Andy McSmith's Diary: Sir Nicholas Soames is hungry for a fight – and proud of it

Sir Nicholas Soames, a pedigree Tory MP, seems to be in a foul mood. Last week the grandson of Sir Winston Churchill was raging at the Metropolitan Police for its “repulsively dishonourable treatment” of Field Marshal Bramall and of the former Tory MPs Leon Brittan and Harvey Proctor. This week, he denounced Julian Assange as “a poisonous puff ball” and when challenged by Assange supporters, upped the ante by tweeting: “scoundrel liar coward bail fugitive and common criminal”.

Next there was his reaction to a polite request to meet Labour’s shadow Defence Secretary, Emily Thornberry, who is married to the High Court judge Sir Christopher Nugee. His reply, sent to her office, said: “I am delighted that Lady Nugee is keen to meet with me, given my expertise and experience in defence matters, but I am afraid that the insight that I would have to offer on Labour’s defence review is too robust for Lady Nugee’s delightfully delicate sensibilities.

“Please will you be good enough to tell her that the invitation, which is clearly a joke, will be going into the waste paper bin which is where Labour’s defence policy always ends up.”

He was so pleased with this retort that he copied it to Eton College’s The Chronicle, his old school’s news sheet.

Such displays of bad temper follow hard on an unconfirmed rumour that surfaced in The Sunday Times that Sir Nicholas is either on a diet or generally off his food. There are reported sightings of him in the tearoom, not eating and looking sorry for himself.

Don’t forget William

At Prime Minister’s Questions, Jeremy Corbyn raised the case of Rosie, a twentysomething professional who has to live with her parents because she cannot afford London house prices. He could just as well have spoken up for William, from Manchester, a 28-year-old professional who has also has to live with Mum and Dad. His full name is William Wragg. He is the £74,000-a-year Tory MP for Hazel Grove. “I am part of that ‘boomerang generation’,” he told ITV’s Granada Debate.

Lily’s burning ambition

The Independent was the only one to report a speech by the schools minister, Nick Gibb, calling for pupils to be taught more facts and fewer “joyless” concepts. He did not impress singer Lily Allen, who tweeted: “I left school 15 years ago and I’ve not used Pythagoras’s theorem once or even seen a Bunsen burner.”

The minister responded: “Not everyone’s lucky enough to have a job like yours. For many people maths and science are crucial to their career and life chances.” Allen replied that she was aware of that. She also asked when school kids will be taught to apply for a mortgage or fill in a tax return.

Team Boris takes a swipe

Marina Wheeler, a civil rights lawyer and QC, shares a quite widely held view that the things David Cameron has been negotiating about in Brussels are not the most important issues arising from the EU. Writing in The Spectator, she is particularly concerned by a judgment by the Court of Justice in Luxembourg that the Charter of Fundamental Rights, drawn up in 2000 and sanctified in the 2007 Lisbon Treaty, has legal force in the UK. Successive British ministers from Tony Blair onwards believed the UK had opted out of it.

Had some other QC raised this issue, it would have been taken as an interesting contribution to political debate from outside, but Wheeler is married to Boris Johnson, making it more a pop at Cameron from within the Conservative extended family. It is worth stressing, however, that she was arguing for the reform, not for exit from the EU.