Andy McSmith's Diary: The ideal figure to bring discipline to unruly Blairites

If Jeremy Corbyn wants a more loyal Shadow Cabinet a Trotskyist dominatrix has to be shoo-in to be Chief Whip

Members of the current Shadow Cabinet, which may well be dismantled by Jeremy Corbyn in the coming days (Corbis)

Margaret Corvid, a sex worker who services submissive men, has written a powerful piece in the New Statesman about why she, a Trotskyist anti-war protester, is joining the Labour Party, even though the party’s deputy leader Tom Watson has said that entryist Trotskyist anti-war protesters are not welcome.

“I will not let any Blairite tell me who a member of the Labour Party should be,” she declares.

It would come as some surprise to Tony Blair to learn that Watson is a “Blairite”, given the passage in his memoirs in which Blair complains about Watson plotting against him.

But never mind that. I have a suggestion.

If Jeremy Corbyn is, as reported, planning to appoint a new Shadow Cabinet more loyal to him, then a Trotskyist dominatrix from Plymouth has to be shoo-in to be Chief Whip.

A bankrupt opinion-maker

Allison Pearson, an eminent newspaper columnist, makes no bones about whose side she is on. “Those of us who voted for this Government need no convincing that our morbidly obese welfare budget requires drastic slimming,” she wrote in The Daily Telegraph in October.

A slimmed-down welfare budget would, of course, reduce the tax burden borne by high earners who do not qualify for welfare.

Ms Pearson was born in 1960 and lives in a village in South Cambridgeshire. I have before me a bankruptcy order agreed by the High Court last month. The petition was lodged by HM Revenue and Customs, which implies that it involves unpaid tax. The person declared bankrupt is identified as Allison Pearson, born in 1960, living in a Cambridgeshire village, whose occupation is “freelance journalist”.

So come on George Osborne: get the welfare bill down, cut the tax rate for the highest earners, and give Ms Pearson a chance to sort out her affairs.

The costs of transparency

Four years after David Cameron described the lobbying industry as “the next big scandal waiting to happen”, the Government decided to do something about it, and legislated to create a register of lobbyists. The register, we were promised at the time, would be “self-financing”.

No chance of that, as things stand. The register cost £261,000 in its first year, but only 113 of an estimated 700 lobbying companies signed up. The annual fee they pay for registering is £700. The Cabinet Office has now put up the fee to £1,000, thereby causing howls of protests from the firms affected, without filling the gap between income and expenditure. The model of a self-funding register is just not going to work, they say.

Attention-seeking behaviour

The selfies that Karen Danczuk posted on social media when she was a councillor and the wife of the Labour MP Simon Danczuk made her famous. Now she is an ex-wife and an ex-councillor, she has to try harder to draw attention to herself. She made a determined effort yesterday by posting a blog setting out how little she thought of her former colleagues on Rochdale council.

They had “scruffy casual clothes, messy hairstyles and dirty shoes”, she wrote, whereas she was “very well-presented”. They were “power-mad individuals who would never be given responsivity [sic] of buying milk in the private sector let alone running a town”, while she had “confidence, a warm heart and brains”.

But her memory clashes with that of Ian Duckworth, a Tory councillor, who told Rochdale Online: “My only memory of her was her sitting through a meeting tapping away at her phone and chewing away in a bovine manner, completely ignoring her surroundings… I suppose she’s running out of sensational things to grab the headlines.”