Lighting up in St James’s
Nigel Farage is looking for a new London club after the East India, his home for the past 30 years, wouldn’t give him a place to smoke. “I have resigned from the club because they refused to provide proper smoking facilities. I said, ‘Enough is enough, if you can’t provide decent smoking facilities I am going.’ So I went.”
His resignation means that he missed the vote last week when the club’s members narrowly decided not to lift a ban on women joining. He thinks he would have voted to maintain the status quo. “Freedom of association is right up there with freedom of speech. If people want to have women’s clubs, blokes’ clubs – they should be allowed to,” he says.
Farage, pictured, thinks the club – which styles itself as “a gentleman’s home from home” – will be running the poll again “pretty soon”. The club’s chairman – Duncan Steele-Bodger – appears to agree, telling members: “The closeness of the vote indicates a strong groundswell of opinion for change and so there is no doubt that the club will revisit this topic.” Don’t they remember what happened the last time someone tried to overturn the will of the people?
Boris Johnson Is An Englishman!
Is the English National Opera trying to curry favour with No 10, with a guest appearance by “Boris Johnson” during its production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore at the Coliseum in London’s West End?
An actor in a blond wig waving two small Union Jacks in each hand is lowered from the gods as an enormous Union flag unfolds, at the end of He Is An Englishman, copying Johnson’s stunt when he was stranded on a zip wire at the beginning of the London Olympics.
A spokesman for the ENO tells me: “I don’t think the PM has seen the show.” He may want to avoid it. Johnson later complained that the zip wire had left him with some rather uncomfortable chafing.
Starstruck
The former Doctor Who and Thick of It actor Peter Capaldi was star-struck to spot the Kinks’ singer Ray Davies in a north London restaurant. He tells me: “I love Ray Davies, he’s written some of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard, and I thought I’m going to tell him that.
“I said, ‘Mr Davies, I won’t keep you long, I just want you to know that I think your songs are wonderful and Waterloo Sunset is one of my favourites of all time.’ And he chatted to me for like 15 minutes about this and that, and then he got me tickets for a concert he was playing, and it was absolutely great.”
Capaldi was planning a 25th wedding anniversary with his wife, Elaine Collins, at the nearby Clissold Arms, where Davies first performed in public. “In passing in conversation I said to him, ‘You know, we’re having our wedding anniversary party at the Clissold Arms, which you used to play at.’ He said, ‘I’ll come down and play for you if you want.’ And, of course, I heard myself saying, ‘I’ve already booked the band, thanks Ray.’ So that was that.” Oh dear.
Ministry of silly faces
Cabinet ministers have been behaving like teenagers and creating their own “memoji”. Both Michael Gove and Sajid Javid have made the emoji characters – which are loosely based on their own likenesses – on their mobile phones to send out in text messages. A guide on Apple’s website says users can “customise the features of the memoji”. What is wrong with a simple ?
