BORIS JOHNSON, who became Mayor of London on a platform promising “to end frivolous spending”, has just cheerfully signed an invoice for changing five lightbulbs at his campaign HQ. Bojo was charged for two hours work at £28.98 per hour – that’s 24 minutes per light – plus the cost of materials, a 10 per cent “administration fee” and, of course, VAT. A grand total of £88.81. He certainly knows how to get value for money.

HARRIET HARMAN’S suggestion of leniency for women who kill their abusive husbands has obviously got under the skin of the aforementioned James Gray, Conservative MP for North Wiltshire, who famously cheated on his wife Sarah while she was battling breast cancer. After Hattie pitched her idea of giving minorities a leg-up in the workplace, the caddish Tory spluttered: “Presumably black, disabled, gay people will be much more likely to get a job than an equally qualified person who is male, white, middle-class and heterosexual. No doubt, if you throw in private education and Oxbridge you wouldn’t stand a chance…”

BEN SUMMERSKILL has weighed into this summer’s silly season debate about the privacy, or otherwise, of politicians’ sex lives. Responding to Norman Fowler’s dully predictable assertion that “politicians should be ready to say that private affairs are politically irrelevant,” the chief executive of Stonewall asks of politicians who love to stand on the moral high ground and bang on to the rest of us about traditional family values: “Should such aficionados of call girls  – Lord Archer – mistresses – Lords Archer, Coe and Parkinson and MPs James Gray and Piers Merchant – and massage parlours – Joe Ashton – really be in a position to complain if their opponents decide their extra-curricular activities warrant public comment?”

DAVID DAVIS, the caped crusader for liberty, has been wiped out of parliamentary history. When he resigned as MP for Haltemprice and Howden in order to stand again, the Commons authorities cleared out all the carefully drafted Parliamentary Questions he had tabled. Result: he was left off the journalistic ring  round for comment on issues which he hoped might create some good publicity to get him back on the political map. Serves him right.

SHADOW Education Secretary Michael Gove strives to be the epitome of Tory-lite political correctness and is always the perfect gentleman. Imagine the blow to his image, then, when it was discovered that his election campaign had been funded in part by a company linked to the puerile lads’ magazine Nuts, whose editorial ethic is to dream up ways of displaying as many images of exposed breasts as possible.

Do Tory attempts to rebrand themselves know no limits? Among the many advertisements for escort and massage services in this week’s BOYZ magazine, a weekly gay glossy, is a full page ad from the Tories, which proclaims “I’m Out. I’m a Tory.” There follows much small print explaining why the Conservative Party is the party of equality. It’s almost as if Section 28 never happened.

ASKED by a reader of The Independent in its “You Ask The Questions” feature: “Who do you fear most – Miliband, Purnell or Johnson?” Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg smirked: “None of the above.”

WELL, it’s taken a long, long time but, at last, a senior British banker has broken ranks with colleagues and attacked the fat cat pay culture in the City of London. Mervyn Davies, chairman of Standard Chartered, said it was time to end “rewards for excessive risk taking”. It’s usually just not done, old boy, to say such things but such is the anger among investors at the pay packets and perks of bankers when investments have crashed that it may, just, be time to get your snouts out of the trough, boys…

YOU screw up the job so badly you get the company fined £14 million. Network Rail’s chief executive Iain Coucher must have thought his prospects a bit dim after the over-run of the new year’s engineering work caused chaos for tens of thousands of travellers followed by that fine. Not a bit of it. It has just been announced that Mr Coucher will receive a bonus of £305,000 for last year. It would have been £50,000 more, but the remuneration committee lopped that off as a rap across the knuckles, which no doubt sent him crying all the way to the bank.

Cabinet loyalty, it seems, is measured in Bands. While an extremely loyal minister might have his or her loyalty measured in tens or hundreds of Bands, a less slavish politician might have to content themselves with a reading in the Decibands or even Centibands. But only a minister who is plotting the overthrow of a Prime Minister he nominated just a year ago could measure his behaviour in Milibands.