Eric Pickles turns into Billy Bunter

No, not his erstwhile colleague on the Tory benches, Nicholas Soames, but the real thing! This is the latest e-mail missive from CCHQ, and I was amused by his allusion in the first paragraph to “your chums”. I can hear Pickles using the phrase, actually, but I’m not quite sure what to make of it – folksy northern charm or old-school Tory recidivism. Either way, it doesn’t ring true with the new, funky, tech-savvy world of Cambo’s Tories, does it (which, to be fair, is not Pickles’ brief in the first place).