They’ve got your number

Ukip is expected to get its best result ever in May’s elections to the European Parliament, chasing Labour for first place. But those who vote for them ought to know that their success will not make a blind bit of difference, because “they can’t change a thing”.

Peter Bone, the Tory MP for Wellingborough, has made his mark on Parliament with a running gag about “Mrs Bone”. Her name has been invoked in Parliament so often that it would be tedious to list every mention. One example was when David Cameron returned from a confrontation with other EU leaders in January 2012. Mr Bone told MPs: “I am happy to report that Mrs Bone was singing in the bath yesterday.”

As Piers Morgan contemplates his next move, there hangs over him the issue of phone hacking, and how much he knew while he was editor of the Daily Mirror from 1995 to 2004. Lord Justice Leveson, it will be recalled, found his protestations of complete ignorance “utterly unpersuasive”. Without suggesting that there was evidence that Morgan had ever sanctioned phone hacking, the judge concluded that “he was aware that it was taking place in the press as a whole and… was prepared to joke about it.”

Lexicon of love

Keep at it, Kristen

Members of Tony Blair’s political fan club did not disappear when their champion, David Miliband, lost the contest for the Labour leadership. They remained grouped around a think-tank called Progress, bankrolled by Lord Sainsbury, who was the party’s biggest individual donor in the Blair years.

Friday, as everyone knows, is St Valentine’s Day, a day for exchanging doe-eyed love messages and looking indulgently upon young lovers. That is unless you work for the nation’s top party pooper, Iain Duncan Smith, whose department has put out an extraordinary statement warning benefit claimants that if they fall in love on Valentine’s Day, they must tell IDS or one of his minions, or risk running foul of the law.

Among the most outspoken opponents of the proposed ban on smoking in cars in the presence of children is the Tory MP Dame Angela Watkinson, who protests that it cannot be enforced. “Are we going to have smoking police weaving in and out of traffic, looking in car windows?” she exclaimed in the Commons.

Stick it to the man

Here is something to cheer up Kevin Pietersen as he contemplates the end of his career as an England cricketer: David Cameron thinks he is good at “tonking”. Speaking on BBC Lancashire, the Prime Minister declared himself to be “an enormous fan”, adding: “Some of my most enjoyable times have been watching him tonking the ball all over the park.

John Bercow was in a funny mood as he presided over the Commons today. Only minutes into the session, he became impatient as the barrister-turned-Tory MP, Robert Neill, asked a question that ran to about 90 words. “If he was paid by the word when he was practising at the Bar, he must have become a very rich man indeed,” the Speaker said.

Bad food rising

While politicians agonise over the size of the Government’s debt, one of the most expensive publicly funded projects in recent years is quietly getting under way.

Somebody should compile a compendium of “Interesting Things Sir Malcom Bruce Has Said in his 30 years in Parliament”. It would be a labour of love, a challenge, involving hours and hours of research, but not many results.