Ann Leslie, the 73-year-old former Daily Mail columnist, reminds me that six years ago she revealed in her memoirs how she was once ambushed in a bedroom by the film star David Niven. After writing that, she received a reader’s letter – unpublishable until now – from a woman who had suffered a similar experience at the hands of Rolf Harris.

Ben Duncan, a Green councillor in Brighton, has apologised, two days after the event, for tweeting “Armed Forces Day has certainly brought the hired killers onto the streets of Brighton today. Hard to explain to my son!”

After that highly publicised affair last week when the Tory MP Michael Fabricant tweeted that he might like to punch my colleague Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the throat, she was in the Commons on Wednesday evening when who should she encounter but the man himself. “I’m on a commission which is chaired by Harriet Harman, on older women. We had finished the meeting; they were all running for a seven o’clock vote. I was coming down the stairs when there he was,” she said.

John Birt, the former Director-General of the BBC, expounded a theory of television journalism which his colleague Peter Jay called the “mission to explain”. Today, whoever was operating their news app seems to be on a mission to mystify, as users twice received a weird message, which included the information that there will be “No nudity in latest episode of Game of Thrones!!!” and that “Push sucks! Pull blows!” It was followed by another message, apologising for the previous two: a test message was posted in error.

Daniel Kawczynski, Tory MP for Shrewsbury, has distinctive views on the Middle East, in which he takes a keen interest. He once told the Commons that the best man to unify Libya would be Crown Prince Mohammed el-Senussi, great nephew and heir of King Idris, who was overthrown in 1969. He is also a friend and admirer of President Assad’s cousin Ribal al-Assad, who has lived in London since a family feud forced his blood-soaked father to  leave Syria.

Now that UKIP has a huge contingent of 24 MEPs, what can we expect them to contribute to the European Parliament? Nothing, according to Ukip’s disenchanted founder, Alan Sked. “They don’t do anything constructive there, they just go there to take the money, the expenses and get pensions…They don’t articulate policies, they are hardly ever there,” said Professor Sked. He launched Ukip in 1993, but left in 1997 after his creation had become “a magnet for bigots.”

Stephen Fry has pulled out of a big Labour Party fundraising event because he doesn’t like the way the party treated one of his friends.

Sir Peter Tapsell, the venerable Tory MP, opened Prime Minister’s Questions by suggesting that the Commons “commence the procedures of impeachment” against Tony Blair for “allegedly misleading the House” over the Iraq war, 11 years ago.

Contempt would appear to be the strongest emotion coursing through the veins of Michael Gove’s former political adviser, Dominic Cummings – contempt for politicians such as Nick Clegg, whom he once described as “self-obsessed, sanctimonious and so dishonest”, and contempt for the Whitehall village  and almost all its inhabitants, apart from Gove, of course.

Attempts to get the civil services to be more business-like have hit a snag: the new-style board meetings that are meant to drive efficiency are so boring that even junior ministers with an eye on promotion have been avoiding them.

David Tredinnick, MP for Bosworth, is not the smartest Conservative there ever was. In the 1990s, he is reported to have lost £750,000 as a Lloyds underwriter, but he is open to ideas about healing the sick. He is the first, I believe, to draw Parliament’s attention to tea tree oil.

Ed Miliband does not look like a potential prime minister to the public, the former Home Secretary Charles Clarke bluntly let on today. Mr Clarke, who has a book to promote, also thinks that it will be “very difficult” for Labour to win next year’s general election outright.

Vince Cable’s dangerous friendship with the erratic peer Matthew Oakeshott might cause him more trouble today.

The eyes of ambitious Labour wannabes are focusing on Bootle, on Merseyside, where the long-serving MP, Joe Benton, has hit a spot of bother with his local party. He is over 80 years old. Incredibly, that would make him only the fourth oldest Labour MP in the post 2015 Parliament, but in Bootle they think that it is old enough, and have decided to hold a contest to select their next candidate.