QUENTIN LETTS: MP and the tart who turned a $50 trick

By QUENTIN LETTS, PARLIAMENTARY SKETCHWRITER
Updated:


Prank: Labour MP Stephen Pound recalled that he once slipped a juicy ­banknote to a ­transsexual prostitute in Hong Kong

Prank: Labour MP Stephen Pound recalled that he once slipped a juicy ­banknote to a ­transsexual prostitute in Hong Kong

Over prawn crackers and Chinese spare ribs in Manchester this week, Labour MP Stephen Pound recalled that he once slipped a juicy ­banknote to a ­transsexual prostitute in Hong Kong.

Before our comrades in the ­red-top Press have a complete seizure, let me explain.

Mr Pound, who represents the good people of Ealing North, was on a fact-finding visit to the Far East with Tory MP Nigel Evans (now a Deputy Speaker in the Commons).

Two things should be noted at this point. First, Mr Evans, 52, has yet to find the girl of his dreams. Second, there is no parliamentarian with a greater sense of mischief than Mr Pound.

The two British MPs, plus attendant oriental dignitaries, were on their way into a restaurant when Mr Pound spotted the long-stockinged, elaborately painted prostitute.

Pound peeled off from the official party and had a quiet word with the lassie. ‘Here’s $50,’ he said. ‘When my friend emerges from the restaurant I want you to go up to him and say: “Nigel Evans, Conservative MP for Ribble, yes, yes, you have come back to me!”

An hour or so later, Pound and Evans were leaving the restaurant when there was an explosion of clacking high-heels as the tart ran up, crying: ‘Meester Nigel Evans, Conservative MP for ­Wibble Valley, yes, yes, you have come back to me!’ With that the fair creature engulfed the Hon. Member in a cloud of cheap scent and scanty garments.

 
   

More from Quentin Letts for the Daily Mail...

Mr Evans, who is plainly ­accustomed to pranks by the ­irrepressible Pound, handled the ­incident with aplomb. ‘Ah, there you are, Pitty-Singh,’ he said. ‘Now then, did you type up those letters I ­dictated to you earlier?’

At the Labour conference, ­‘comrade’ and ‘socialism’ were not the only old-fashioned Lefty words back in fashion. Keith Vaz MP, ­chairing a session, kept referring to female ­delegates as ‘sister’ this and ‘sister’ that.

What made the whole thing slightly surreal was that one of the delegates, the splendidly posh Valerie Vaz, really was his sister. Madness.

Hats off to Blair's love rival

One of the most celebrated photos of the young Tony Blair is of him in his long-haired Oxford days, wearing a boater.

An Oxford contemporary informs me the boater did not in fact belong to future Prime Minister Blair.

He was handed it by his fiery girlfriend Mary Harron (who went on to direct the violent, sexually explicit film American Psycho).

Nor did man-eater Harron own the blessed hat. It belonged to another of her boyfriends, a groovy go-getter called Christopher Paul-Huhne. He, today, is better known as Liberal Democrat MP and Energy Secretary Chris Huhne.

Did you notice that when defeated David Miliband returned to his London home on Tuesday night, he remained empty-handed while his poor wife had to cope with their suitcase?

Perhaps it’s all those years of being a minister and having a bag carrier. Now he’s a backbencher, Mr Miliband can revert to gentlemanly behaviour and offer to lug the impedimenta himself.

As for his brother Ed, my friend Michael Henderson, who is among other things a music expert, cites the old Cole Porter line: ‘How strange the change from major to minor.’


Crime writer Peter James, speaking at Thursday’s Daily Mail literary lunch in London, had a ­warning for shoppers. Do not leave your receipt in your trolley at the supermarket.

The new wheeze among thieves is to seize such discarded receipts, enter the shop, and fill their ­baskets with the very items on the receipt. They can then claim to have bought the goods legally

James researches his novels by going out with the police in Brighton once a week.

He also spends time with convicts, so knows his stuff.  He concluded his speech on Thursday by telling us his favourite ‘bad’ opening line from a novel: ‘As a ­scientist, Throck­morton knew that if he were ever to break wind in the echo chamber, he would never hear the end of it.’

How Fagin learned to fake it

Fagin

Fagin

Actor Ron Moody was unforgettable as Fagin in Lionel Bart’s Oliver! — but not unforgetting.

In newly-published memoirs, Mr Moody (left) describes how he struggled to master the lyrics of one of Bart’s songs when the show opened at the ­Wimbledon Theatre in July 1960.

‘I couldn’t for the life of me recall the order of the verses in Fagin’s four-stanza ­show-stopper Reviewing The ­Situation,’ he confesses.

What with Fagin being money-obsessed, Mr Moody performed the song with lots of fingerwork, holding his palms up close to his eyes as though counting the pennies.

There was an ulterior motive to this gesture. On his mittened fingertips, Mr Moody wrote the start of each of the four verses.

He counted them off as he went — and a hit was duly created.

Outside the Comedy Theatre in ­London this week during the interval of Birdsong — newly adapted from Sebastian Faulks’s book — I heard a young man talking into his mobile telephone.

He told the person at the other end of the line: ‘I’m at the theatre, ­watching Birdseed.’