Andy McSmith's Diary: Blairites get their message across – to each other

The room in which the new online magazine The Argument was launched on Wednesday evening resembled the land of lost Blairites.

This initiative has been launched by the new Labour MP for Hove, Peter Kyle, as a forum where the like-minded can argue without name-calling and escape that sinking feeling that all is lost.

“I knew in my heart, within two months of being adopted as a candidate, that we were going to lose the general election,” Kyle confessed. “The public didn’t know what we were fighting for. I can’t say I blame them: I didn’t know either.”

I can see two possible outcomes from this venture: either its contributors will hit upon a story for Labour moderates to tell that voters can understand and believe, and thereby save Labour and the two-party system; or it will be a place where they talk to themselves as they sink into irrelevance.

Good luck, Mr Kyle.

Turning back the tide

“I will be voting for Brexit and supporting the excellent Vote Leave campaign. We should look to the world, not just the EU,” the communities and local government minister James Wharton grandly declared earlier in the week. On Thursday the Government announced that it was applying to the EU Solidarity Fund and the European Parliament for money to help areas hit by the recent flooding. The minister who brought this news to Parliament? The self-same James Wharton.

A grandee moment

The EU referendum has put renewed vigour into that fine old Tory MP Sir Nicholas Soames. The spectacle of Churchill’s grandson erupting in defence of David Cameron is like watching lava spew forth from a volcano you thought might be extinct. On the Daily Mail’s role in the referendum so far, he had this to say on his Twitter feed: “There is something so wonderfully reassuring about the chippiness and vitriol of @DailyMailUK almost French in its whining and whingeing.”

Trouble in Turkey

For a time it appeared that a new version of the film Midnight Express might be in the offing, featuring Glasgow East MP Natalie McGarry, who was questioned by police near Turkey’s border with Syria. They wanted to know why she was using her mobile phone near a checkpoint. After she explained that she was part of a delegation and was recording the sound of bombs dropping, they let her go.

Gender revisited

At the bottom of a feature in the online version of Time magazine about the 100 most-read female writers, there is this correction: “The original version of this story included Evelyn Waugh, who was a man.”

Playing the long name

I sometimes wonder whether Waugh could have invented a character as priceless as Jacob Rees-Mogg, Tory MP for Olde England. This week, he and his wife Helena, née Helena Anne Beatrix Wentworth Fitzwilliam de Chair, announced the joyful news of the birth of a son, who is to be christened Alfred Wulfric Leyson Pius Mogg.

You might wonder why. The answer is: Alfred, after Alfred the Great; Wulfric, after Saint Wulfric, the 12th-century anchorite and miracle worker who hailed from a village close to where the Rees-Moggs live; Leyson, after Louis Leyson Rees-Mogg, who was killed in the Gallipoli landings at the age of 25; and Pius, after Blessed Pope Pius IX, the longest-reigning elected pope and the last ruler of the papal states before the unification of Italy.

If the laddie ever meets the Queen, he could cite that line from a Paul Simon song: “I will call you Betty, and Betty when you call me, you can call me Al.”