Steerpike

After eighteen months of Covid, it was with a sense of relief and joy that MPs, peers, bag-carriers and hangers-on descended on London's Rosewood Hotel. After all the twists and turns of the pandemic’s politics, ministers and opposite numbers enjoyed the chance to break bread and hear from some of Parliament's leading figures collecting gongs at tonight's awards. The guest of honour at the shindig was the recently-defenestrated Robert Buckland, liberated from high office and now enjoying his new-found freedom on the back benches. And it was with great delight that he dispensed the awards all evening, with heavyweights and grandees dispensing jokes and jibes alike.

'China Spy Blitz' blared the Sun this morning: 'UK spooks hiring Mandarin speakers in cyber war.' Spy bosses, the paper reports, are embarking on a recruitment drive, directed at people who speak the language or have grown up within a multilingual family, with MI5, MI6 and GCHQ all increasingly wary about a moment of reckoning with the Communist superpower. Yet while the secret services have woken up to the threat posed by Beijing, others within government appear to still be fast asleep. Newly obtained figures reveal that the number of fluent Mandarin speakers within the Foreign Office (FCDO) has dropped by nearly 10 per cent since 2016.

Oh dear. Boris Johnson's much-trailed speech to the Confederation of British Industry has caused something of a social media storm – but not for the reasons the Prime Minister will have wanted.  In a confused, shambling performance, the Tory premier lost his place repeatedly throughout the speech and spent three minutes riffing on his family trip yesterday to a theme park based on the fictitious children's cartoon Peppa Pig. He asked the assembled businessmen 'Hands up how many of you here have been to Peppa Pig World?' before adding: A pig that was rejected by the BBC, now exported to 180 countries around the world. No Whitehall civil servant could have come up with Peppa.

Mr S has been in his fair share of dodgy disco hot-spots but few captured his heart like Klute, the much-loved, much-hated Durham nightclub for generations of local students. With its sticky floors, cheesy tunes and lashings of cheap liquor, it’s no surprise FHM christened the Marmite establishment ‘the second worst nightclub in Europe.’ Klute subsequently inherited that dubious honour after the winner burnt down. But what makes this seedy citadel of student solace of such interest is that the club is owned by Dominic Cummings’s family. The Vote Leave architect even worked, according to various reports, as either a doorman or helping to take in the club’s earnings, during his summers on holiday from Oxford University.

Tennis is in the news again and this time it's not Emma Raducanu's prodigious feats making the headlines. Chinese sensation Peng Shuai, a onetime Wimbledon doubles champion, has gone missing a fortnight after accusing a former top party official of forcing her to have sex after playing tennis at his home.  Unlike the craven apparatchiks of the International Olympic Committee or the National Basketball Association, the Women's Tennis Association has threatened to pull tournaments out of China, with the men's Association of Tennis Professionals demanding clarity from the Beijing authorities. It's refreshing stuff from a top sports body, with Shuai's fellow professionals queuing up to join the #WhereIsPengShuai protest.

So farewell then Geordie Greig. The Daily Mail editor is leaving his post this week after just three years in the role, following an internal power struggle at Associated Newspapers. The supremely connected Old Etonian addressed the troops late this afternoon in the Northcliffe House newsroom, with many sharing in the ‘funereal’ atmosphere that greeted news of his departure. Fortunately Steerpike’s spies were in attendance and were able to record Greig’s (brief) farewell comments to his Mail men and women as they prepared to bang him out in age-old fashion… It's a profound pleasure and privilege to be editor of the finest newspaper in the world. Three times in three years, newspaper of the year.

As the race for the Elysée hots up, presidential candidates are busy courting voters and raising funds. And with Macron's poll ratings flatlining in Paris, all eyes are on Eric Zemmour, the right-wing talkshow host who is still yet to declare but is nevertheless third in the polls. So Mr S was intrigued to learn that Zemmour plans to come to London this weekend in light of the capital's considerable French contingent, with the metropolis often cited as the sixth biggest French city. Unfortunately Zemmour's plans have run aground, with successive venues cancelling on the anti-establishment candidate in light of his controversial past statements — some of which have put him beyond the pale of much of polite Parisian society.