AS POLITICAL icons go, it is possibly up there with Thatcher’s handbag, Major’s underpants, Blair’s dodgy dossier and Kennedy’s bottle of whisky.

Nonetheless, we cannot help but find the idea of forking out £300 for David Cameron’s bicycle pump a tad excessive.

It was sold at the launch of the charity Auction My Stuff, at the Chartered Accountants’ Hall in Moorgate. “It was a very nice pump,” says Sophie, from the charity. “Smart, modern, silver.” Were any other cyclists to sell their pumps, we would be left wondering how they would now inflate their tyres. Dave probably has a spare wheel following him in a chauffeur-driven car.

The auction also included evenings with Take That (£1,450) and Angela Rippon (£500).

• After the spat over the crucifix worn by Fiona Bruce, the BBC newsreader (in summary: some viewers objected to her wearing one, Middle England threw a wobbly), wags at the BBC have doctored her portrait in the White City “Hall of Fame” corridor. In the picture, Bruce is wearing a thoroughly secular necklace. A crucifix has now been added in a black, indelible marker.

  “It could be worse,” offers our spy. “Last year, somebody gave her some horns.”

• At Cancer Research UK’s Turn the Tables event at The Savoy yesterday (in which politicians grill journalists), Ian Hislop reminisced about the curious period of his life that followed his cruel drubbing of Piers Morgan, then Editor of the Daily Mirror, on Have I Got News For You.

  “He sent some journalists to my village,” a bemused and unrepentent Hislop told his interlocuter, the maverick Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews. “The first I knew of it was when I got a call from the vicar. Apparently, they had been asking whether I said anything good in confession. That did make me worry about the Mirror’s knowledge of the C of E.”
  

  Ps

  Ricky Gervais managed not to be too overawed at his New York stand-up debut, even though his fellow performers included Will Ferrell, Jack Black and Ben Stiller. “Who are they?” he asked.

• Michelle Collins, the former EastEnders star, is finding life on stage (Daddy Cool, at the Shaftesbury Theatre) even less glamorous than the BBC. “I hate mice,” she told the audience at the Theatrical Management Association awards. “The Shaftesbury Theatre is full of them. And cockroaches.”

people@thetimes.co.uk

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