Goodbye to the public convenience. Hello to the public house

Is there no end to the ambition of Hazel Blears? First she wants to be deputy leader; now the communities secretary has seized control of Labour’s key public lavatory policy.

Here is her vision: councils won’t bother with public lavatories any more, but will pay pubs and restaurants to open their facilities to all and sundry.

“It’s ridiculous,” says the British Toilet Association (no, really). “In a developed and wealthy democracy, we can’t afford a few toilets?”

Fair enough, but why stop at pubs and restaurants? In these days of 24-hour binge drinking, won’t anybody with a front garden qualify for the money?

- David Dimbleby, host of BBC1’s Question Time, appears on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs today, asking for the presenter Kirsty Young to be his luxury item. Presumably he hopes to fashion Kirsty into some sort of escape raft. Otherwise, he’ll need that island to escape the wrath of Mrs Dimbleby, granddaughter of the 9th Earl De La Warr.

Fruity civil servants show the way with a bit of extracurricular action

- Where do randy civil servants go now that John Prescott’s Office of the Deputy Prime Minister has been wound up? Ladies and gentlemen, form an orderly queue at Ed Balls' department for schools and families.

Andrew Adonis, the schools minister, has told colleagues how he was strolling around the department one evening not long ago when he spotted a couple putting in some unpaid overtime. He would normally have gone over to congratulate them, but realised they were not hunched over important paperwork on school standards. They were making love on the desk.

Too shy to intervene, the minister crept away and later mentioned the semi-naked civil servants to the human resources people. Now he has had to complain again after his latest walkabout in the open-plan department. More than half the computer screens, he noticed, were showing Facebook, the social networking site.

It was reported recently that the UK has been slipping down the international league table of school standards. Do we have a plan to reverse this trend? Oh yes . . . yes . . . yessss.

The day Mrs Gove fell for Michael’s true-blue jimjams

Last week the Tory Michael Gove gave us invaluable advice about his party’s current thinking on neckwear. Now brace yourself for part two of Fashion with the Goves. Mrs Gove has revealed that what originally attracted her to the MP for Surrey Heath was the fine cut of his Turnbull & Asser pyjamas, which she first clapped eyes on at breakfast on a skiing trip. “I admired a man who felt solid enough in his masculinity to consume his breakfast eggs in a calm and orderly fashion while dressed head-to-toe in sharply pressed powder blue,” she blushes. Great things are expected of Michael, yet can we take him entirely seriously now we know he has lady-killer pyjamas?

- Downing Street has rejected an online petition that calls on Gordon Brown to sing, “We’re going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line,” while standing in a barrel of custard. The petitioner has been told: “This is outside the remit of the prime minister.” Is it something Harriet Harman could do instead?

- Unleashing his famous sense of proportion, Tony Benn has warned that Chinese restaurants could soon be under state surveillance. In a speech in London, the former cabinet minister said governments have ruled by stoking fear of, in turn, the Germans, Russians and Muslims. “In three years’ time it will be the Chinese,” Benn said. “There’ll be an MI5 officer in every Chinese takeaway.” That’ll be rice for one, then, shaken, not stir-fried.

- The Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has decorated his office with portraits of every leader of his party from Gladstone to Ming Campbell. Well, not quite every leader. David Owen, in joint charge during the alliance years, seems to be missing. “There isn’t room,” an aide says. “We might be able to hang him in the loo.”

- Hunter Davies, ghostwriter to the stars, has finished the autobiography of John Prescott. Reporting this in the New Statesman, Davies recalls Prescott’s time in the Commons football team. But perhaps the real surprise was that Neil Kinnock, former Labour leader, played in goal. What must that have been like? “Goalie’s ball! And in saying that, as I’ve said in many games before, that’s not to rule out the possibility that a centre-back - a Labour centre-back - might get his head to it . . . [etc etc]”

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