Andy McSmith's Diary: Mann of the people finds way to recover Labour cash

John Mann suggests party impose a tax on every member with a house or multiple homes worth more than £1m

Firefighters demonstrate outside the Houses of Parliament against the Trade Union Bill in November last year (AFP/Getty)

John Mann, Labour MP for Bassetlaw, has concocted a mischievous proposal to recover the millions that will be lost to his party when the Trade Union Bill now going through Parliament becomes law, making it impossible for unions to continue funding it in the way they have done since its foundation.

He has written a blog suggesting that the party impose a £1,000-a-year “mansion tax” on every member with a house or multiple homes worth more than £1m. He argues that the increase in membership – up more than 188,000 since the election – makes the party increasingly middle-class.

“One street in Islington North, with owner-occupiers living in multi-million pound properties, had 40 people over a 12-week period join the party,” he wrote. “Membership is now higher in the average Tory heartland seat than in the average Labour heartland seat. Within heartland areas it is again overwhelmingly the middle classes who have joined… This is a big political problem: while the Labour Party has rapidly grown it is now conversely more distant from its traditional base.”

John Mann is the Labour MP for Bassetlaw (AFP/Getty)

Slapping a £1,000 membership fee on some property owners “will raise significant money and it is entirely socialist in its approach,” he claimed.

He named no names, but assuming that Tony and Cherie Blair are still party members, they would certainly be hit by this wheeze. Something tells me that one person actually in Mann’s sights was Seumas Milne, Jeremy Corbyn’s £90,000-a-year director of strategy, who has a desirable residence in Richmond and is not popular with certain categories of Labour MP.

Ewe can’t be serious

Chris Grayling, the Leader of the House, has revealed the strangest email he says he has received since taking up his job last May. The sender was Angus Brendan MacNeil, SNP MP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar – or the Western Isles – who asked: “Could you tell me when the Easter recess will be, because I need to work out when to put the ram out with the ewes?”

The recess will begin on 24 March, and will last two weeks, which is apparently very good timing for lambing purposes.

As seen on Shah

“Once I appeared on television to talk about forced marriage,” the Labour MP Naz Shah, who experienced a forced marriage in her teens, tells Stylist magazine, “and a man tweeted me saying, ‘My wife wants to know where you bought your top from’.”

There is life after politics

Hearing that the former MP for Banff and Buchan, Sir Albert McQuarrie, has died aged 98 prompted me to check whether there are any living ex-MPs older than he.

There is one. Ronald Atkins, the former Labour MP who lost Preston North in 1979 by just 29 votes, will have his 100th birthday on 13 June.

McQuarrie was the oldest former Conservative MP.

Ask a simple question...

It seems a simple enough question. Andrew Rosindell, a right-wing Tory MP, asked the Foreign Office “how many new EU regulations have become law in the UK since May 2015?”

The reply from David Lidington, a Foreign Office minister, stretched to more than 150 words, so I will not reproduce all of it, but it began thus: “There are different types of EU laws, some of which are directly applicable in the UK (regulations), and others which may require domestic implementing measures to give them full effect (such as directives).” He went on and on before declaring that “the information which brings together all these categories of EU measures is not held centrally”.

It would have been much simpler to reply “I dunno.”