PETERBOROUGH

Ich bin ein Tory MP

Conservative Party chairman Greg Hands, who can speak five languages, has put his linguistic skills to good use on behalf of his constituents.

The MP for Chelsea and Fulham has recorded a minute-long video in German addressed directly to Baden-Württemberg-based Lidl about its plans to evict a Post Office on Fulham’s North End Road. In a heartfelt video plea addressed to “Lidl in Deutschland”, Hands insisted “wir brauchen dieses Postamt” – “we need this Post Office” – as he popped a protest letter in a House of Commons post box. I am sure he can deliver.

Mel unshelled

When the David Cameron government was in trouble, Treasury minister David Gauke was dispatched onto the airwaves to restore calm. George Osborne would say it was time to “Uncork the Gauke”.

Now I hear Mel Stride, the Work and Pensions Secretary, one of my guests this week on podcast, has seized Gauke’s mantle. This time though the order is different: it is time to “Unshell the Mel” and “Don’t hide the Stride”.

Elvis’s secret trip to the Palace

More details are emerging about a secret visit Elvis Presley, made to London in 1960 where he met up with British pop star Tommy Steele.

Steele, 86, tells broadcaster Mike Reed on Talking Pictures TV that the king of rock ‘n’ roll headed straight to Buckingham Palace.

“He knew who I was, and I knew who he was. He was in town. I got a call – ‘Will I show him around London?’ So we got a cab,” Steele says.

“He had his two mates with him, and I said, ‘Do you want to see Buckingham Palace?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ So we went around the Palace, and then around Trafalgar Square – and he was just looking at it like he’d gone back in time.”

Do the history books now need to be rewritten? Uh, huh!

‘Ello, ‘ello, ‘ello, Lord Ponsonby

Is it time to rewrite the family motto of life peer and Labour frontbencher Lord Ponsonby of Roehampton, who is also the 4th Baron Ponsonby of Shulbrede?

Ponsonby’s coat of arms carries the words (For the King, the Law and the People).

In a Lords’ debate, the peer admitted he was not always terribly good at the

bit. “I was stopped more times that I can remember by the police in Notting Hill and suspect my experience of the police force 50 years ago was very different from the one displayed in Dixon of Dock Green,” he said.

Ponsonby was maintaining a family tradition. His grandfather, the 2nd baron, was arrested in 1925 when he and his friend Evelyn Waugh drove the wrong way down London’s Oxford Street while on a pub crawl.

must run in the family.

Alan’s

Post-It love letter

Alan Carr’s new sitcom Changing

charts what it was like to grow up in Northampton as the son of the local football club’s manager, Graham Carr.

“I want to put Northampton on the map,” he says of the sitcom which is “a kind of love letter” to the town, he says.

“Why shouldn’t Northampton have its own

Maybe Olivia Colman will play me in the next series?”

That’s as far as it goes though. Carr, 46, has no plans to copy Hollywood stars and “do a Wrexham” by buying Northampton Town FC. “When I said ‘love letter to Northampton’, it’s more of a Post-It note,” he adds.

May is ready for

her close-up

Theresa May made history back in 2016 when she became Britain’s second ever female prime minister. I hear she will soon join the first – Margaret Thatcher – in having a portrait on the walls of Parliament.

Tony Blair, David Cameron and John Major are already on the walls – and Sir Lindsay Hoyle’s art advisory committee has decided the Maybot will be next. Will it look anything like the severe image of May for her forthcoming memoir, with a chain around her neck? And could this pave the way for a slice of wall featuring Boris Johnson’s blond mop? I am afraid – for his critics – it is only a matter of time.

A broadsheet’s better

“Had my bare bottom slapped with a newspaper last week in a film,” Robert Bathurst, the star told his 11,600 followers on Twitter this week. “There was no intimacy counselling and, to add insult, I wasn’t even given the choice of which newspaper.” I just hope it was

for his sake. Broadsheets have more surface area.