A political scrap has broken out on the new All Party Parliamentary Group on the National Trust, set up by Tory MP Andrew Murrison to scrutinise some of the organisation’s woke activities. It all started when shadow cabinet minister Emily Thornberry signed up her Labour colleagues Rupa Huq, Paul Blomfield, Alex Sobel and Luke Pollard to the group. “She did not want to see this APPG hijacked by a group of Tory MPs fixated on fighting silly culture wars,” her spokesman tells me.

The mild-mannered Murrison – now co-chairman with Pollard – is having none of it: “If Emily or any of her colleagues think the Trust would not benefit from parliamentary scrutiny, greater transparency, from being democratically accountable to a huge membership and responsive to its workforce, tenants and army of loyal volunteers, they should say so. Under my chairmanship the APPG and its officers will continue to be the Trust’s critical friend with an open door to its many stakeholders.”

Let the battle commence!

Fellowes’ defence against bores

Julian Fellowes, the Downton Abbey creator, tells me that one of the hazards of being a top screenwriter and producer is that random people approach him with terrible ideas for their own shows. “It happens quite often,” Fellowes said at a Dorchester Hotel event, on the arm of his wife Lady Kitchener to raise funds for sick children.

Fellowes – or Lord Fellowes of West Stafford as he is known – adopts a line often used by the Queen. “I just say ‘how interesting’,” he says. That normally does the trick.

How Laura shocked The Donald

Two theatrical dames – Joanna Lumley and Judi Dench – were on hand to pay tribute to Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s political editor, who stood down this week after seven years. Guests were treated to a “greatest hits” package of Laura K’s toughest questions, notably a corker to Donald Trump from a January 2017 press conference in the White House, when the then-prime minister Theresa May called her for a question.

Kuenssberg listed Trump’s previous dubious claims about torture, abortion and Russia, and a ban on Muslims coming to the US, before she asked him: “For many people in Britain, those sound like alarming beliefs. What do you say to our viewers at home who are worried about some of your views and worried about you becoming the leader of the free world?”

A shocked Trump turned to May. “This was your choice of a question? There goes that relationship.”

Jimmy Osmond stands in for Ed Balls

Ed Balls has moved onwards and upwards since being unceremoniously thrown out of Parliament by voters at the 2015 general election. But at a fundraiser for the National Theatre, he said his “one regret” was rejecting a role in the musical Grease after appearing on Strictly Come Dancing in 2016.

“I got asked whether I would like to play Teen Angel in the touring show Grease,” he tells me. Balls turned it down and the part went to 1970s singing sensation Jimmy Osmond. “It is one of the high points of my life to think me and Jimmy Osmond were competing for the same gig,” he tells me proudly.

Making up with Whitehouse

Before the culture wars were invented, liberal minded Joan Bakewell and conservative campaigner Mary Whitehouse would regularly clash over morals and standards on television in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, Bakewell has lost none of her fire, describing this week how she found Whitehouse – who is the subject of a new documentary – to be “a prudish, narrow-minded campaigner”. But Bakewell added a footnote. “Nevertheless, I visited her when she was dying. We made up.” Perhaps a lesson for today’s keyboard warriors.

Welcome back to a Tory turncoat?

Boris Johnson has clearly not given up on persuading Christian Wakeford to return to the fold. The former Tory MP crossed the floor of the Commons to become a Labour MP at the height of the Partygate controversy.

“I think CCHQ has a malfunction with its email because I got an email the other day asking me to join the Conservative Party,” Wakeford tells me. “I am probably now the last person they want to join … Imagine if I’d replied and said yes?” Imagine indeed. Worth a try by Johnson, I suppose, particularly if a leadership election is around the corner.

Peterborough, published every Friday at 7pm, is edited by Christopher Hope, the Telegraph’s chief political correspondent and the author of the daily Chopper’s Politics newsletter. You can reach him at peterborough@telegraph.co.uk