Move over Jacob Rees-Mogg. Change UK candidate Rachel Johnson was out on the stump yesterday with a potent electoral weapon — her childhood Norland nanny as the pair went leafleting in Gibraltar.
‘My old nanny Mary Kidd is looking after me,’ Johnson, who is top of the new party’s list in South-West England, tells me. ‘She works here.’
During the 1997 General Election, Rees-Mogg, then 27, famously took his nanny, Veronica Crook, canvassing when he unsuccessfully contested Central Fife in Scotland. He later defended the decision on the grounds that ‘Nanny’ was ‘part of the family’.
‘My old nanny Mary Kidd is looking after me,’ Johnson, who is top of the new party’s list in South-West England, tells me. ‘She works here’
Johnson and her three siblings, including former Foreign Secretary Boris, grew up with a Norland nanny — the child carers of choice for the Royal Family — when their father Stanley was posted to Brussels in the Seventies. Mary was hired to help care for Boris, then aged ten and known as Alexander, Rachel, nine, Leo, seven, and Jo, two.
Kidd, 64, recalled of the encounter: ‘We were doing a class that covered conception and I remember Alexander asking, “Which comes first, the foetus or the embryo?” and me thinking: “Uh-oh.” ’
Rachel later took Nanny to meet the Rock’s Chief Minister, Fabian Picardo. ‘Nanny met Picardo’s children Valentina and Oliver and immediately swung into Norland action,’ Johnson says.
So will Mary make any difference to Rachel’s electoral prospects? Johnson, 53, admits: ‘Unfortunately, Nanny Kidd cannot vote for me because she’s been out of the country for more than 15 years.’
Last weekend, former staunch Lib Dem Johnson criticised her own party. ‘Change UK is a terrible name,’ she said. ‘They want to focus-group everything and they have a leadership team of about 11 people.
‘If I were running it we would have one leader and a different name and we would have done a deal with all the other Remain parties. Then we would be able to give the Brexit Party a fight.’
Yesterday she was a bit more on-message, trilling: ‘Rock on Change UK!’
Queen pops out to the shopsThose surprised that the Queen and her family aren’t commemorating the bicentenary of Queen Victoria’s birth on Friday will be relieved to hear that Her Majesty is to honour another Victorian institution today — Sainsbury’s, on its 150th anniversary.
Still a novice when it comes to supermarket shopping, the Queen will enjoy ‘a pop-up experience’ at London’s Covent Garden, where she can see everything from a recreation of the first stores through to self-service tills.
Her great-great-granny would surely be amused. I hope she remembers her Nectar card.
Doctor Who screenwriter Neil Gaiman is wary of the BBC after the broadcaster ruined his last episode involving the Time Lord. ‘One episode was fantastic and won lots of awards,’ he says of The Doctor’s Wife. ‘I felt the other was a dog,’ he reveals of Nightmare In Silver starring Matt Smith as the Doctor.
‘Both scripts were comparable in terms of quality. The difference was one got shot as intended and the other one didn’t because by the time we got to shooting, scenes had been randomly dropped or rewritten by the art department, who felt they couldn’t deliver what had been asked in the script.’
Gaiman made sure he had control on Good Omens, the apocalyptic new drama series
