Londoner's Diary: John McDonnell curries favour on Stella’s patch

Out of town: Walthamstow MP Creasy
Rob Stothard/Getty Images
1 February 2016

The heat was on last Friday night at the Zaiqa curry house in Walthamstow as shadow chancellor John McDonnell tripped up to Stella Creasy’s constituency to speak to local activists while Stella was out of town.

This sort of thing is regarded as a lapse in manners — if there is such a thing in politics — as a frontbencher might be expected to agree his visit in advance with the sitting MP. Creasy was already booked to speak in Edinburgh at a Burns Night dinner.

Would McDonnell be respectful of Stella in her absence or use the opportunity to prime the activists to his agenda? In the end his main attack was against the Evening Standard, which received more mentions in his speech than Stella — most disobliging.

“Stella and I are good friends,” he said. “We’ve worked together closely and I respect her as one of the best constituency MPs… What a woman!” he added.

McDonnell’s warm-up act was Matt Wrack, general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, which was subsidising the evening. He was less enthusiastic about Stella, not mentioning her by name once in his speech.

McDonnell also added that: “Jeremy has introduced this new form of politics of being careful and considerate — I’m only halfway through the course.”

Having come from another curry night at Hounslow, “two portions” McDonnell was tasked with the raffle, with prizes such as “organic extra-virgin Palestinian olive oil” and a Jeremy Corbyn superhero T-shirt going to Wrack. A new kind of politics indeed.

***

London Thinks, a series of talks and debates, will be at Holborn’s Conway Hall next month to consider the theology and ethics of Star Wars.

Speakers including the Reverend Giles Fraser will ask “Is Obi-Wan Kenobi a benign spirit guide, or a radical preacher recruiting vulnerable teens to join a terrorist movement that blows up government Death Stars? And is Han Solo really a humanist?”

We’ll be there in less than 12 parsecs.

Bookish Yentob away from the numbers

Keeping his nose clean in Columbia: Alan Yentob
Carl Court/Getty Images

Alan Yentob’s name has resurfaced in a report on Kids Company, saying his interventions were “unwise at best, deliberately intimidating at worst” — but whither the trainer-clad man himself? Colombia, where I’m told he’s “defiant” over the issue. He is one of the speakers at the Hay Cartagena Festival.

Dressed in purple pyjama bottoms, Yentob was “Remembering Shakespeare” alongside Simon Schama and Deborah Levy on Thursday, before “Remembering Bowie” with Rosie Boycott, Jamie Byng and his old pal Hanif Kureishi.

In fact, memories of things past was a theme of his trip: a chat with Colombian journalists titled “The Media and its Challenges” introduced Yentob’s position as “presenter and British television executive whose career has been forged in the prestigious BBC”.

Boys suck, Girl Power rules

IS STAYING in the new going out? Radio 1 presenter Gemma Cairney, right, launched her party project on Saturday night suggesting just that: The Sleepover. A group of lucky women gathered in the Royal Suite of the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel for a night of childish dancing, silly pyjamas, booze and yoga across the three bedrooms, private study and marble bathroom.

Guests included Harriet Vine, above left, of jewellery brand Tatty Devine, and blogger Lucie Kerley, above right, who snuggled up with perfume fiend and host for the evening, Katie Puckrik, centre. The gang hit Instagram with pictures of themselves posing in the suite’s gigantic bathtub, as well as the staircase that was in the Spice Girls’ Wannabe video.

And with Gemma wearing “Boys Suck” slippers, Girl Power seemed like the theme of the evening. We’re jealous.

Artistic cheers for Cara chameleon

Instagram is like, so over — these days cool kids are turning to canvas. Rejecting selfies for sketches, Cara Delevingne has been adopted as portrait artist Jonathan Yeo’s muse — her eyebrows will appear in oil on the walls of the Museum of National History in Denmark an upcoming retrospective of Yeo’s paintings.

Yeo, who has been entrusted with the faces of everyone from Kevin Spacey to Prince Philip, by way of Malala Yousafzai and Helena Bonham Carter, worked with the “brilliant chameleon” Delevingne for more than a year on images designed around the changing face of identity creation due to social media. Ink and paper over Instagram? We’ve been championing that for like, ever.

***

Goodbye to Terry Wogan, who among other things hosted the Eurovision Song Contest. And no wonder he always had such a smile on his face. A friend says while Wogan’s parting advice to Graham Norton, who took over Eurovision compering duties a few years ago, was “don’t start drinking until at least the fifth song.” Wogan couldn’t resist some Irish cream while he narrated. One year, however, he hit a snag: the venue was dry, so his producer had to carefully decant a bottle of Baileys into orange juice cartons to get past security.

Red-faced with Redmayne​

The Londoner was at a party last week, nursing a glass of champagne, when our interest was piqued by a conversation between a rather tall gent and a woman who had arrived alone.

The unacquainted pair got chatting about one of the week’s hot topics — the Oscars — and the woman began to wax lyrical on the subject. “Eddie Redmayne is completely undeserving of his nomination for The Danish Girl,” she said.

The Londoner awaited the fallout: “You do realise he’s my brother,” the gentleman, HarperCollins CEO Charlie Redmayne, pictured, said with a raised eyebrow. “I doubt you’ve even seen the film,” he added.

That might well have been true, so what else could the young woman do but bluff? “Of course I knew that,” she said, blushing. “I was just joking to see how you’d react.”

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