So the Ulster Unionist leader wants to experience social deprivation. Don't change the sheets
• Moaners and backbiters are always banging on about politicians being removed from the experience of common people – as if the fact of being privately educated, like 59% of the original Con-Dem cabinet, somehow means they can't relate to the rest of us. So we applaud Mike Nesbitt, TV presenter turned new leader of the Ulster Unionist party, for engaging with the class whingers head-on. "I grew up in leafy suburbs," the Cambridge-educated Nesbitt – elected at the weekend with a North Korea-shaming 81% vote share – confessed. What was required was for a poor family to "adopt" him for 24 hours. "I'd actually like to live in an area of social deprivation because I think it's important to get a feel for what it's like." Well, his luck is in: Mr and Mrs Phillip Ferris from Co Armagh have generously agreed to allow Nesbitt a snatched glimpse of their drudge-like existence. The visit is all confirmed, Mr Ferris told the Irish News, but he will "have to stay in my bed. It is a broken bed and a single bed on the ground floor. My wife said we'd have to put him into that bed because there is nowhere else." Perfect. We do hope Cam, Clegg and their fancypants pals aren't too uppity to follow suit.
• Sweet of Neil "Wolfman" Wallis, lately deputy ed of the News of the World, to embarrass his old chum Lord Stevens at the Leveson inquiry by revealing that the Met commissioner-turned-NoW columnist had not, in fact, penned his column, "The Chief" – since it was ghostwritten by one N Wallis. Modest, too, to detail how he, Neil Wallis, had been instrumental in Stevens's appointment as commissioner by advising him to style himself as the "copper's copper" or (yes, really) the "thief-taker" – "in other words he was a man of action, rather than rhetoric". In fact, reveals a former intimate, "Stevens was much better known by the rather less imposing nickname of 'Captain Beaujolais', for reasons unrelated to either coppering or thief-taking."
• It's not as easy as it looks being a dictator Wag, as Syria's Asma al-Assad is learning. No longer feted in the pages of Paris Match as "the element of light in a country full of shadow zones" (we think this means she's pretty), all everybody wants to blah on about these days is her husband's murderous regime and her repeated declarations that she's right behind his actions. Now the EU has banned her from entry, and though the Foreign Office can't block her from Britain as a UK citizen, it believes she's unlikely to try. Does Asma miss home, we wonder? If so, we suspect she'll enjoy the Syrian National Symphony Orchestra's performance on Thursday of a selection of bucolic treats by Britten, Vaughan Williams and Elgar at Damascus's Dar al-Assad opera house. The evening, conducted by Briton Howard Williams, is entitled "British Landscapes". Was that the sound of distant shellfire? Louder, second violins!
• Great to learn of the £500m contract signed by NHS Surrey, whereby eight community hospitals, and all sexual health services and prison healthcare in the county, will now be delivered by Virgin Care. And even more cheering to see that the deal has been struck in such a way that the 2,500 former NHS staff will be employed not by VC but a new social enterprise called VH doctors, thus allowing them to remain within the NHS pension scheme. Medical director Graham Henderson must be particularly chuffed, given the affection in which public sector pensions are held by the government, of which his wife, health minister Anne Milton, is a key member.
• Finally, our report yesterday of Prince Charles's visit to "one-toilet town" Wigton prompts one well-travelled scribbler to exhume the deeply buried memory of a royal tour to India some years ago, during which the prince was taken to a small village in northern Rajasthan. The village not yet being blessed with plumbing, the locals had expended no little effort erecting an elaborate marquee privy with scarlet silk hangings and a red carpet for HRH's private use, should he urgently need to ascend to the throne. Alas, nature failed to beckon. Isn't it always the way?
Twitter: @estheraddley