His late father Derek, who was MP for Hemsworth, used to entertain regulars in Annie’s bar with a spirited rendition of the Chinese national anthem – in Latin.Lord Brabazon of Tara doesn’t want him to go. Nor do John Biffen MP and George Walden MP (though they’re both going anyway). Creevey agrees, and signed the petition demanding that we save Stephen Silverne, the barber of Westminster. He has been snipping legislators’ hair for 26 years, but in a fit of political correctness, the palace authorities have decide to turn his men-only shop into a unisex salon.Stephen is, well, a man given to loquacity, as all good barbers are He is a part of parliamentary history He once asked Enoch Powell how he would like his hair cut. “In silence,” came the icy reply.And finally to Goodbye Corner, which this week bids farewell to David Shaw, the Tory Ranter of Dover. His tiny majority is vulnerable to a swing to Labour of just over one per cent, or less than one-tenth of the seismic shift recorded at Wirral South last Thursday.Shaw’s 10-year stint at Westminster has not been without incident. He was, you will recall, the MP who gave Pamella Bordes her pass to get into the palace.

It went a bit downhill from there on, culminating in an unfortunate court appearance in March 1990 when he was fined pounds 180 for assaulting a photographer from the Today newspaper. He was also reprimanded by William Nimmo Smith QC, in the official report on “corruption” in Labour- controlled Monklands Council. The report condemned him for relying on circumstantial evidence, and described his behaviour as “irresponsible”.Shaw, who is the Sunday Times’s snout (though this has no connection with his appearance here) blamed the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise on drunken crewmen led by trade unionists, though the inquiry said the vessel took to sea with her doors open.Baldilocks Shaw, who often sits on the back-benches next to bouffant- haired Michael Fabricant, as though his thatch might migrate, was fiddling with an electronic personal organiser on his lap during Prime Minister’s Questions last week. Maybe he was putting his CV together, despite the fact that he has more business interests than you could shake a stick at.The beneficiary of Shouter Shaw’s political demise will be Labour’s Gwyn Prosser, a Kent county councillor who fought him to a close result last time out.

Prosser, 53, is a former marine engineer with 12 years on the cross-Channel ferries. Sounds like the right make to succeed an accountant at Dover.. I Have long cherished one, rare, piece of evidence that John Major has a sense of humour – his appointment, after the last election, of Nicholas “Bunter” Soames as Minister of Food But that was before I talked to Meirwen Pugh. Mrs Pugh’s farmer husband, William, is one of more than 500 Britons suffering horrifically after using organophosphate (OP) sheep dips.

He has depressions, memory loss, eye trouble and painful muscle spasms Once she was only just able to talk him out of suicide. Soldiers exposed to OP pesticides in the Gulf war report similar symptoms. Last week Mr Soames refused to resign for misleading Parliament on the issue.
The minister has told the Commons that, thanks to his having been Minister of Food before moving to the Defence Ministry, he was “extraordinarily aware of the question of OPs”.In the summer of 1994, Mrs Pugh and the wives of three other stricken farmers went to see Mr Soames when he was Minister of Food to tell him of their husbands’ plight “I came out crying, to tell you the truth,” she says. She found him “really quite nasty” with “no feelings for us”.My Conversation with Mrs Pugh followed several days pondering “What is Nicholas Soames for?”. The same weighty question seems to have been bothering members of the Commons Defence Select Committee. At the committee’s meeting on Wednesday the minister blamed his officials for not telling him the truth about the use of OPs in the Gulf until September last year. Mr Soames is an honourable man, so we’ll believe him, but he seems also to be a curiously incurious one.

After all, besides being “extraordinarily aware” himself, he is a bosom pal of the Prince of Wales, Britain’s most celebrated organic farmer, who questions the use of pesticides almost as much as modern architecture. Doubts about the ministry line have been raised repeatedly in Parliament, by the select committee itself, by medical researchers, veterans and the press. And on Mr Soames’s own admission, ministers were first alerted by officials that it might be false in October 1995. But questioning his civil servants’ advice, he says, “did not occur to me”.Isn’t that what elected politicians are there to do? Shouldn’t they, as one committee member put it, develop a “nose” for this sort of thing? Mr Soames retorted he had such “a very good nose” that he could be reincarnated as a bloodhound. (“It certainly wouldn’t be a whippet,” commented another member.) But even his cousin Winston Churchill wanted to know why questions had not been asked.