After Mandrake helpfully pointed out that the House of Lords Reform Act 2014 states that peers who miss an entire session are liable to be chucked out, Evgeny Lebedev put in his first appearance in the Upper House for more than a year.
“He showed up in a dark jacket, top and jeans with no tie, looking like a nightclub bouncer,” one fellow peer informs me. “I’ve actually been taken to task by the worthies here for wearing a loose tie, with the top button of my shirt undone, but, of course, no one dared say a word to this sinister fellow.”
He added that Lebedev – whose father Alexander has been sanctioned by the Canadian government – sat silently and alone on the cross-benches and no other peers wanted to be seen dead with him.
The security services – whose report counselling Boris Johnson about whether to elevate him to the peerage remains unpublished – are unlikely to be happy that the son of a former KGB man is still being allowed unfettered access to the Palace of Westminster.
Meanwhile, a senior master at one of our leading public schools, where a number of oligarchs’ children are being educated, told me that the school was under instructions to alert the security services immediately if any children absented themselves. “Oligarchs moving themselves, their children or other members of their families out of the country at short notice is apparently one of the signs we are under imminent nuclear threat,” he told me.
