BLACK DOG: Maria's hubby on the home team

By BLACK DOG FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY

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Culture Secretary Maria Miller can rely on support from loyal husband Iain as she fights to save her Cabinet seat over claims that she pocketed £90,000 in MPs’ expenses for a home lived in by her parents.

He works for City law firm Bevan Brittan, specialising in mortgage fraud  and ‘professional conduct and discipline  in public bodies’. Mr Miller lists his recreations in Who’s Who as ‘children,  wife, Sunderland FC and managing the stress caused by each’.

Mrs Miller is in greater danger of being relegated than Sunderland.

Culture Secretary Maria Miller can rely on support from husband Iain as she fights to save her Cabinet seat

Culture Secretary Maria Miller can rely on support from husband Iain as she fights to save her Cabinet seat

 

Normally affable Tory MP Nadhim Zahawi was left fuming when Guardian scribbler Laurie Penny claimed that he’d said people were out of work because they couldn’t get up in the morning.

Zahawi drew on his own rags-to-riches story to retort: ‘I didn’t say that. I was talking  about my own family experience – that it’s hard to motivate yourself in the morning, I’ve been there when my father lost everything, our home was repossessed. My mother had to pawn her wedding ring so  we could actually put food on the table.  I will take no lectures from you!’

 
Cherie Blair has picked a fight with Helen Grant (pictured) for advising girls to take up cheerleading so they can 'look gorgeous'

Cherie Blair has picked a fight with Helen Grant (pictured) for advising girls to take up cheerleading so they can 'look gorgeous'

Cheery Cherie... the feminist cheerleader

Cherie Blair - who could start a fight in an empty room - has picked one with Tory Sports Minister Helen Grant for advising girls to take up cheerleading so they can ‘look gorgeous’.

Tony’s wife has forwarded  a mocking article about Ms Grant and ‘sequinned socks’ to her friends, saying: ‘I thought this would amuse you’.

Dog is certainly struggling to imagine arch-feminist Cherie in a cheerleaders’ outfit.

Fresh from the triumph of the US version of his House Of Cards trilogy, Michael Dobbs is toying with giving the House of Lords the same uproariously fictional treatment he gave the Commons.

The Tory peer told Total Politics magazine: ‘Maybe one day I’ll write a play about this place. It’s wonderfully theatrical.’

His working title? ‘I’d call it The Zimmer Conspiracy.’ A trifle cruel on their venerable Lord and Ladyships, you might think, but Dog couldn’t possibly comment.

 

Alex's mid-life crisis

A holiday last week with wife Lucy in a croft on the Isle of Islay has led Tory MP Brooks Newmark to devise his own novel theory for Alex Salmond’s campaign for Scotland to quit the UK.

‘He is like a man in a mid-life crisis who wants to divorce his wife for a sexy young French model,’ says Brooks.

‘But if he does he’ll be worse and wish he could dump the floozy and go back to the missus.’

A holiday last week with wife Lucy in a croft on the Isle of Islay has led Tory MP Brooks Newmark to devise his own novel theory for Alex Salmond's (pictured) campaign for Scotland to quit the UK

A holiday last week with wife Lucy in a croft on the Isle of Islay has led Tory MP Brooks Newmark to devise his own novel theory for Alex Salmond's (pictured) campaign for Scotland to quit the UK

 

The woman who told Ed Miliband to ‘get out!’ of the crisis HQ of flood-hit Wraysbury near Windsor has received hate mail from Labour supporters.

‘They called me “Tory scum” and worse, but I have no regrets,’ says Margaret Lenton, ex Slough Grammar headmistress, magistrate  and deputy mayoress of Windsor.

‘We were trying to rescue a paraplegic lad and Miliband and his media scrum were in the way.’

It’s a braver man than Red Ed who stands in the way of a Tory Maggie.

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