Oh Carol!

She may be Mrs T’s daughter, but Carol Thatcher is delightfully independent in spirit. She acquitted herself well on today’s Andy Marr Show, occupying the sofa with Neil “utterly and totally” Kinnock. Clearly the deeply subversive Beeboids have relented and allowed her back on to their mainstream channel.

Her independence was shown at the end of the programme, when she and Kinnock were joined briefly on that sofa by the Rt Hon Gideon George Oliver Osborne, who found himself on the wrong end of a comment attributed by Carol T to her mother (although Kinnock remembered it as being one of Nye Bevan’s) about folks going into politics to be someone, rather than to do something.

She clearly noticed Osborne sitting there on the end of the sofa, and quickly added “present company excepted”, but she’d said it. And it was right: apart from being the Heir to the Seventeenth Baronet, Osborne hasn’t been anyone outside politics. And he is not alone in the House of Commons.

Moreover, this is not merely a Tory characteristic: Pa Broon’s confidante “Auguste” Balls is another career advisor cum politician – well, apart from a spell at the FT, that is.

And then they take it in turns to accuse each other of being out of touch with ordinary people. They may all be right, which really is scary.