Andy McSmith's Diary: Who said politics was all about the money? White Dee

White Dee, heroine of the Channel 4 documentary series Benefits Street, has been advised by her agent to shun politics. If the bookies are correct, she has a better chance than any other challenger of unseating the incumbent Labour MP Shabana Mahmood in Birmingham Ladywood where she lives, but her manager, Barry Tomes, thinks she should forget it. He has advised his client, whose real name is Deirdre Kelly, that she can make more money by being a media personality. She is thought to have been paid £100,000 for appearing on Celebrity Big Brother.

“Who would want to be an MP and earn £50,000 a year?” he told the Birmingham Mail. “She could earn a lot more than that just by being Dee Kelly.”

I am not sure about this advice. Firstly, MPs are better paid than Tomes thinks. Their basic pay is £67,060, the expenses are still pretty good, and so is the pension. And there is nothing to prevent an MP from picking up a fat fee for going on reality television, as George Galloway and Nadine Dorries have demonstrated.

On the other hand, Shabana Mahmood is defending a majority of 10,105, which leads me to think that Tomes has a point after all.

Fired up by Jay-Z

“You can’t be the moaning man in the pub,” Liz Kendall, Labour’s shadow care minister, advises her colleagues, via an interview in The House magazine.

“Actually, the moaning man in the pub often has a real point underneath it all. But mostly you end up not listening.” In other words, smile as you talk about the cost of living crisis. Look happy, as you proclaim that a Conservative election victory will be the end of the NHS as we know it. Good advice.

And on a happy note, she revealed that she “mostly” listens to rap music on her iPod, including “loads of Jay-Z, but from the old days of The Black Album” – which she thinks is “brilliant, particularly if I’m about to speak in the Chamber”.

Imagine firing yourself for a debate on care for the elderly with lyrics like: “I got 99 problems but you ain’t one....”

Get your oats

According to TripAdvisor, the best restaurant in Cardiff, out of 946, is The Clink, inside Cardiff prison, where food is prepared and served by prisoners. Do they – I wonder – serve porridge? Sorry.

Fit for a Lord

The man we used to know as Sir Robert Rogers, the Clerk of the House of Commons who fell out with the Speaker, John Bercow, was introduced to the House of Lords today – so he is now Baron Lisvane of Blakemere in the County of Herefordshire and of Lisvane in the City and County of Cardiff.

The two Labour deputy speakers, Lindsay Hoyle and Dawn Primarolo, and the former Tory deputy speaker, Nigel Evans, took the trouble to watch his introduction. Even if the Speaker did not rate Sir Robert, others did.

Brittan’s inequality battle

Leon Brittan was reckoned to be the cleverest of the so-called “Cambridge Mafia”, a group of six future Conservative Cabinet ministers who knew each other as students. The others are all alive. Four – Michael Howard, Norman Fowler, John Gummer and Norman Lamont – are in the Lords. Ken Clarke is in the Commons.

They were big noises at the university’s students’ union in the early 1960s, when there was an argument over whether women should be allowed to take part in debates. Brittan was one of the young men who battled against this innovation.

“People would not listen to them as speakers,” he proclaimed. “They would look at them as women.”