TO Limbo, capital of mushy peas, where the Tories coagulated last week to choose a new stooge. Alas, they neglected to do so, perhaps because nominations don't close until this week. Talk about not being able to organise a soiree in a brewery!

By common consent Daffodil Davis, the early front-runner to succeed Michael Horrendous, withered and died on the podium, looking throughout his speech as if he'd just swallowed a pint of weedkiller. I fear he may be toast. Or - at the very least - Ryvita. Which leaves who? Theresa May? Or maybe not. She has until Thursday to throw her pashmina into the ring.

The other morning on the wireless she wouldn't give anything away, even the name of the stockist of her kitten heels. (I mention "kitten heels" secure in the knowledge that I can't tell the difference between them and Kensitas Clarke's Hush Pups).

Mr Clarke, of course, is reckoned to be a prime contender, but for what?

Room 101? His Barbour looks as if it's got more life left in it than he has.

Well, looks aren't everything

ONE would like to say a few kind words about my near neighbour, Sir Talcum Riffers, but his being described in the Torygraph as looking like "the Richard Wattis character in an Ealing comedy" - younger readers should call our helpline - cannot be taken as a ringing endorsement.

Pundits say the momentum has swung in the direction of Dishy Cameron, who spent much of his young life incarcerated in Eton, a maximum-security institution. Cammy spoke for 20 minutes without notes, a fact reported with awe, as if he'd been juggling omelettes. So what?

My dear friend Ricardo Demarco of Torness can speak for hours on end without drawing breath and inarticulate Edinburgh councillors still treat him with contempt.

The wild card is Dr Lame Fox who seems to have forgotten he is ane o' oo (translation: one of us), even though he sounds as if he came up the Clyde on the Vital Spark. My dear friend Andra Neil says he hasn't got a cat in hell's chance, so it's probably worth putting a few bawbees on him. All of which doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Not for the first time, one is reminded of Borges's remark about the UK and Argentina going to war over the Falklands: two bald men fighting over a comb. There was only one real winner in Limbo last week:

Irn Broon. Reports are coming in of him dancing in the streets of Raith.

Aberdeen goes radio gaga

THROUGHOUT the past week Radio 2 has been resident in Aberdeen.

Lord Wogan of Blarney made the trek north and was put up at the Marcliffe, the poshest B&B in that neck of the woods.

Were the worker ants at Radio Teuchter, which is currently subject to painful cuts, miffed? Not on your nellie! In order to balance the books, Jeremy Vine was helicoptered to an oil platform in the North Sea, which was just like the old days when pirate radio stations ruled the waves.

However, no expense was spared elsewhere with pop guru Moby flown in from Argentina to wow a mere 300 punters at Marischal College last weekend and Richard Hawley plucked from a German tour to do just two songs on the Mark Radcliffe show. You aren't by any chance thinking what I'm thinking:

why Aberdeen? Surely it cannot be connected to the fact that Radio 2's head of live music and talent, Lewis Carnie, lives in Fettercairn?

Vettriano's merits skating on thin ice

THE world is divided between those who think that Jack Vettriano can't paint for toffee and those who say he is to Kirkcaldy what Michelangelo was to Firenze. What nobody can deny is that the Daily Record, not normally noted for its interest in artistic matters, scored a coup when it revealed that Mr Vettriano had used an illustrators' manual for the figures in his famous painting, The Singing Butler. No doubt we will soon learn that a similar manual was used for Scotland's second best-known painting, The Skating Minister.

A couple of things have always intrigued me about The Singing Butler. First, the maid and the butler in the painting are holding umbrellas but over themselves, not over their dancing bosses.

Surely this ought to have been a disciplinary matter. Second, we must take it as read that the man in the bowler hat is the butler, but how do we know he is singing since he has his back to the viewer? You may say that the couple are dancing and that, therefore, they must be dancing to something. True.

But the butler could as well be playing a mouth organ as singing.

