Steerpike

Valentine's day might have passed but the spirit of Kamasutra is still alive in one party at least. The many positions of the SNP's finest on post-Scexit pensions has greatly amused Mr S in recent weeks, with Ian Blackford in particular appearing to be something of a tartan Tantric.  First, the Westminster leader claimed that 'absolutely nothing' would happen to the country's state pensions if it voted for independence. Then he insisted that the 'obligation' would be on Britain paying such a debt from some mythical accumulated pension fund. Blackford next reverted to the 2014 White Paper position and admitted the Scottish government would have to pay its pensioners.

Happy register of interests' day! Commons sleazebusters marked Valentines' day yesterday by quietly releasing an updated list of MPs and what they've been declaring. There's plenty of fun stuff there: Carlton plotter Will Wragg got a handy £5,000 donation from his gentleman's club of choice while both Lib Dem leader Ed Davey and Labour MP Grahame Morris were embarrassingly forced to make belated entries on various undeclared interests. Holly Lynch got perhaps the most intriguing donation: a £20,000 bequest to advance 'the campaigns or careers of young socialist women.

Stormont, the home of Northern Ireland's assembly, has never exactly been a place associated with social liberalism. So Steerpike was surprised to find that the Ulster parliament – where the Bible-bashing Ian Paisley held court for so long – has spent thousands of pounds on controversial LGBT+ charity Stonewall.  Freedom of Information requests by Mr S found that the Assembly paid £7,500 to be members of the organisation's 'diversity champions programme' between 2018 and 2021, with the Northern Ireland executive spending a further £1,440 for Stonewall seminars on leadership, allyship and promoting mental health since the beginning of 2020.

Jeremy Corbyn's fans were never the sharpest tools in the box. But even by Corbynista standards, the egg-heads over at Skwawkbox do a disservice to the Magic Grandpa with their constant half-baked witterings. Since Labour was crushed at the 2019 election, Mr S hasn't had to care much about what the left-wing websites says about anything, given Sir Keir Starmer's preference for briefing newspapers, not disreputable blogs. But even he couldn't resist writing about the latest conspiracy which the slavish socialists have now fallen for, hook, line and sinker. For Netflix series The Crown is currently shooting in Westminster, with season five expected to cover the monarchy in the 1990s, with the Queen's annus horribilis, Diana's death and all the rest of it.

As yesterday's attack showed, there's no love lost between Boris Johnson and John Major. Mr S has previously chronicled the many times Major has criticised his successor, with whom he so publicly disagreed over Brexit. The enmity between the two men stretches back to the early 1990s when Johnson was the Telegraph's main man in Brussels and subsequently the paper's chief political commentator in Westminster.  The-then journalist had great fun lampooning Europhile excesses at the time of the Maastricht debate, something which naturally didn't make him popular with the pro-EEC Major as he tried to ram the treaty through Parliament.

Oh dear. Guto Harri's first week as Boris Johnson's new press chief hasn't got off to a great start. First, he took a pop on Twitter at Dominic Cummings. Then he gave an interview in which he offered faint praise to his boss – declaring him not to be a 'complete clown'. Next he rocked up Downing Street wielding a Tesco shopping bag like a samurai sword, bantering with reporters in a somewhat awkward exchange. And now, he appears to have indulged in another social media slip-up. For Harri this evening has retweeted his onetime fellow lobbyist Gavin Devine, after the latter attacked Tory critics of John Major.