Michael White's diary: Match of the day? Wembley's all set for a Michael Gove-Jeremy Browne love-in (original) (raw)

Tension is usually high between Tory and Lib Dem ministers nowadays wherever knife crime, academies or free school meals are found on a coalition agenda and backstairs Tory apparatchik Dominic Cummings can find space to throw a punch. It is always high when a lucrative place in football's Premier League is at stake. So Saturday's Championship playoff final between QPR and Derby is hardly the place for a Lib Dem-Tory love-in. Or is it? Despite tensions between Michael Gove and David Laws, his fastidious Lib Dem deputy at education, Gove is going to the match with a fellow QPR supporter. Step forward sacked Lib Dem minister Jeremy Browne, whose recent book compared his party to a wonky supermarket trolley that pulls to the left unless firmly controlled. He and Govey both pull to the right.

Scientists have been working for weeks to explain a radiation leak from plutonium-tainted waste buried 2,000ft below a hitherto safe US nuclear storage site in desert New Mexico, one which exposed 21 workers to risk. It is beginning to look as if a chemical reaction may have generated enough heat to melt seals on the drums holding the dangerous sludge. Among suspected culprits is the material now used to absorb liquids when packaging the waste: kitty litter. What else?

A defeat for Bell Pottinger and other smarmy London PR agencies which toil to improve the battered reputation of the Gulf microstate of Bahrain, whose vital natural resource is not oil but US/UK naval bases. Prince Andrew of Airmiles has pulled out of a commitment to open an exhibition organised by London-based expats on Friday. The event has been critisised by Bahrain's opposition as it struggles to hold King Hamad to promised reforms and an end to to crackdowns and arrests. Last Friday, the high court ruled that Prince Nasser, Bahrain's Prince Andrew, could be named in an action which seeks to overturn his immunity from prosecution for what is delicately described as "his involvement in torturing prisoners".

Lantern-jawed Douglas "Kamikaze" Carswell, Tory MP for Clacton and libertarian evangelist to the rich, is busy lecturing his elders and betters about the need for all of us, especially politicians "who can't run a bath", to stay out of the Pfizer-AstraZeneca brawl. What, even Hezza, who has joined the tsunami of informed criticism despite filling his own bath with self-made millions? Yes, he's wrong too, says Kamikaze who has not run much himself. That advice also goes for the AZ board which had the cheek to reject Pfizer's kind offer on Monday . The shareholders who own AZ are the people best placed to decide, says EU-and-climate-sceptic Carswell, though boards are paid eye-watering sums to decide these matters. All this on a day when the FT reported that only 1% of patents applications to exploit graphene, Manchester's wonder discovery (George Osborne mentions it all the time), are British. Red China leads the patent field.

Conspiracy theorists have been puzzled why Natural England's consulation paper is proposing that nests and eggs of common birds such as robins and starlings should be open for destruction without a special licence to kill. But they are rarely defeated for long. So the Pride's Purge website draws readers' attention to last year's appointment as NE's new chairman of accountant Andrew Sells, whose chief qualification appears to be writing generous cheques to Tory funds. In his other life as a venture cap', Sells was a founder of Linden Homes, which specialises in building on urban brownfield sites. Excellent, except that protected nesting birds are the curse of brownfield sites and the equipment builders use on them. Nuff said?

Amid the lunacy of the annual Sunday Times Rich List there is no place for KR Murdoch. Though plenty of London-sort-of-based foreign squillionaires are listed, Rupert is "an American citizen" based there, it explains in very small print (but he's worth £7.16bn). Daughter Lis makes the cut at No 353 with a paltry £260m.

Twitter: @michaelwhite