Steerpike | 21 February 2013

Dave’s a listener. He listens to women in particular. That’s the sub-text of his recent disclosure that Sam keeps urging him to promote more women to the Cabinet. Yet Dave’s top table boasts just four leading ladies. And at his last reshuffle he replaced ousted females with men. ‘He’s listening all right,’ says a junior minister, ‘with both fingers stuffed in his ear-holes while humming and doing the complete opposite.’ A senior Tory puts it more succinctly. ‘Like the Prime Minister, I favour Cabinet equality,’ he says, ‘but we’re still about half a dozen birds short of a lap-dancing club.’

Vicars of Christ! Since Benedict XVI decided to hand back the keys to the Popemobile, right-wing Catholic hacks have been reminding everyone that the bishops of England and Wales will have no influence over the choice of his successor. Archbishop Vincent Nichols still hasn’t been made a cardinal and will play no part in the conclave. Our only red-hat, Cormac Murphy O’Connor, is disqualified on the grounds of age. However, at the last conclave following J-P II’s death in 2005, Cardinal Cormac took the lead in English-language talks within the College of Cardinals. And he is understood to have opposed the eventual winner, Ratzo himself. Cormac, still an active and canny operator at 81, is bound to wield considerable influence even though he has no vote in the election. Vatican experts are already dubbing 2013 ‘the year of Cormac’s revenge’.

A pal who cleans the Tupperware at Buckingham Palace tells me that the Duke of Edinburgh was greatly tickled by the Pope’s resignation barely eight years into the job, observing that if ‘Lilibet’ had done a Ratzo, he could have given up public life in 1960. The rules of succession, according to irreverent courtiers, account for the Queen’s amazing stamina and her refusal to abdicate.