Or they can give the whole lot to a school if they wish.Reminds Creevey of the great joke about President Gerald Ford’s library burning down Both books were destroyed And he hadn’t even finished colouring them.. Strange business, though, isn’t it, that Cook should be so against first-past- the-post, when he writes a racing column for a Scottish news- paper? What does he think? That the horses should take it in turns to win? Or that it should be called the Alice-in-Wonderland Stakes, and every horse gets a prize?And while we’re about it, who is going to be Robin Cook’s eyes and ears in the Commons as his Parliamentary Private Secretary? Step forward Denis MacShane, MP for Rotherham and former press officer of the IMF. That’s the International Metalworkers’ Federation, not the International Monetary Fund. Denis, a former president of the National Union of Journalists who left his employment with the BBC over a little disagreement about ringing a phone-in programme while posing as Joe Public, is a Francophone ski- loony.Dillons, the bookshop people, have decided to splash out more than pounds 30,000 to find out what Members of Parliament are reading these days. No, not the Chinese and the dissidents of Hong Kong, but Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and his Minister of State, Derek Fatchett.

Cook is billed to be the star speaker at a forthcoming Commons meeting of the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform, proportional representation and all that. Fatchett, by contrast (who was seen last week shaking hands with Peking’s new boss in the former colony, and looking pretty embarrassed about it too) is a rabid supporter of the status quo.Friends are telling him he must not turn up to heckle his boss. He has now taken to imitating Skinner’s mocking gestures and fancy footwork on the floor of the chamber An unlikely pair. More Jekyll and Hyde than Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Bardolph, you might think.Which new Peer popped his head round the door of the Commons smoking room and complained that all the Labour MPs he heard speaking in the chamber were either Oxford or Cambridge, and the only place you can find the working class these days is in the House of Lords? Creevey’s guess is Lord Evans, formerly John Evans, ex-engineering worker, Geordie and fierce hammer of the intellectual Left in his day.It will require all the guile of the Foreign Office to reconcile these two opposing forces. Over the champagne in Westminster College Gardens at a lobbying party, he confided that he has found a role model since entering Parliament in the Hagueite cause. Could it be Edward Heath, who he sits next to on the front row? Not likely.Lewis, right-wing Central Office hard man, scourge of the satirical magazine Scallywag and compulsive writer of letters to the Daily Torygraph, is a secret admirer of Dennis Skinner, the left-wing troublemaker, sorry, guardian of the sacred socialist flame.

Whoa there, Mandy!Dr Julian Lewis, the self-appointed president of the League of Militant Abstentionists who, you will remember, turned up in person not to vote in the Conservative Party leadership, has discovered a new meaning in life. They named the Society after the Roman General, Quintus Fabius Maximus, aka Fabius Cunctator, the Delayer He bided his time before striking against Hannibal. Perhaps Mandy should have recalled the origins of Fabianism, founded by the Webbs. Michael Jacobs, an academic at the London School of Economics and author of The Green Economy has come up on the rails to win.

In his equestrian hurry to get on Labour’s National Executive Committee, the last refuge of the would-be leader, Mandy has fallen at the first fence. He put round the word (ie instruction) that the chairmanship of the Fabian Society should go to Gareth Butler, a producer on Radio 4’s The World This Weekend and son of the noted political academic David Very trendy.
However, he overspun this one. He then hurriedly corrects himself: “Their personal arrangements are none of your business.” None of our business certainly Of some interest, however. Perhaps Peter Mandelson, the Minister without Portfolio (but with Large Ambitions), is not the master of the universe he thinks he is. It is that skill which he will pass on in his School for Social Entrepreneurs After all Lord Young has been doing it for half a century.. William Hague, the Boy Leader of the Conservative Party and his fiancee Ffion Jenkins are together in his constituency in the Yorkshire Dales this weekend, prompting the question: are they living together? Caught off guard, a Tory spokesman says: “This is the 1990s” – which surely means “Yes”. Lord Young came up with the idea when he heard that Bengali patients were dying in the Royal London Hospital because they could not talk to their doctors He saw the need and worked out the solution.

It was the Institute’s farewell to Language Line, a telephone interpreting service in 140 languages which runs 24 hours a day. It had become so successful that it had outgrown the office space available and was moving to King’s Cross. Like so many of Lord Young’s original projects, it is now big enough to strike out alone.Language Line is now used by the police, hospitals, benefits agencies, local government and other public bodies in need of immediate help when dealing with someone who cannot understand English. The school will be open to people of all ages and backgrounds. Ultimately he wants to encourage the most able graduates to choose a career in the voluntary sector. “We must encourage people to work neither for the state, nor for profit, but for the public good.”Will the School for Social Entrepreneurs join the long list of Lord Young’s projects that become so successful that we end up believing they are just part of the fabric of society, part of the way we do things here? Maybe a party held last Wednesday at the Institute of Community Studies, of which Lord Young is director, can give us the answer.