Mr Gorgeous WLTM special lady (good sense of hubris essential)

Lock up your daughters: George Galloway is on the pull.

The Respect MP wants to settle down and find himself a wife – somebody courageous and indefatigable, obviously, but above all somebody who is not easily embarrassed. This is a man, after all, who famously imitated a furry kitten on national television.

Galloway announced that he was open to offers during an interview with online magazine Eyebrow. “I’m looking for a wife,” he said. “So if there’s anyone out there . . .”

If there is anyone out there, you should know that the same interview discussed his secret vices. He wouldn’t reveal what they were, but don’t say you weren’t warned.

Poor Terry the punk prof gets all tetchy over his bad hair day

There are fears for the health of Terry Eagleton, the renowned literary critic, who has revealed that he is suffering from a debilitating disease – a pronounced thinness of the skin.

The news has come as rather a shock. Over the past weeks he has felt well enough to start an entertaining feud with the Amis family, denouncing the late Sir Kingsley Amis as “a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals”.

But even though he can still dish it out, it seems the so-called punk of lit crit cannot stand even the mildest blow in return. Professor Eagleton has complained about last week’s profile of him in this newspaper, which had the effrontery to describe him as a “warm, funny man with a twinkly smile”.

He is furious that the accompanying illustration made him look slightly balder than he is. In fact the illustration was based on a photograph supplied by Manchester University, where he is professor of cultural theory. If anything, the hairline shown was rather more generous. It’s time for his friends to rally round. Thin skin can wreck lives. Just look what it did to John Prescott.

Form an orderly line to lay into the queue-barging MPs

If you wish to complain about members of parliament, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait. Their staff have rudely barged to the front of the queue. Officials and secretaries are furious at a new rule that allows MPs to jump queues for lunch, the photocopier, the telephone and the post office (yes, your post office might have closed but there is still one at the Commons).

“You cannot have an MP standing in a queue for ages,” says Labour MP Frank Doran, whose administration committee introduced the new rule. “They are busy people.”

Now a backlash is being led by Pat Fea, formidable assistant to John Gummer, and Dan Whittle, researcher for Labour’s Anne Snelgrove. Doran faces a protest meeting this Tuesday. “Luckily, our employers have taught us how to campaign,” says Whittle.

After his ordeal as Labour’s deputy leader in the 1980s, you’d think Roy Hattersley might have suffered enough. Yet he has just read the memoirs of both David Blunkett and Alastair Campbell.

“They are equally awful in different ways,” he says. “I believe they both do irreparable harm to the men involved.”

There’s good news and bad news for Sir Ming Campbell, who under the rigid bylaws of journalism must now be described as the “beleaguered” leader of the Liberal Democrats. The good news is: members of his party aren’t nearly as tough as they used to be. The deputy leader, Vince Cable, a keen student of history, visited a museum in his Twickenham constituency recently and found a cudgel on display that was taken from “the leader of the Liberal roughs” during the 1880 general election (which the Liberals won, by the way, under a 70-year-old leader, Gladstone). And the bad news? With his party at the bottom of the opinion poll barrel, how does Ming feel about his deputy getting access to a cudgel?

Staff at the House of Commons were not immune from recent election fever. A guidebook for new MPs was quickly revised on the off-chance that new MPs might soon be arriving.

Dorset police have put in a bill for £4.5m to cover the costs of policing the Labour party conference in Bournemouth. You’ll remember the conference highlights, of course. Gordon said he’d never let us down, while his youthful sidekicks spent the week getting us all excited about a snap election. And then Gordon let us down.

If the prime minister were a business, we’d be asking for our £4.5m back.

Here’s a question for the 42 MPs who have signed a Commons motion about National Identity Fraud Prevention Week: how do we know you are who you say you are?

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