The comedy of Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov, the two glum Russian ‘tourists’ who denied on television that they were involved in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, seems set to run and run. The Moscow press tells us that Russia’s ‘Golden Brand’ has offered them a brand name for a company specialising in tourism, women’s clothing, and chemicals for the scent industry. The two tried to persuade the world that they had come to Britain simply to admire Salisbury cathedral, its 123 metre-high steeple and its ancient clock.

David Lidington is the most powerful minister you’ve never heard of. He is Theresa May’s de facto deputy, tasked with both supervising the domestic agenda and solving the trickiest Brexit conundrums. Much of government business is, nowadays, done through committees of cabinet members: he chairs seven such committees and sits on another 20. ‘I am the man who stands on the stage spinning plates on the top of poles,’ he says cheerfully.

Next month the Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary will be released from prison, having served just half of his five-and-a-half-year sentence. He was jailed for his role in encouraging Muslims to join Islamic State. At the time of his sentencing in 2016, the judge described the hate preacher as ‘calculating’ and ‘dangerous’. The Justice Secretary, Rory Stewart, echoed that verdict earlier this month, calling Choudary ‘deeply pernicious’ and a ‘destabilising influence’.

Bernard Ingham once told a story about a reporter from the Financial Times who went to cover an election in Ingham’s hometown of Hebden Bridge. The reporter went into a café and ordered a cappuccino. ‘Nay lad,’ said the waitress. ‘You’ll have to go to Leeds for that.’ Ingham told that story to illustrate the no-nonsense attitudes of the rugged town he grew up in — attitudes that shaped the man who became Margaret Thatcher’s muscular press secretary.