It’s toff in Crewe

The class warriors of Crewe, in their top hats and tails, may have a point. There is indeed a “toff” standing in tomorrow’s by-election. But guess what? It isn’t the Conservative.

You get all sorts of scum in Who’s Who and Debrett’s these days, but for Burke’s Landed Gentry (19th ed), you have to be the real deal. And there she is. “Dunwoody — (Moyra) Tamsin ; born Totnes, Devon, 3 Sept 1958 .”

Yes, indeed. This particular member of the “landed gentry” is also the Labour candidate, who described herself on Monday as “a single, unemployed mother of five fighting for a job”.

No sign of the Tory, Edward Timpson. But then, he’s just the kid of some cobblers.

— Did we know about the Russophilia of Jacques Chirac? The former French president is to be given a humanitarian award by the Kremlin. “This is a man who has done a lot for Russian culture as a whole,” said Mikhail Piotrovsky, the deputy head of the (Russian) presidential arts body, revealing that, as a young man, Chirac translated a novel by Alexander Pushkin into French.

— Lord Black of Crossharbour has written another autobiography. The former newspaper boss, presently residing at Coleman Federal Prison in Florida, has found the time to pen The Fight of My Life, which is due out in October and will take up where his last book A Life in Progress (1993) left off. “It’s very honest and very straightforward,” says his Canadian publisher, McClelland Stewart. A book tour seems unlikely.

— The jobless former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, is to host a weekly talk radio show in the capital on on LBC, starting this summer. The station will not reveal what he will be paid, but his media earnings will almost certainly be less than those of Boris Johnson. Ken’s old mate Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, has a weekly radio show, too. Any chance of a live link up?

— Following on from yesterday’s item about Gordon Brown likening himself to Demosthenes, a reader suggests a more apt classical likeness — the Roman emperor Tiberius, as seen by David Stockton in The Oxford History of the Roman World.

“He came to the task of government in his mid-fifties with excellent and unrivalled credentials. But his character was dour and introspective . . . with more than a touch of melancholia and insecurity. Above all, he lacked the consummate political adroitness of Augustus . . . Men could never be quite sure what was going on in Tiberius’s mind. This led to the view . . . that he was a hypocrite . . . In fact [this] stemmed . . . from the system which he inherited, the product of the great illusionist Augustus.” Uncanny.

— Indiana Jones has been named as the fictional character British people would most like to be rescued by, in a new survey possibly designed to fill the top right-hand corner of the People page.

“There’s something about Indiana Jones that makes us go weak at the knees,” said a spokesman for LOVEFiLM.

Han Solo came second.

— We may have been over eager yesterday in our appreciation of the Jewish Chronicle’s description of Sir Alan Sugar as “the most entertaining Jew on television (on Wednesday nights)”. Having now checked the schedules for ourselves, we are reminded that Paramount Comedy 2 often shows Zach Braff in Scrubs at 23.40. Sorry.

Postscript

Just in case you’d forgotten that consuming fewer calories, not more, helps you to lose weight, please refer to knowyourlimits.gov.uk, the Government’s new campaign offering advice on alcohol-related issues. “Question: My drinking is making me fat. How can I reduce this? Answer: You can reduce your calorie intake from drinking alcohol by alternating pints with half-pints.” So, thanks for that.

— “I like to actually create the stuff. I go to the factories, I work on the stuff,” said Victoria Beckham to Jamie Theakston on Heart FM, talking about DVB, her line of jeans. Do you, Victoria? And, after a busy day toiling over the sewing machine, do you clock out before going down the pub with the girls in your apron?

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