• So get rid of Maria Miller and vote Ukip for an end to political hypocrisy and expenses greed? Not exactly. Nigel Farage cheerfully admits to his participation in the Great Euro-Gravy Train robbery to the tune of £2m of expenses since 1999 – far more than Ronnie Biggs managed from his 1963 caper. Some fellow-Kipper MEPs do even better, and all this on top of their £79k salaries in a job they all despise, especially the work bit. One was jailed for fraud (£36k diverted to cars and wine), another for benefit fiddling (£65k). That's an even higher proportion than Labour considering Ukip currently has seven MEPs, after losing six to pub sulks and defections since 2009.

• Not convinced? Then take a look at the online battle raging at Cupwith reservoir, on the moorland outside Huddersfield, between locals and William Legge, aka the 10th Earl of Dartmouth (which makes him Princess Di's stepbrother). A Kipper MEP for South West England, he's also a Yorkshire landowner. At stake is a planning application to build a windfarm (each turbine worth £20k a year in rent to its landlord), which critics say makes Legge a hypocrite since Ukip opposes wind nonsense. Harried by activists and a tenacious blogger called Autonomous Mind (they keep finding Legge's name linked to labyrinthine company structures involved), Legge finally abandoned his Maria Miller posture this week. "The land is owned by a relative," he conceded. But who?

• A less controversial peer, Labour's Viscount Simon, asked yesterday if it is true (the BBC reported it, so it must be) that Britain has "the largest production and consumption of baked beans in the world", and whether what Lord S called "the smelly emission resulting therefrom" formed part of the government's climate change calculations? An important point, replied Lady Verma cryptically: "We need to moderate our behaviour." Wot? No windfarm?

• When our celeb culture sustains a casualty like Peaches Geldof, the media behaves like a rubbernecking motorist at an M1 crash rather than the lorry near the front of the pile-up whose driver has escaped unhurt (again). Yet some celebs survive it all. After eight wives, three bankruptcies, drink, drugs and 340 films, Mickey Rooney was prematurely carried off this week at 93. He even survived playing Baron Hardup in panto at 89 – in Milton Keynes too.

• The Daily Mail, which rarely leaves a feud untended, joined forces this week with the Real IRA to deplore (over five pages) the decision to make the Queen dine with ex-IRA gunman Martin (White Tie) McGuinness, in honour of Ireland's pixie president Michael D Higgins, at Windsor. The spirit of reconciliation has not yet permeated Catholic Voices, a Vatican-backed social media enterprise, where an activist who tweets as Madame Ratzinger (naughty, that's Pope Benedict's surname) has just belatedly resigned after remarking that "all fags are mentally ill", and that the IRA might care to bomb a Northern Ireland abortion centre. Also unmoved by the Windsor love-in and the McGuinness white tie is the National Trust for Ireland. It has just won the right to challenge the new nuclear power station across the water at Hinkley Point. Doesn't Dublin realise it's Chinese investors they're taking on now?

• The backlash begins. Steve Pound, the lovable Labour MP for Ealing North, remembers Maria Miller as "top Tory totty" (and a moderate) in their LSE days. Nor is she the first Tory highflying MP for Basingstoke to come a cropper. Denzil Freeth (1924-2010) quietly resigned a promising ministerial career in 1964 after being classed a possible security risk in the wake of the Profumo scandal and panic. Gay? Possibly. The past is another country.

• Irrepressible ex-MP and HMP Brixton graduate Denis MacShane, is telling French 'acks that he introduced his ex-assistant Axelle Lemaire, new digital economy minister in Paris, to François Hollande in 2007 as a future president. "Not before me, I hope, Denis," the scooter lover quipped. MacShame on her CV may be a barrier.

Twitter: @michaelwhite