Though no expert, I would argue that it is difficult to sing while holding aloft an umbrella and attempting to keep one's feet dry while the tide advances. Then again, The Mouthieplaying Butler wouldn't have had quite the same ring. I look forward to Mr Vettriano's thoughts on this matter.

Hack's magic story disappears in a puff

FOR one incredible moment it looked as if eager Arfur MacMillan of Mayday! Mayday! was the first to break the story about where Mr Vettriano finds his inspiration. One ought to have known better. Though still an infant hack, Mr MacMillan has magically acquired the habit of grabbing sticks by the wrong end.

Hereabouts, we never cease from chuckling at his wonky assertion about who our new editor was to be.

According to Arfur, Mr Vettriano did not gain his inspiration from an illustrators' manual but Samuel Peploe, the noted colourist. A cursory glance at Peploe's work will demonstrate even to the visually impaired that he has about as much in common with Mr Vettriano's work as yours truly's has with Pepys's.

Mystery . . . er, what mystery?

MY dear friend Colette Douglas Home, Daily Wail columnist, describes the backdrop to Mr Vettriano's paintings as "evocative landscapes".

One doubts that the great John Ruskin could have done better. Ms Douglas Home, one assumes, was referring to The Singing Butler. But more often than not, Mr Vettriano sets his pictures in what might best be described as bedrooms where a man is either putting on or taking off his braces and a woman, invariably garbed in suspenders, is fiddling with her bra.

A large part of the appeal of Mr Vettriano, so we're told, lies in the stories behind his paintings. In short, who are the couples and what are they up to? Call me naive, but it seems safe to say that they are not about to have a game of Scrabble.

Also chuntering in the Wail, my other dear friend, Tim 'Toulouse' Luckhurst, whom I had hitherto not realised was much of an art lover, said that Mr Vettriano "uses stylised situations to express images of longing". Pull the other one, Toulouse! Mr Vettriano shows folk with their kit off because he knows he can sell sexy pictures, which sit snugly in suburban living rooms because they're not too offensive to conservative tastes and won't tax untutored eyes. Toulouse compares Mr Vettriano to Shakespeare who was also apparently "largely self-taught". There, the comparison ends. Shakespeare was a genius and Mr Vettriano, ahem, is adept at covering up damp patches on walls.

It's a dog's life for big cat hunters

COULD this be the end of cervical cancer? Whose chummy mummy? Is this proof a deadly big cat is on the loose in Scotland? When is the Daily Wail going to start answering questions instead of asking them?

Apropos the big cat, the Wail showed a cast of a paw and quoted Mark Maylin, Fife Constabulary's wildlife and environmental crime officer, who said: "Given the large number of independent sightings by very credible people I'd be surprised if there aren't big cats living in the wild."

As opposed, one supposes, to a flat in Glenrothes. The constable says he suspects there could be as many as six lynx in Fife alone. There could even be a puma or two.

Doreen Graham of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals says that when captured, the cats should be kept in a zoo until the council finds a house with en suite bathroom for them. Just kidding. But one had to wade through acres of such guff to find the experts from Edinburgh Zoo who dubbed the mystery paw a dog's. Panic over!

Always look on the cheery side of life

NATIONAL treasure Alan Bennett is due in Glasgow at the end of the month, as part of the nationwide tour to promote his autobiography of sorts. He is sure to be well received in Scotland, as one might expect, given that he first came to acclaim with Beyond The Fringe at the Edinburgh Festival.

However, his jaunts to these parts appear not always to have been happy. In March 2001, he recorded in his diary a visit to Inverary where he experienced Highland hospitality at its most hostile. On the menu of a cafe , he saw separately listed beans and toast. He thought it would not be unreasonable to ask for beans on toast. For inexplicable reasons this could not be done. "There are two courses open, " writes Mr Bennett, "to order toast and baked beans and combine them under one's own steam, as it were, or take our custom elsewhere, which we do."

Sophistication, he concludes, "hasn't reached this corner of Scotland".

A few years earlier, he recalls, a friend was playing in a Chekhov play at Perth where it was billed as The Cheery Orchard. Now you can't say that's not sophisticated.

aftaylor2000@aol. com