The leading critic of Alastair Campbell’s alleged role in the “sexing-up” of the Iraqi dossier was John Maples, the suave former Tory minister.

While most MPs on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee floundered, Maples pursued Campbell with admirable vigour and was noticeably gentler with Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter, and the late Dr David Kelly. Maples sought repeatedly to inject greater scepticism about Campbell's role in preparing the dossier into the select committee report.

The MP for Stratford-on-Avon even tried publicly to distance himself from the second committee report on Gilligan, which accused him of changing his story. “I want to completely disassociate myself from this,” said Maples, although he did not attend the second hearing in which Gilligan was alleged by the MPs to have changed tack.

But questions are now being asked by some MPs about whether Maples, the BBC’s most passionate defender, should have declared an interest.

When Dr Kelly told the committee which journalists he had met, they included Jane Corbin, a highly respected reporter for the BBC’s Panorama programme. Corbin happens to be the wife of Maples, a fact he omitted to mention during his tirades against the Government.

IAIN DUNCAN SMITH’S Conservatives pride themselves on their honesty and principled style. Which is, no doubt, why the party’s official website lists the political interests of the Shadow Cabinet member Oliver Letwin as “agriculture, European community affairs, education, international affairs and international development, social security, trade and industry”.

Everything, in fact, except Mr Letwin’s own portfolio of Home Affairs. What admirable candour.

Our man from Havana

Lord Moynihan, the energetic new Shadow Sports Minister and Olympic silver medallist (as cox to the GB eight at the boycott-hit Moscow Olympics), has spent the past three nights at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club where Chucho Valdes, the Cuban jazz pianist, was playing.

Each evening Moynihan organised a Cuban-style dinner at his London home before ferrying dozens of guests to the Soho jazz club. Proceeds from a charity auction each evening are destined to fund a Cuba-British HIV-Aids relief project to be led by the Cuba Initiative, which Moynihan chairs.

Jazz transcends any political divides: his guest of honour on Monday was a rising star of the Government, Baroness Scotland of Asthal, the Minister of State in the Home Office.

CATE BLANCHETT is planning a second collaboration with the director who made her an international star in Elizabeth. Blanchett would play the lead in Shekar Kapur’s biopic of Mary Evans, an Australian circus artist who became Fearless Nadia, the greatest heroine of pre-independence Bollywood.

“They called her the Lady with the Whip,” the actress said at the London premiere of Veronica Guerin. “She was an amazing woman and I really hope it happens.” So do we.

Getting a grip: having ducked under a rope cordon to reach her quarry, Dorothy Edwards, 77, from Haughley, near Stowmarket, intercepted Camilla Parker Bowles at yesterday’s Sandringham Flower Show in Norfolk and kissed her flush on the hand.

Mrs Parker Bowles, who was accompanying the Prince of Wales to the annual show in the grounds of the Queen’s residence for the second year running, was apparently delighted and amused by the gesture.

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