Andy McSmith's Diary: Tony Blair has the French swooning

The former Prime Minister made one Europe 1 listener giddy with his fluent but accented French

Tony Blair (PA)

Some French people say Jane Birkin, who gave her name to the Birkin bag, has the cutest English accent they have ever heard – but the 1960s film star and former lover of Serge Gainsbourg has a rival.

Tony Blair appeared on Tuesday on the breakfast show on Europe 1, answering the interviewer’s questions in fluent but accented French.

Afterwards the radio host read out an email from an ecstatic listener who declaimed: “Monsieur Blair’s French is even nicer than Jane Birkin’s.”

Gove, the muesli muncher?

The Justice Secretary, Michael Gove, having scrapped the court charge and other idiocies introduced by his predecessor, Chris Grayling, is now, of course, a target for the swivel-eyed right. “You’ve gone native… hanging off every word that is said by the Howard League for Penal Reform… when will you put victims at the heart of what you are doing?” Philip Davies, the right-wing MP for Shipley, complained in the Commons.

Mr Gove replied: “I’m not sure Labour MPs would agree with the suggestion that I have become a sandal-wearing, muesli-munching, vegan vaguester.”

That’s rich, m’lord

The 6th Earl of Listowel issued a sensible warning to fellow peers as they considered the impact that the Government’s Welfare Reform Bill might have on child poverty. “It is very easy to avoid meeting families in poverty,” he said.

“Many of the leaders of this country will perhaps have been educated privately. They may never have worried about where the next meal will come from or whether they can afford to heat their homes, and they may not mix with people who have those worries.”

About five minutes after he had said that, he was followed by another hereditary peer, Lord Northbourne, an old Etonian, who lives in a grand 17th-century house, Northbourne Court, near Deal in Kent. He declared: “The families themselves ought to do more to create the income they so desperately need. I have not come prepared with any evidence… but I hear a good deal to suggest that a number of families prefer to live on benefits rather than go to work.” Somebody was not listening.

Another suspicious death

Alexander Litvinenko, whose murder was laid at Vladimir Putin’s door in a report published last week, is, of course, not the only critic of the Russian government to die violently. It was announced in Moscow that the authorities have completed the investigation into the murder of the former opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was shot close to the Kremlin last February.

The official line is that he was killed by Chechens, but his friends and family doubt it. On Monday, Nemtsov’s daughter, Zhenna, asked the Council of Europe to investigate. There were many reasons why someone may have wanted Nemtsov dead, not least that he was working on a report into Russia’s military role in Ukraine.

Ghost ship mystery

Two years have gone by since a cannibal rat ghost ship sailed into the imagination of the nation’s mass media. On 23 January 2014, we were warned of the approach towards our shores of the Russian vessel Lyubov Orlova, which had come to grief off the Canadian coast. It had been sold for scrap to a buyer in the Dominican Republic, broken its moorings as it was being towed south and was drifting across the Atlantic.

We were further warned that there were no living creatures aboard except feral rats who had survived by eating their own species. This story created a sensation that lasted three or four days, then drifted away, never to be revived. Does anyone know what became of the cannibal rat ghost ship?