Corridors . .
PUZZLE HEARS that trendy Nicholas, Lord Bethell is expecting to return to the Government in the coming reshuffle. Young Bethell was forced to give up his Job as a Whip in the House of Lords because of the Prime Minister's distaste for having any of his men involved in legal actions, and Bethell was then suing Private Eye.
PUZZLE NOTES WITH INTEREST that the engaging and active Unionist MP Stratton Mills is scarcely on speaking terms with his colleagues, and particularly not with Captain L. P. S. (Willie) Orr, doyen Of the little Ulster group. Mills is a convinced liberal, and Orr is trying hard to niake peace with Jolly Bill Craig. More important, it is rumoured that Mills thinks Orr is stupid, and has said so.
THE SAME JOLLY BILL Craig, who has drunk no more than two glasses of white 'vine in recent days, to a Catholic Irish Journalist at lunch: "I like you. But when the time comes I'm afraid you will Probably have to be shot."
MR JOHN SELWYN GUMMER'S alternative name for the Tory Party (some of the trendies want to change the name to appeal more to the young) is said to be The Social Democratic Party — with Willy Brandt for leader, no doubt.
CURLY-FIAIRED Peter Hain is said to be thinking of resigning from the Liberal Party, after their decision not to contest the Lincoln by-election and instead to encourage Party members to vote for Dick Taverne. Hain can't stand Taverne, who is, he thinks, just short of being Fascist. Jeremy Thorpe, et al, have no time for Rain's Wedgie-Benn type populism and agree that their only hope for the future lies in an alliance with such right-wing Labour defectors as the arrogant and balding young QC.
RUMOURS HAVE reached Puzzle that there is a plot among certain London taxi...drivers against the saintly Lord Longford. urivers, accustomed over the years to ferrying drunken and amorous politicians about, simply refuse to believe that Lord Longford can be the good man of his appearance, and hawk-like eyes scan the streets late at night in the hope of spotting the lord :in some embarrassment.
LATEST OUTSIDER in the running for the editorship of the Daily Telegraph: Tory IVI,R and former Cabinet Minister Bill ,ueedes, now chairman of the backbench ,7°111e Affairs Group, and of the Select `-ornmittee on Immigration and Race Relations, also a long-standing Telegraph ataff man. It is said that the Young Turks °r1 the staff, who idolise
COlin Welch, fear that he flay not get the job and .
Javour Deedes as a stopgap.
Tom Puzzle
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