Brown's mystery fist

It was, you may recall, generally assumed that when Tony Blair referred to the “clunking fist” hammering David Cameron, he was referring to Gordon Brown.

Ben Griffiths, of the Welwyn & Hatfield Times, may suggest otherwise. Finding himself next to the PM-in-waiting during a recent visit to Knebworth Park, the local hack yelped a question on that thorniest of issues, the East of England Plan.

“He did not flinch as he marched towards his car,” says Griffiths. “Instead, a gigantic bouncer . . . palmed me away . . . knocking me into a wall.”

Crikey. Shades of John Prescott. Sort of. But the identity of this clunking fist remains a mystery. Says Brown’s campaign office: “No one saw anything like that, but there was a ferocious media scrum. They were rolling around on the floor.” Really? “No. Metaphorically.”

— Open season in Brussels once again on the, ahem, eccentric UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom. The man who suggested that small businessmen were lunatics if they employed women of childbearing age recently attended the Women’s Affairs Committee. “It did not take long before the conversation got around to rape and prostitution,” he says on his podcast. “Interesting that none of [its members] are in danger of the first or could earn their living from the second.”

“Outrageous,” says Mary Honeyball, a Labour MEP.

“My eyes rolled when I first heard it,” his spokesman sighs, wearily. “But he stands by it.”

— Simon Schama, on stage at the ICA’s 60th anniversary fundraiser, is trying to talk about art. Unfortunately, so is most of his postdinner audience, loudly and drunkenly. “What art is supposed to do,” he shouts over the din, “is to stop banal conversation.” Tough crowd.

— Sharp-eyed hacks will have noticed that Ian McCartney, the dimunitive Consumer Affairs Minister, spoke at the National Consumer Council yesterday standing on a box. “I gave a speech at a wedding recently and was obscured by the lectern,” he explained, in a tiny voice.

— A tough job for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, organising a football match this Thursday between an all-star celebrity XI and a team of MPs. Particularly difficult is finding a Tory to go with the two Lib Dems and thirteen Labour volunteers, with only Alistair Burt, MP for North East Bedfordshire, stepping in at the last minute. Says a charity spokesman: “We hope he can encourage a few more. Tory MPs aren’t renowned for their athleticism.”

— Security was tight, we hear, at the postshow party for Antony Gormley’s Hayward Gallery exhibition, held for some reason at the South Bank outlet of the posh burger chain Giraffe. “Sorry, we’re full,” the doormen told one slim, bespectacled guest and his female companion. Not too full, it eventually transpired, to allow in Gormley and Jay Jopling, his art dealer.

— In November 2005 John Cleese said he was “terribly happy” about having a new species of lemur named after him in honour of his work to protect the endangered primates. This weekend the residents of Palmerston North renamed their rubbish dump after the Python star in honour of his comments that the town was the “suicide capital of New Zealand”. A “Mt Cleese” sign has been erected. We imagine he’s not terribly happy about that.

— Will the former England footballer Ian Wright be a surprise contender to run as Conservative candidate for the London mayoralty? He told People at the MyLife charity event: “I’d promise to scrap the congestion charge . . . I used to be new Labour but when I started making money I started to appreciate just how good Margaret Thatcher and her policies were to me.” Ah. Probably not the right sort of chap then, eh, David?

Postscript

Edward Albee, the playwright, was accused of being a thief at a New York luncheon last week. A producer said: “As a messenger boy for Western Union, he didn’t have a typewriter, so he took one . . . I don’t think he ever returned it.” Did

Leonardo DiCaprio travel by fuel-guzzling jet to the Cannes premiere of his global-warming documentary The 11th Hour? “No, I took a train across the Atlantic,” he told the reporter lucky enough to ask.

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