Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

The election of Lord Pearson of Rannoch as the new leader of UKIP may radically change public perceptions of the party.

Lord Pearson's predecessor Nigel Farage has the appearance of the salesman ready to offer you a couple of cut-price bargains from inside his cashmere overcoat, the cheeky chappie who relished getting up the noses of the political establishment.

Lord Pearson, in contrast, must be the most upper crust figure elected to the leadership of a political party since Lord Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ in 1963, much more upper class in appearance and style than David Cameron.

Lord Pearson, like Mr Cameron, went to Eton. And just like Mr Cameron at the time of his election to his party's leadership, Lord Pearson is a member of the White's, the old-fashioned gentlemen's club which still excludes women from its premises (Mr Cameron has since resigned from White's, no doubt because its stuffy image badly conflicted with his efforts to modernise the Conservative Party).

In voice and appearance Lord Pearson takes us back to a Britain of the mid-20th Century when politicians were expected to be articulate performers on TV.

And remarkably Lord Pearson is 22 years older than Mr Farage. When was the last time a party elected a leader who was that much older than his predecessor?

It will be interesting to see how Lord Pearson goes down with existing UKIP voters, and whether he encourages more defections from more traditional Conservatives of the older generation.

I said my item on Jennings had nothing to do with politics, but I should add that the great irony of Anthony Buckeridge is that he was a life-long socialist, and a pretty left-wing one at that (he had very little time for Tony Blair).

Yet few people can have done more to promote private education in Britain, however unintentionally. His Jennings stories (four of which have just come out in a new compendium edition by Carlton Books), must have encouraged scores of young boys to persuade their parents to send them to boarding schools.

This is nothing to do with politics at all, but I am sad to report that Dairmaid Jennings, the model for Anthony Buckeridge's famous Jennings stories, has died at the age of 96.

One of my proudest scoops as a journalist was to track him down about a dozen years ago. I had got to know Anthony Buckeridge through my daughter's love of the Jennings stories (following on from my own interest as a child).

Anthony told me that the model for the stories was a boy called Dairmaid Jennings at his school, Seaford College, where they were schoolboys together in the 1920s, and where Dairmaid was always getting into scrapes.

But Anthony had no idea what had happened to Dairmaid in later life.

I was determined to track him down, and found he was living in a nursing home in Nelson in New Zealand.

Amazingly, Dairmaid Jennings knew nothing about the Jennings stories, and that he'd been the model for a fictional character whose exploits have been read by millions, ever since Anthony Buckeridge published his first Jennings stories after the war (his last Jennings book came out in 1994).

They were turned in radio and TV series, and translated into 17 languages, but Dairmaid was ignorant of all this, partly because he'd gone to live in Australia around 1940 (and later New Zealand), and perhaps because he'd never had any children of his own.

After I'd discovered Dairmaid, he was put in touch with Anthony and they remained in contact for the last few years of the writer's life (before he died in 2004). Anthony's publishers sent Dairmaid copies of the Jennings books, which were read to him by the staff at his nursing home. He loved them.

I thought Gordon Brown got the slight edge over David Cameron in Wednesday's Queen's Speech debate.

But the Conservative leader got an excellent laugh when he pilloried Mr Brown's Government Of All The Talents - the so-called Goats - distinguished outsiders who were brought in as ministers in the Lords without ever standing for election or getting their hands dirty in politics.

But five of the Goats - Digby Jones, Mark Malloch-Brown, Stephen Vadera, Stephen Carter and Ara Dharzi - have now all left ministerial office.

"The only jobs this prime minister has created are for his cronies," said Mr Cameron, "all of whom have repaid his generosity by leaving his government at the first opportunity - but of course keeping their well-upholstered seats in the House of Lords.

"Never has so much ermine been wasted. Never have so many stoats died in vain. Never mind jobs for the boys - under this prime minister it's stoats for the goats".

It was a variation on a wonderful 17-year old joke by Michael Heseltine from back before the 1992 election, when he taunted Labour leaders Neil Kinnock and John Smith for trying to woo the financial community with a series of lunches and dinners in the City of London - what became known as the prawn cocktail offensive.

"All those prawn cocktails for nothing," Mr Heseltine told MPs. "Never have so many crustaceans died in vain. With all the authority I can command as secretary of state for the environment, let me say to the Labour leader 'save the prawns'."

