Nigel’s making it great again

The Telegraph’s weekly Peterborough diary column offers an unparalleled insight into what’s really going on at Westminster and beyond

Nigel Farage has been trying to channel Donald Trump’s extraordinary election performance by sporting a “Make America Great Again” cap in teal – Reform UK’s party colours, above. Farage wore it to Trump’s eve of election day rally. He told me: “Donald thought it was terrific – ‘Love the hat’. ” Farage says he is now looking at getting a new batch of these baseball caps made by the original MAGA hat manufacturers for Reform UK supporters, bearing a new legend: “Make Britain Great Again”. Farage’s MBGA hats might just catch on, even if they don’t sound quite as catchy.
Ping! A notification on X, formerly Twitter, informs me that HM Treasury appears to have just started “to follow” president-elect Donald Trump. Perhaps officials are getting ready for the late night tweets from The Donald slamming Rachel Reeves’s tax policies. An HM Treasury spokesman says: “In line with the Foreign Office and the Foreign Secretary, we also follow president-elect Donald Trump.”
Millionaire eco-financier Ben Goldsmith, right, was intrigued when, over lunch in Mayfair this week, he spotted my mismatched shoes that I had mistakenly bought in a shoe shop’s closing-down sale. Pointing to his (matching) black lace-ups he told me his feet had increased a half size in the past few years. He added: “I’m now wearing my father’s expensive Lobb shoes, which were always too long for me previously.” Is he alone? Have any Peterborough readers also seen their feet grow unexpectedly in middle age?
Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg does not much like Royal British Legion’s new, all-paper Remembrance poppies, preferring the older ones. “I like the ones with a plastic stem. These new ones are absolute rubbish, and they fall to pieces immediately and they don’t look very smart,” he told me on GB News. He even takes off the green paper leaf, as he used to do as a child. “I can’t think why they need to put a leaf on,” he added. Isn’t it time to embrace change, I asked him. “I don’t wish to,” Rees-Mogg replied.
Tory MP Sir Gavin Williamson’s tarantula appears to be having a gender identity crisis. The furry spider, called Cronus, hit the headlines in 2016 when the arachnid was kept as a pet on Williamson’s Westminster desk when he was government chief whip. That was eight years ago and Cronus has far outlived the expected lifespan of male tarantulas (just one to two years). Staff are now questioning whether Cronus –thought until now to be male – may, in fact, be female. Sadly, I can report that Cronus is unwell and might be on his or her last legs. He/she is living out his/her final days in Williamson’s constituency office in South Staffordshire.
Peterborough readers have been touch. Sue Brough offers a new way to dry knickers after Dame Joanna Lumley said she held hers outside of the cars’ windows: “A salad spinner that was used to ‘spin dry’ their underwear”. While others are as mystified as the Garrick member about the definition of an “influencer”. David Dawson says it was a “useless/unemployable poseur with a meaningless label”. And Brian Stanton suggests: “A nasty bug which you can be vaccinated against.”
Peterborough, published every Friday at 7pm, is edited by Christopher Hope. You can reach him at [email protected]