No birthday cake for Judi

The Telegraph’s weekly Peterborough diary column offers an unparalleled insight into what’s really going on at Westminster and beyond

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Shh! No one wish Dame Judi Dench happy birthday when she turns 90 at the beginning of next month. The Oscar-winning actress is starring in a couple of celebratory West End shows with presenter Gyles Brandreth, but has insisted there is no mention of her milestone birthday in the advance publicity. Dench’s eyesight is failing because of age-related macular degeneration which means that if Brandreth manages “to sneak a birthday cake onto the stage, she may not notice it”, he writes in The Oldie. When West End director Trevor Nunn surprised her in a similar show two years ago, dressed all in black, the audience recognised him, but Dench didn’t. “Who is it?” she whispered to Brandreth, who hollered his name over the applause. “A nun!” she cried. “A nun! How wonderful.”
Poet Pam Ayres, who performed with composer George Fenton in Chester and Basingstoke this week, is suspicious of electric cars. She writes: I bought a new electric car Me old one had gone West, The salesman he convinced meThat electric cars are best.“One charge lasts two hundred miles,” he said.But that’s a con.It’s one trip up our drive If you have switched the heater on.
John Prescott was not mean to all Conservatives. Former Tory MP Michael Brown describes how his MP neighbour Prescott “began and ended the 1997 election in Cleethorpes determined to oust me. He played beach cricket as a stunt saying he would ‘bowl Brown out’.” 
Prezza succeeded and Brown lost his seat. But Brown got his own back the following year by describing, in a newspaper column, how Prescott’s words “tumbled out in no particular order but everyone knew what the deputy PM meant”. 
Brown says: “I was summoned to his vast office. I assumed I’d crossed him. On entering he came out swearing how useless I was as an MP. But he loved the sketch and became a fan – giving me his valedictory interview when he left office in 2007 for my ITV Yorkshire politics programme.”
The Covid Inquiry says that it “does not recognise” its estimated £200 million cost, says Jacob Rees-Mogg. 
“Let me let you into a secret: when government departments say they ‘don’t recognise the figure’ you know they are being very careful not to lie by pointing you in the wrong direction,” he tells his GB News viewers. “A confession: I did it myself as a minister. When people were jolly close, but not quite there, you could truthfully say you didn’t recognise the figure, but it meant that the water was getting quite warm.”
Unexpected praise for Boris Johnson from Labour. During an anguished debate on the UK’s falling birthrate Labour peer Lord Foulkes said that “although there are dozens of reasons for us to criticise him, this is one area in which we can be grateful to Boris Johnson?” Johnson is thought to have fathered at least seven children. Treasury minister Lord Livermore disappointingly declined to join in Foulkes’s joke. “I find it hard to sympathise with that man on anything,” he said, a little grumpily.
Penny Mordaunt’s bouffant hairdo attracted all the attention at the BBC’s election debate earlier this year. Viewers compared her with Margaret Thatcher and joked that the more animated she got, the more the volume increased. Now I can reveal that the product behind the gravity-defying blow-dry was a product called Got2b Glued, which offers “super strong hold for up to 72 hours”. Ms Mordaunt is now sworn off it for life, however. She says: “I was doing the BBC the other day and someone came at me with some and I was like, ‘Nooooo – not that stuff’.”
Thanks to the Peterborough readers who sent in memories of fathers who served in the Boer War (1899 to 1902). Lady Fergusson’s father Esme (born in 1875) served in the Scots Guards, as did Caroline Coke’s father-in-law Richard (born in 1873). Edward Crofton’s father Morgan (born in 1879) served in the 2nd Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers, including at the Relief of Ladysmith and at Spion Kop. They went on to fight in the First World War. History is sometimes nearer than we think.
Peterborough, published every Friday at 7pm, is edited by Christopher Hope. You can reach him at [email protected] 
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