YOU GOT A FRIEND IN ME

POLITICS can be a nasty old game, so it was heartening to hear this week how well Nicola Sturgeon and Theresa May get on. Whenever the First Minister and the Prime Minister meet they breeze through official business as quickly as possible so they can spend the rest of the meeting dancing round their handbags to Donna Summer, necking margaritas, and trading tales about the patriarchy’s latest outrages.
No, hang on, news just in: they cannae stand each other. To be precise, we do not know how Mrs May feels about the FM, but we have been left in no doubt how Ms Sturgeon regards the PM.
“This is a woman who sits in a meeting where it is just the two of you and reads from a script,” Ms Sturgeon told fellow Herald column jockey Chris Deerin, slumming it for the New Statesman.
“I remember just after May came back from America, when she’d held Trump’s hand, she’d also been to Turkey and somewhere else. We sit down, it’s literally just the two of us and I say, ‘You must be knackered’. She said, ‘No, I’m fine’. And it was as if I’d insulted her.”
Though that might seem a perfectly reasonable exchange to some, one should point out that Ms Sturgeon has spent most of her life in Glasgow, home of the slagging. Here, if affectionate teasing does not commence within five minutes of meeting someone, it’s war.
It was all so different between Nicola and David “Call me Dave” Cameron. Though opposites politically, they always managed to have “a personal rapport”, she said. Wonder if they still keep in touch? Probably not. Toasty personal relationships between political leaders do not tend to survive out of office, but at their height they can give off a fair old heat.
Think Churchill and FDR, or Churchill and Attlee, whose memorial speech about the wartime premier in 1965 referred to him as “an old opponent and colleague, but always a friend”. Reagan and Thatcher’s relationship was likened by author Nicholas Wapshott to a “political marriage”, even though it had its spikier moments, as when the US invaded the Commonwealth territory of Grenada. The president later later telephoned Downing Street to apologise. “If I were there, Margaret,” he said, “I’d throw my hat in the door before I came in.”
A willingness to get on, to give and take, oils the wheels of politics. It does not work if the relationship is too one sided, as with Tony Blair and George W Bush, who used to summon the British PM to his side at summits by shouting, “Yo, Blair!”
Friendships can thrive lower down the ranks, and across political divides. SNP MP Mhairi Black gets on well with both the Labour old guard and some Tories, going so far as to refer jokingly to Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg as her “boyfriend”. 
It looks like she’ll have to fight Labour MP Jess Phillips for him, though. The Birmingham Yardley MP acquired a soft spot for the Tory toff when Channel 4 sent her to his Somerset constituency to spend a day campaigning. She still found it in her to take the Michael mercilessly, mind. When he referred to the “Nanny” who had looked after the Rees-Moggs for 50 years, Philips shot back: “Nanny, like the dog in Peter Pan?”
Spouses and siblings need not feel left out. Ivanka Trump and Chelsea Clinton are pals, a friendship that has its roots in the old days when Bill and Hill were chums with Donald Trump. They were such social soul mates, indeed, that the Clintons danced at one of his weddings. I forget which one. He probably does too.
As can be seen from the chilliness between May and Sturgeon, political friendships cannot be forced. The other night I was listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast with the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, interviewing Hillary Clinton. Talk turned to Putin. He was appalling, she recalled. He would manspread, make belligerent comments to the press in front of her, and if the two were left alone he would not even look at her.
Being the good swot she is, Hillary prepared for their next encounter by finding out what pressed his buttons. The big day arrived. “You know one thing we do have in common Mr President,” she ventured, “is a great interest in wildlife conservation.” He looked at her,  jumped up, and beckoned her to follow him through his dacha to a “situation room” where he had maps and gizmos galore to track Siberian tigers and bears.
I’m going on an expedition soon to tag polar bears, said Vladimir. This is it, thought Hillary, here comes the thaw by way of an invitation. Putin turned to her. “Would Bill like to come?”

WATCH OUT, HE'S BEHIND YOU!

EVERY time Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary appears in the news one is reminded to book tickets for the panto. His role in life seems to be as a character to hiss and boo at.
Changes in baggage rules, late running, cancellations, whatever the matter no one quite generates controversy like the diminutive Irishman. Sometimes one fancies he is being paid by other bosses to act as a kind of lightning rod for consumer fury. He takes the flak so they don’t have to.
Even so, the cancellation of 2000 flights takes some beating as a slap in the face to customers. After a week of being pilloried, Mr O’Leary told his company’s AGM in Dublin that he had made a “boo-boo”. Not good enough, said one shareholder. “You should make a large donation to a third world country and wear sack cloths for a few weeks.”
Better still Mr O’Leary, hire someone else to do your job better and take off for a late-life gap year abroad. Probably best to book an airline other than Ryanair if you want to be sure of getting to your destination, though.

ANTIQUES ROADSHOW ANTICS

RIGHT, stop what you are doing and pay attention, here is a proper crisis. Britain is running out of antiques.
There are still shed loads of stuff in, er, sheds, but there may not be enough bits and bobs of sufficient interest to keep the experts on Antiques Roadshow in work.
As one of those experts, David Battie, told the Radio Times: “There are definitely fewer really stonkingly good objects on the Roadshow, which is inevitable, given we’ve been going for 40 years, sucking them in like a vacuum cleaner.”
Past “stonkingly good” finds include a £400 painting that turned out to be a £400,000 Van Dyck.
Host Fiona Bruce reckons the reason why AR is still a hit 40 years on is that we all hope there is something in the attic that turns out to be worth a fortune, or has a great story behind it.
Dare one break it to Ms Bruce that the real joy of AR is watching the faces of punters who have brought along an heirloom hoping to scoop the jackpot, only to find what looks fit for the jumble sale is just that?