Brighton bomb. As celebrated admirers of Norman Tebbit, they will no doubt soon be reminded.

MY BUNNY girls have been sent home. Overkill, I’m afraid. Once again displaying their extraordinary reproductive powers, my own personal bunny army appeared not just in the Diary yesterday, but all over the press. So I set them free.

They were delighted to get away, as it happens, after a very hostile reception at a meeting of the Conservative Countryside Forum attended by William Hague. Welcomed at first because of their sexy outfits, and subjected to well-meaning but fairly grotesque lechery, they found the atmosphere turning nasty once delegates realised they were anti-vivisection campaigners.

“Can you even spell vivisection?” sneered a charmer called Peter Stevens, the vice-chairman of South Suffolk Conservative Association. Delegates tried to jostle us out, and the police were set on us. Fortunately, the Shadow Agriculture Minister Tim Yeo turned up. “I’ve brought some anti-vivisection bunny girls to hear you speak,” I said. “What fun,” he replied.

If the Tories had more Yeos and fewer Stevenses even the bunny girls would vote for them.

• Bournemouth’s Royal Bath Hotel has not made itself popular with guests, with bans imposed on wearing jeans, using phones, talking too loudly and touching (let alone playing) the piano. Furthermore, one young politico has twice been burst in upon by staff while she was standing naked in the middle of the room (though why she spends so much time naked in the middle of the room I do not know). Now she tells me that when she asked why there was no soap in her bathroom a cleaner plucked a bar from her pocket and told her it was the only one in the place. Pun-fanciers among you will have guessed that guests are now calling it the “Royal No Bath Hotel”.

  YESTERDAY The Times revealed that William Hague used to pick nettles for soup on his way home from school, and advises that nettle-pluckers wear rubber gloves. What it did not ask, however, was: “Does this mean young Willy took rubber gloves to school every day?” We knew about the compulsive Hansard reading and the memorising of parliamentary majorities, but this is something quite new. A kid who spends his schooldays with a pair of pink Marigolds dangling out of his pocket really is in trouble from the start.