I popped into see Sir Jeremy Bagge today, the leader of the so-called Turnip Taliban, who is leading the critics at tonight's meeting of the South West Norfolk Conservative Association against the selection of Liz Truss.

Sir Jeremy showed me a couple of wonderful old paintings which portray his great great grandfather being elected a Conservative MP in 1837 and 1847, in the market square in Swaffham, where tonight's meeting takes place.

And I can also reveal - exclusively, I hope - that the walls of Sir Jeremy's loo are covered with wood-carvings of couples having sex in all sorts of different positions.

So I think we can take Sir Jeremy at his word when he says his opposition to Ms Truss is nothing to do with her sexual behaviour.

Perhaps I should have declared an interest over last night's story on the government phasing out childcare vouchers, as I claim the maximum amount of tax-free vouchers for childcare for my three-year-old daughter.

I was interested to learn how parents of children at private schools are allowed to use the vouchers to pay for boarding fees (though not tuition costs).

And several top public schools, including Ampleforth and Wellington College, encourage their parents to make use of the scheme.

What of Eton? I contacted the bursar who told me that none of their parents do so.

"Its not been suggested," he said. So they're missing a trick there then.

What surprises me is how little take-up there is. Three hundred thousand families is a very small fraction of the many millions of parents of children up to the age of 15 who might benefit.

Indeed, I suspect that many parents might not have known about the scheme until this row broke out.

So ironically Prime Minister Gordon Brown's policy may encourage a lot more people to subscribe to childcare voucher schemes, and claim tax relief while they still can.

And that, of course, would end up costing the government money in the medium term, not save it.

"Cast-iron guarantee" was the phrase of the day at Prime Minister's Questions today as Gordon Brown and Labour MPs taunted the Tories on their pledge to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

The trouble is that Brown calls it "iron cast" and pronounces "iron" in a rather strange way, with two syllables rather than one.

Still, we can expect Labour researchers to be busily examing past Conservative policy statements to see where else they have made "cast-iron guarantees", or "iron-cast".

Interesting to see that the Speaker John Bercow twice gave mild rebukes to Gordon Brown over straying into party politics, and Brown's later retort that he did "not always agree" with Bercow's rulings.

Further to my report last Monday that Jonathan Powell was distracted this week from running Tony Blair's campaign by having to do jury service, I'm glad to see that the London Evening Standard diary finally caught up with the story... on Friday.

It is fascinating how the features of modern-day Westminster politics have permeated down to deepest Somerset.

In the small town of Somerton, where I was filming on Friday, 11 members of the 14-strong town council - all independents - have suddenly resigned their seats.

That leaves only three councillors to run the show, and one of those plans to resign as well, which technically leaves the council defunct until the town elects some more councillors.

Their official reason for this mass resignation is the the persistent campaign run by a local blogger, Niall Connolly, accusing the town council of being "riven with a culture of secrecy", a failure to keep proper records and lack of consultation.

He also called it a "tender-free-zone" in its decisions on who gets local contracts.

Yet Mr Connolly also uses colourful and aggressive language which verges on the abusive at times. And his targets have been paid MPs or ministers but part-time councillors who were, after all, only unpaid volunteers.

One councillor complains Mr Connolly accused him of being a racist. Mr Connolly himself admits he described two elderly women councillors (who do indeed look rather similar), as "the ugly sisters".

And the councillors complain that Mr Connolly's website, , accuses them of being "corrupt and degenerate".

But scratch below the surface and the story gets a lot more complicated. When I heard that 122 people attended a public meeting on Tuesday evening I immediately knew that all was not happy among the citizenry of Somerton.

The broad critique, voiced by many other people in the town, is that the council is living in the past in the way it treats the public, that there is a lack of openness, transparency and accountability.

That is why Tuesday night's meeting unanimously called for a referendum on the council's plan to to move the local recycling centre.

In short, Somerton reflects in miniature important developments these days in national politics. "Somerton," says Mr Connolly, "is only Westminster writ-small."

So we have a political elite under fire from an increasingly disillusioned public who feel their rulers are out of touch.

Throw into that mix internet bloggers and our new Freedom of Information laws, and we see politics undergoing a transformation unlike anything since Thomas Paine and James Gilray in the late 18th Century developed the arts of political pamphleteering and cartooning