Dream come true

Allan Stewart, pickaxe-wielding Conservative MP for Eastwood, has just published his autobiography, The Long March of the Market Men. He reveals that he was able to attend St Andrews University with the help of a Ramsay residential scholarship and two small bursaries. When he told his father he had won a scholarship, the immediate reply was: "I know, it is the Ramsay." Stewart was taken aback, since the Ramsay was not a well-known scholarship, and asked him how he knew, whereupon his father exp-lained that he had dreamt it.

"There is a tradition of second sight in my father's family, although I do not claim to have it," Stewart explains. So no tips on the date of the general election then.