This Wretched Hive Of Scum And Villainy

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Another one: James Heappey (Wells, to be renamed and reconstituted as Wells and Mendip Hills) is resigning as armed forces minister and will retire from parliament. Will be a Lib Dem target.

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His brother also resigned earlier this year as tory candidate for Bath for what it's worth.

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Bit old to have clowns in to entertain the guests, isn't he?

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The most shocking thing to me about this story is that Farage is somehow still only 60.

He's younger than Starmer!

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If Peter Bottomley is defeated (his Worthing seat seems like one of those places that will fall in a bad result) there will be no more MPs elected from the 70s (Sheerman and Harman are standing down). I assume Leigh will be safe even in the worst scenarios, so he may be father of the House.

Related, assuming he stands again I think Clive Betts will be the most senior Labour MP left, with everybody else retiring or having lost the whip. No more 80s Labour people!

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Bizarre story about Mark Menzies (Fylde) has dropped in the Times - in December he was locked in a flat by "bad people" he met on a dating site, and proceeded to call a 78 year old party volunteer to ask for 5k to be wired to him asap at 3am, a ransom that quickly increased to 6.5k and was eventually paid via campaign funds (although not before his office manager had to cash out her personal ISA). And apparently money has been going missing to pay for "health concerns" regularly.

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I... I... I...

Did the head of the Lancashire conservative party offend a genie or something?

The same story also contains two old stories about him (he brawled with a friend over an argument about who was to blame for getting a dog drunk, and in 2014 a Brazilian rent boy said he was asked to buy drugs for him), and a fresh story that he got drunk at last night at the proms and had a brawl with audience members, and in his own words "accidentally poked somebody while waving a flag".

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Genuinely did not know he was that old tbh (and he doesn't really look it either) Starmer and Corbyn have one thing in common, in that they show older people *can* still lead political parties these days.

Ming Campbell must be seething right now.