How Polly got an eyeful of Boris in the buff

Polly Toynbee and Boris Johnson have long been flashing white knuckles at one another. When Boris announced two weeks ago that he'd stand against Ken Livingstone to be London Mayor, columnist Toynbee launched a poisonous attack on the Henley MP, a man she dismissed as a "jester, toff, self-absorbed sociopath and serial liar".

The roots of Toynbee, the voice of working class Joe, are of course far more aristocratic than those of Boris: she descends from the 9th Earl of Carlisle.

However, it was in fact the straw-haired clown who got stuck in first, last year shoeing the character of New Labour's "fairy godmother ... the defender and friend of every gay and lesbian outreach worker, every form-filler whose function has been generated by mindless regulation. Polly is the high priestess of our paranoid, mollycoddled, risk-averse, airbagged, booster-seated culture of political correctness and 'elf'n'safety fascism."

Their "previous" stretches back to 1965, when Toynbee, then 18, dated a young fellow who happened to be Boris's uncle.

"She remembers what Boris looked like naked when he was six months old: fat and pink," says a friend. "Polly will always have this over him. She was probably the first female journalist to see him in the nude - but certainly not the last."

Asked to comment, Boris texts me: "She's got a crush on me ... It's the only explanation. And I've always had a slight thing about her ..."

* Hurrah! It's celebrity hedge wars. In the Notting Hill equivalent of one of those neighbourly disputes where the owner of a semi-detached home shoots the man next door for poisoning his beloved Leylandii, one West London resident has taken exception to Damon Albarn's fast-growing bush.

The frontman of Blur and Gorillaz owns a house in Westbourne Grove, where he can be found ordering a Thai in the Walmer Castle pub. His front garden is protected from nosy parkers by cute oriental wooden slats, over which a bamboo-like bush protrudes into the middle of the footpath, creating an obstacle for pedestrians. One of Albarn's neighbours has tired of this excitable plant-life and threatens to take cutting into his own hands unless the musician locates his hedge trimmer.

"It's in the way, and I'm fed up of walking around it. If he doesn't want to cut it, he shouldn't be surprised when someone else does." You've been warned, Damon ...

* For men of a certain age (49), Debbie Harry will remain a pin-up as her hair turns from platinum to white and the rest succumbs to gravity. Everybody knows of her close relationship with the plastic surgeon's scalpel, but the Blondie singer, working on a West End musical of the 1985 Madonna film Desperately Seeking Susan, has also resorted to a creepier treatment involving sheep's embryos.

"They would take from the embryo's liver, from the glands, from the bone and make up these injections," she tells the television interviewer Daphne Barak of her visit to a Swiss clinic. "There were 11 injections, and I thought it was marvellous."

She has since turned to injecting growth hormones. "I think it's sort of like the same thing when a diabetic has to do insulin. It's nourishment from the inside."

Long live the spirit of punk.

* Last week, after the poor show by "David Cameron's Conservatives" in Ealing, the Tories' artful campaign director George Bridges, an Old Etonian chum of the leader, resigned. Bridges has left Westminster to marry and honeymoon his ravishing young fiancée Gabby Bertin, Cameron's deputy press secretary.

A CCHQ insider, commenting on the "spooky" coincidence of Bridges leaving as the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson arrives, says that the prospect of Bridges returning soon is "remote". Yet emails from the party HQ are still signed off "Promoted by George Bridges on behalf of the Conservative Party, both at 30 Millbank, London." Says the source: "We're still using his name because we are too disorganised to have changed it."

* Little Chef, clogger of the nation's arteries, celebrates its 50th birthday next year. The owners of the roadside café empire, R Capital, have drafted a guest list of famous patrons. It includes Prince Harry (a fan of the Olympic Breakfast), Freddie Starr, Ronnie Corbett, John Major (visited sister chain Happy Eater in 1991), Russell Brand, The Independent's Janet Street-Porter ("When I die I'm going to throw a party for all my enemies in a branch of Little Chef"), and Stella McCartney and Jean Paul Gaultier, who blessed the lavatories en route to the Scottish nuptials of Madonna and Guy Ritchie.

"The problem," says a mole at R Capital, "is that Little Chef top management has lost the exact date the first Little Chef opened. We're fuming. It was in Reading, in either September 1958 or May 1958. We're asking old locals to help."