Daily catch-up: Pharisees, Puritans, Methodists, Punks and Other Insults

The Top 10 in The New Review, the Independent on Sunday magazine, was Insults Worn As Badges of Pride. My favourite is Prime Minister, which originally meant the monarch's favourite at a time when the respectable fiction was that all ministers were equal.

I mentioned Tory in passing (under Vermin) and could have had Whig, short for whiggamore, horse or cattle driver, derogatory term adopted by Scottish covenanters in the 17th century.

And there were several good nominations for which I did not have space. Nicolas Doye and Brian Corbett nominated Puritan. Oliver Kamm, Mr Memory and (Rev) Kate Le Sueur suggested Methodist, so called because John Wesley and his friends were so methodical in their prayers.

Omer Lev ‏offered an early example, the Pharisees. "It means those who set themselves aside from everyone. Later, when they were only sect left, still used by them."

And Ken Wing ‏mentioned a modern example which I had overlooked: Punk.

If anyone has nominations for future Top 10s, including Authors Whose Original Work is Inferior to Its Adaptation, let me know.

• The shadow cabinet had new tactics at Prime Minister's Questions yesterday. Jeremy Corbyn had a row of enthusiastic shouters on the front bench beside him, who heckled David Cameron during every one of his answers to six questions about housing. Diane Abbott, Emily Thornberry, Heidi Alexander, Seema Malhotra and Lucy Powell kept up a barrage of indignation, with Hilary Benn stranded in the middle of them, adhering to the dignity of the new politics. Powell on one side of Corbyn and Chris Bryant on the other came up with a new line of Ed Balls gestures. "Going down, it's going down," shouted Powell when Cameron was asked about levels of home ownership.

Punch and Judy are dead. Long live Punch and Judy.

• The latest Labour membership figures were given to The Guardian yesterday. As of 10 January there were 388,000 full members. This has gone up 17,000 since the previous update on 8 October, when there were 371,000. After an astonishing rise from 246,000 when Corbyn joined the leadership race in June, the rate of increase has slowed down, and it now looks unlikely that the Corbyn surge will exceed the previous peak membership of 405,000 in 1997.

The party says that only 14,000 members have left since May, but as it allows six months' grace before allowing membership to lapse, that is the figure up to July. The anti-Corbyn exodus has yet to show up in the figures.

• Donald Trump is now the favourite in the betting markets to win the Republican nomination (via Mike Smithson). Which reminds me that I should correct the record. The minutes of the Peter Mandelson Memorial Dim Sum Supper were taken down incorrectly (that is, I couldn't find the napkin on which they had been written and so wrote up the proceedings from memory). Those of our number who were prepared to predict the Republican candidate divided between Trump (not Ted Cruz) and Marco Rubio.

Also, the majority of the meeting thought that the EU referendum would be in June or July, while the minority opted for September, rather than the other way round. Glad to have straightened that out.

• And finally, thanks to Moose Allain ‏for this:

“How long does it take to shoot an apple off someone’s head with a bow and arrow?”

“Time will tell.”