Liberal dinner party hostess cooks up a storm

Guests invited to Nick Clegg’s home for dinner find out pretty quickly whether or not they are in the good books of Miriam González Durántez, his Spanish wife.

“I love cooking,” declares the glamorous highflying lawyer, who is expecting the couple’s third child in the new year. “But I have a very emotional attitude towards it. If I like somebody I cook for them. But I find it very difficult to cook for people I don’t like . . . as far as I’m concerned, they can have a takeaway!”

The silver service at the Lib Dem leader’s Putney home will be dusted down for Louis Theroux. Sam Mendes and his wife, Kate Winslet, are also friends. But which of Clegg’s parliamentary colleagues are on Miriam’s takeaway pizza list we are not at liberty to say.

Mrs Clegg, 40, is a Nigella Lawson lookalike from Castilla y León, or “Don Quixote country” as her hubby calls it. She could yet snag her own TV cookery series. “Her menus are authentic, learnt from her mum, learnt from her grandmother,” says Mr Clegg. “My favourite is heavenly deep-fried croquetas made with flour, cheese and ham.” Better watch that waistline though, Nick.

Peter Mandelson’s introduction to the House of Lords is keeping the College of Arms busy. Notting Hill already has a peer, although there could be two. The new Business Secretary could have chosen Hartlepool as a title, Lambeth like his grandfather, or even Lord Voldemort, an outside bet. We gather he has settled on plain old Lord Mandelson, without a fiefdom. “Territorial designations are purely voluntary,” says a Garter spokesman.

Dave Brailsford, the performance director for GB Cycling, will submit to a sport industry summit grilling from Alastair Campbell next month. The organisers promise a “no holes barred” one-on-one interview. We’re not quite sure what that entails but no doubt there is a gold medal for it.

George Orwell’s diaries, now running as a blog 60 years on, continue to throw up revelations. Yesterday our hero sampled the “Arab drug kiff, said to have some kind of intoxicating effect”. From a Camden dealer maybe? “Unpleasant taste and so far as I am concerned no effect.”

Frequent interruptions during the ceremony to install the new Chancellor of the University of Stirling failed to prevent James Naughtie from receiving his award

We were surprised to learn that Simon Pegg’s memoirs have been sold for £1 million – the figure that Hodder & Stoughton yesterday stumped up for a three-book series from the “everyman” comic actor. Pegg’s tome will compete with Russell Brand’s in the Christmas market. Can Pegg, a civil servant’s son from Gloucester, rustle up enough lurid tales to match his counterpart? “Simon is absolutely the most talented person in the whole wide world. He is our biggest export,” says Hodder. No pressure, then. EastEnder’s poignant wedding

The Face: Wendy Richard

"All I want is a pain-free day and to be able to laugh,” says Wendy Richard, 65, of her marriage today to John Burns, a union given added poignancy after the actress disclosed a cancer diagnosis that she believes is terminal.

Richard, three times divorced, has shared many of the traumas of Pauline Fowler, the long-suffering EastEnders matriarch whom she played for two decades. The “dowdy” Fowler was wholly at odds with Richard’s breakthough role as the “cheeky Cockney” Miss Brahms in Are You Being Served?

After beating cancer twice before, she accepted the latest diagnosis with her trademark stoicism.

But a new David Croft comedy, in which she plays an “updated” Miss Brahms, should bring a smile to viewers.

Postscript

David Gilmour and Lech Walesa both have eight children, a coincidence discovered when the pair met in Gdansk, the scene of the Pink Floyd man’s new live DVD. The Polish ex-electrician fondly recalled his fertile past. “I’ve given up my tools. All I can do right now, as far as male things go, is shave.”

— Nothing Too Much Just Out of Sight is the title of Sir Paul McCartney’s latest download under his new Fireman name. “It’s a phrase that an old friend of mine from back in the Sixties, Jimmy Scott, used to say down the clubs.” Scott also invented “ob-la-dee ob-la-da” so it could have been worse.

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