Londoner's Diary: Vogue prepares for its own bit of fly-on-the-wall

With the rise of special interest parties such as the Green Party, Plaid Cymru and the SNP, has the time come for a dedicated women’s party? Catherine Mayer, former editor-at-large at Time magazine, thinks so and has founded the Women’s Equality Party.

Ed Miliband’s team were unamused when Amandeep Singh Bhogal approached the leader for a photo opp while on a train to Manchester. “Are you going to get the Sikh vote out for us?” asked Ed, when Bhogal suddenly pulled out a mask of SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon — a taunt over the prospect of a SNP-Labour coalition — and revealed himself as a Tory candidate.

Let’s talk hypotheticals: say that, come May, David Cameron has to form another coalition and chooses the devil he knows, the Liberal Democrats. But there’s potentially a serious problem here as the party might be headless: a recent poll by Lord Ashcroft found that Oliver Coppard, the Labour candidate in Nick Clegg’s Sheffield Hallam seat, was leading by 36 per cent to 34 per cent.

In March, the National Gallery confirmed the art world’s worst-kept secret: that Gabriele Finaldi, deputy director for collections and research at Madrid’s Prado museum, would be taking over from outgoing director Nicholas Penny. But what was the hold-up? Could it have been the cost of the new director’s relocation deal?

What should you write about if you’ve spent the past 40 years being one of the country’s most prominent biographers? After shining a light on the lives of Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen and many others, Claire Tomalin has decided to write her own biography.

A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse! Earlier this month, The Londoner reported worries over the State Opening of the new Parliament. There were fears that the ceremony, during which the Queen shows up in her carriage and all her finery to welcome a new day in British politics, might clash with her far more fun garden party commitments.

To tweet or not to tweet, that is the confusion. After yesterday’s dissolution of Parliament, politicians are not allowed to refer to themselves as MPs until after the election. Except, it seems, on Twitter.

Who should succeed Jeremy Clarkson?  Time to consult the great sage of motoring, Angela Rippon.

“Why don’t you let others follow you on Instagram?” a fan of The Satanic Verses author Sir Salman Rushdie inquired of him yesterday on Twitter. “Because when I did, a magazine stole photos and pretended I’d written a piece for them,” replied Rushdie. “Not a tabloid: The Paris Review, no less.”