Forget the TV debates – catch the Party Leaders Bake Off

Just in case those televised leader debates never happen – and we still can’t be sure David Cameron won’t find another excuse to stay away – readers might want to tune in to the Party Leaders’ Bake Off.

It’s one of the sketches in ‘Rory Bremner’s Coalition Report’, to be broadcast by the BBC on Tuesday, 3 February, in which the veteran impressionist has a field day taking the p*** out of the party leaders – plus Boris.

Three trailers are doing the rounds: Bojo the Clown, with Bremner in blonde wig and riding a unicycle as he goes through Johnson’s political juggling act – standing for the Tories in Uxbridge, writing all those books and columns and – what was the third? – oh yes, being Mayor of London.

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The second has Bremner and fellow comedian Matt Forde discussing Ed Miliband’s Style. Forde says there’s one thing you have to get right if you’re impersonating Ed – the ‘long blink’. It always begs the question: has he fallen asleep mid-speech?

Then there’s the Party Leaders’ Bake Off, with Bremner as Paul Hollywood. Miliband bakes a date and walnut cake but forgets to include the key ingredients, Cameron “out-sources” his task and buys cupcakes…. You get the picture.

Last night, Bremner grabbed the chance – live, not on television - to take the p*** out of the Speaker of the Commons, John Bercow, when the two men co-presented the Polemic of the Year prize at Paddy Power’s Political Book Awards.

As The Spectator reports, Bremner quizzed the Speaker about the recent Sunday Times report on the rising cost of renovating the MPs’ gym at Westminster.

Bremner: “Can I ask you, have you come from the new gym?”

Bercow: “I have, I was there earlier, I didn’t see you there.”

Bremner then asked if was true that a spinning room at the gym had been named in Bercow’s honour.

Bercow: “It’s not called the spinning room, you must always be accurate. It’s called the John Bercow room but it wasn’t chosen by me, it was chosen by others.”

Bremner: “But also, the gym has put on a few pounds hasn’t it? Wasn’t it supposed to be £250,000, it’s now a million?”

Bercow: “You’re broadly accurate.”

Incidentally, the Polemic of the Year prize went to Geoffrey Robertson QC for An Inconvenient Genocide, his book about the massacre of the Armenians in 1915.