COULD the orangutan be Jeremy Corbyn’s new secret weapon? Earlier this week I reported that transport union TSSA had resolved to “adopt” an orang in Malaysia or Indonesia, as it joins a campaign against palm oil. The union will now push Labour to ban government incentives to companies which use palm oil products. With anti-fox hunting and animal welfare memes being credited with shoring up Labour’s vote in 2017, if Corbyn takes up the cause, he might be onto a winner.

MY WEEK was vastly improved by a surprise visit (thanks, Kirsty) to the Loch Lomond Bird of Prey centre at Balloch. There I met Birkita, a 13-year-old Great Grey Owl, among other feathered friends. The description on her plaque read: “Very curious, wants to look at everything.” I may have found the journalist hero of my first novel.

AMONG my niche collections in my Glasgow flat are several newspaper headline posters, including my favourite, from the Teignmouth Post: “Widow’s shock at ruined internet bouquet”. Now joining them is one from the Courier, which I picked up when on the road for EIS conference: “PERTH DEALER’S FRYING PAN OF COCAINE”. The Courier is a sister paper of the Press and Journal, where Michael Gove was a trainee reporter. So I did wonder if the Tory leadership contender had realised that his confession to snorting the Colombian marching powder would never match Housing Minister James Brokenshire’s four ovens – and decided to reveal more of the story.

Ian Rankin, the creator of Inspector Rebus, is on the trail of the Tory leadership race. “Rory Stewart is definitely a spy, isn’t he?” Rankin asked spy novelist Mick Herron on Thursday night at an event hosted by Edinburgh’s Golden Hare Books. “He used to work next to my brother-in-law in Afghanistan, and I think my brother-in-law was a spy.”

Asked by Rankin how he came to write spy novels, Herron, whose Slough House series has been optioned for TV, said it was the easy way out. “I thought, if you write about spies you can say anything you like, and nobody can say ‘you got that wrong’.

“All my knowledge comes from reading the same books, watching the same movies and everybody else.”

To which Rankin retorted: “That’s exactly the kind of thing a spy would say.”