No WhatsApp for Maggie

It’s not hard to find differences between Boris Johnson and Margaret Thatcher – but Caroline Slocock, Mrs Thatcher’s private secretary between 1989 and 1991, may have found a new one. In the wake of the row over the Downing Street flat, she tells me it is “inconceivable” that the Iron Lady would ever have used WhatsApp.

“She was far too busy working on genuine affairs of state to spend time using WhatsApp or texts, even if they were available,” she says, adding that Mrs T paid for everything in the flat herself, even her No 10 ironing board.

She adds: “In the past, all exchanges by a PM were monitored and recorded. Private secretaries or political staff listened to every conversation including by telephone and made a note. The use of WhatsApp and texts by ministers has led to loss of transparency.”

Put the phone down, Boris!

Boris’s beavers causing trouble

The former Tory leadership contender Rory Stewart was left heartbroken recently after finding that beavers have been chewing through a prized oak tree at his home in Cumbria.

Beavers, hunted to extinction 400 years ago for their pelts, have been reintroduced around the country. Those vexing Stewart, who was recently tipped to be the next National Trust chairman, started out on the River Tay but have since travelled the 30 miles to his home via the River Earn.

“This whole stretch of the Earn is getting hit very hard at the moment,” he tells me. Besides the oak, which he planted himself, he reports that “two giant poplars have just been toppled downstream.”

There’s no love lost between Stewart and the PM, who has been a supporter of rewilding and used the last Tory Party conference to declare it time to “Build Back Beaver”. An olive branch looks less likely than ever.

Love on the slopes

In last week’s column, I named 31-year-old Lady Tatiana Mountbatten, below – whose father, the Marquess of Milford Haven, is the Queen’s cousin – as one of the sporty aristocrats heading to the ski slopes despite Covid concerns.

Now I can report some happy news – she’s engaged to Alick Dru, an Old Etonian banker, who proposed on the top of a mountain in Verbier. Here’s hoping it’s not all downhill from there!

Sunshine socialists

Two prominent figures in the Corbyn project – former spinner James Schneider and Left-wing writer Owen Jones – have decamped to sunnier climes to finish books on how socialists can win power, with strikingly similar titles.

Schneider has just polished off a draft of Our Bloc: How We Win on a lengthy work trip to the Caribbean, while Jones is currently working on The Alternative: And How We Build It from a bolthole in Barcelona. Was Cuba fully booked?

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