The fake proprietor calls

Westminster and Fleet Street are all a flutter about An Unexpected MP: Confessions of a Political Gossip, the memoirs of former Tory MP, Jerry Hayes.

It’s a fun, naughty read. As a fellow diarist, Mr S particularly enjoyed Hayes’s tales from his days at Punch. Hayes joined the magazine in the late nineties during its revival under the proprietorship of Mohamed Al Fayed and the editorship of James Steen, the man who Piers Morgan once called ‘the world’s most mischievous journalist.’

‘James had a particularly mischievous side,’ Hayes writes. ‘He was also a fantastic mimic who used to love to wind up the rich and pompous. One of his favourite targets was the Daily Mail’s gossip king, Nigel Dempster. Poor old Nigel had lost the plot by this stage and was hitting the bottle in a big way.