I think I detect the makings of a groundswell. Are the nation's bingo enthusiasts to be the next pressure group to take on the Government and embarrass Gordon Brown? The row is over taxation changes in the last Budget, in which the Treasury decided that the scrapping of VAT on bingo, after several legal challenges, warranted an increase in duty from 15 to 22 per cent, leaving the industry worse off. In the past few days, a petition has opened on the No 10 website calling on Brown to reverse the tax rises. The excellent Edward Timpson, MP for Crewe and Nantwich, has thrown his support behind the campaign.

Tellingly, the Prime Minister himself, on a “press the flesh” exercise in the North East the other day, was rounded on by a Mecca Bingo customer, who attacked the tax changes. Brown, I am told, looked “perplexed”. This is a Government keen, at least until recently, to build far more damaging “super-casinos”. There are 80 million visitors to bingo clubs each year, suggesting about five to six million fans. About the same number and demographic as anglers, a constituency Labour has been very keen, indeed, not to upset in the past.

The celebrity experience as lived in Notting Hill

There is a thriving industry in Southern California of celebrity tours, whereby the dim and credulous are ferried about by charabanc to view the security gates of various stars. It could never take off in this country, because we lack that vacuous celebrity culture and would never fawn mindlessly over the rich and the famous ... Hang on, an e-mail arrives for a celebrity tour of Notting Hill. You get to see the homes of Sir Richard Branson, Robbie Williams and George Orwell — him again, he's dead, they may or may not tell you — and “the famous Victoria Beckham charity shop”, whatever that may be. And the hotel where Jimi Hendrix choked to death on his own vomit. There's class for you.

In the blue corner: Brian Barwick

It is a long way from the Football Association to Hampton and Richmond Football Club, which for two seasons in a row has narrowly failed to lift itself out of the Blue Square South. But Brian Barwick, after years at the top of the sport, is putting something back into the grass roots.

He is joining the club board, having lived in that stretch of southwest London for 30 years and watched the team play for the past few seasons. Barwick is best known for his work as chief executive of the FA and has run both the BBC's and ITV's sports operations. He spent eight years as editor of Match of the Day.

Barwick will presumably use his contacts to raise the club's profile and help to find sponsors. The manager is Alan Devonshire, who played for West Ham and England and has done well, a club insider tells me, to replicate the Hammers' style there. Honorary president is another local resident — Alan Simpson, of the Galton and Simpson team who wrote Hancock's Half Hour and Steptoe and Son.

— More on the bizarre world of Bernie Madoff, from an interview in Tatler by Julia Fenwick, a long-time manager at his office in Berkeley Street, Mayfair. Madoff had an obsession with grey and black and every piece of furniture and surface was uniformly drab (how did they ever find anything?). Staff would go around every morning before he arrived using marker pens to touch up the black skirting boards and doors, and each (black) computer with its (black) mouse had to be lined up precisely, as did the monochrome pictures on the walls, using tape measures. You wonder why no one remarked on these psychological aberrations. Except, of course, that he was rich and the rich aren't mad, they're eccentric.

— The mighty Caz continues to benefit from the fallout in banking that has seen several big brokers abandoning various corporate clients. The latest monthly listing from Hemscott, the financial information business, finds that JPMorgan Cazenove has added three FTSE 100 clients over the past three months. Caz has 37 out of 100, equalling its highest tally since Hemscott started keeping records.

— A note to Friends Provident, which tries to pep up some dull research on ethical investment with a comparison with events of 25 years ago, when it first entered the area. George Orwell did not write Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984. If you think about it for long enough, you'll realise why.

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