right up my street Bum Correspondent Heat

right up my street”, Bum Correspondent, Heat).Arabella’s latest project, aside from washing school windows on Make and Mend Day (“Well, I’ve agreed to do the windows I can reach…”) is Posh Nosh, her TV take on the absolute banality of cookery programmes, with Richard E Grant. I got to ride in a fire engine” – before veering off into comedy and The Fast Show, where she created those wonderful self-explanatory characters Pushy Saleswoman, Different With Boys and, most famously, Insecure Woman, whose obsession with her backside spun off into the mega-selling novel Does My Bum Look Big in This? (“A riotous read… Well, she’s the one who started off as a “proper actress” appearing in The Bill and the like – “I played a junkie threatening to set fire to herself. PMT?Arabella Weir, now in her early forties, with the lovely bag and the totally un-Brian Mayish hairdo (“It’s more Rebecca from Cheers, Arabella!”) Let’s see How to sum her up. Arabella, if you are reading this, I would just like to say such remarks are, actually, wholly unlike me I must have been having a funny turn. I can see, now, that this was a complete lapse of judgement on my part.

“My treat, Arabella.” She is wearing an M&S top – “nice top, Arabella” – teamed with black trousers in which “your bum does not look big at all, Arabella” I ask if she’ll still only have sex with the light off “I’m not answering that question!” she cries. What I don’t know about creepiness just isn’t worth knowing.)I pay for our coffees. (I think I even add: “I wish I had hair like yours, Arabella.” I could give Mr Bashir a masterclass in full-blown creepiness. (Obviously, it’s the one Mariella Frostrup allowed to get away.)Arabella arrives accompanied by a divine turquoise handbag – “divine handbag, Arabella” – and a new hairdo which, she says, her friends say makes her look like Brian May I say her friends don’t know what they’re talking about It’s a super hairdo, Arabella. Oh, hell.Annoyingly, considering she lives just two roads down from me – actually, now I think about it, it’s not that annoying, and I could do with the exercise – I’m asked to meet Arabella in central London, in a Starbucks on Wardour Street, because she’s got a voice-over to do in the area at lunchtime.

(Maybe it could do book reviews?) But the most alarming thing about all this is: what if she’s a right old cow-face and I say as much? Will she rope me into double bunting duty? Get me at the school gate? Pull my hair and snatch my Beyblades? She looks bloody strong. I don’t know why I’ve never clocked her or her bum, which is possibly now a celebrity in its own right and, for all I know, is about to start its own column in Heat. (Look, my kid is a lot older than hers, so I’ve done my bunting and loo stints, all right.)
I don’t know why I didn’t know any of this about Arabella before. The day before I’m due to meet Arabella Weir I discover a number of utterly alarming facts: 1) she lives round the corner from me; 2) her child has just started at the state primary school my own son goes to; and 3) she’s been made co-chair of the school’s PTA, which means, probably, that she’ll try to rope me in to putting up bunting in the halls at the weekends and scouring the stinky loos on “Make and Mend Day” and all that. When Iain wants to change jobs around I’d be delighted to talk to him about it.”. I don’t think there’s an imminent reshuffle and I don’t think it’s very friendly to say I’d like colleague X’s job.

What job would he take? The party chairmanship perhaps? “At the moment none of these jobs is available. We can’t make sense of British politics if we ignore the elephant in the living room” (ie, the issue of the EU).So what of his own future? He turned down shadowing the DTI after the election. But he believes the Tories should campaign for a referendum on the outcome of the convention on the EU’s future, which Mr Redwood is sure will be a fundamentally more integrationist blueprint than the Government will admit “I’m not shy about Europe. He is convinced that Mr Blair will not risk a euro referendum in this parliament. If you did open it up much more it would become much more normal, it would look much more like the treatment we get from all the other services.”On Europe, Mr Redwood’s advice to Mr Duncan Smith, it’s pretty clear, is to abandon the party’s reticence on the subject.