BLACK DOG: Theresa May snaps after Tory backbenchers sneak away

What little love there is left between Theresa May and Boris Johnson will surely evaporate when she learns why Tory backbenchers were one by one discreetly deserting her unusually bravura performance at Prime Minister’s Questions. 

They were sneaking off to have their photograph taken with her would-be successor in a Commons’ committee room. 

‘For ****’s sake, why couldn’t Boris wait till she finished?’ fumed a May aide. 

David Davis watched the furore over Michael Gove’s cocaine use with wry detachment. 

‘When my nose was broken for the fifth time, the surgeons stuck gauze up it dosed in cocaine. 

So I can’t claim never to have had it up my nose,’ recalled the rugby-playing, ex-SAS Tory tough guy. 

‘But that was my one and only experience of illicit drugs,’ he added hastily. 

Gove himself looked decidedly down in the dumps arriving at the annual Spectator summer party. 

‘He walked in, downed a glass of champagne and walked out again without speaking to barely anyone,’ says Dog’s party-going mole. 

‘His second consecutive failure in a Tory leadership contest and Boris’s seemingly imminent triumph must be getting to him.’ 

Gove looked decidedly down in the dumps arriving at the annual Spectator summer party

Lucy’s crude howler leaves ’em laughing 

Jeremy Corbyn was roundly upstaged at Labour North-West’s annual shindig last week when Manchester MP Lucy Powell became the latest person to embarrassingly mispronounce Jeremy Hunt’s surname – despite careful pre-delivery practice of her dinner-speech dig at the Tory leadership contender. 

‘I did get the biggest cheer of the night. Everyone laughed,’ she confessed. 

The Great Leader’s gloom over ‘false’ reports that he was too sick to be PM briefly lifted when Tory MP Andrew Bridgen told him how ‘sprightly’ he was looking. 

‘Why, thank you,’ replied Corbyn, only for Bridgen to shatter the spell by adding: ‘When I say I want you to stay on as Labour leader that’s because that would be best for the Tory Party.’

Hunt’s hammer blow

Tory leadership underdog Jeremy Hunt has got the builders in to spruce up his £2.4 million townhouse a stone’s throw from the Commons. 

Dog hears the foreman is cracking the whip as he’s been told the owner will be ‘moving back in about three weeks’. 

Surely Jeremy doesn’t fear the double whammy of both losing out on the keys of Number 10 and to his grace-and-favour flat as Foreign Secretary? 

Leftie actor Robert Lindsay of Citizen Smith fame tells The Stage newspaper how he once refused a post-theatre performance supper with Margaret Thatcher – even after the Iron Lady appeared in his dressing room saying: ‘Have I done anything to offend you?’ 

‘No, not me personally. Just the whole of the country,’ he replied. 

And Dog thought the Tooting Popular Front was supposed to be fiction.